Scenario (based upon multiple real-life customer service call center reports) – You receive a report from your call center that shows more than 75 percent of all of the leads entered by a certain sales person are not legitimate.
What now? – The sales person that pulls leads from the phonebook will eventually be caught, but better now than later.
Lesson Learned – Telephone surveys of potential customers vs. actual customers provide vital information to a dealership.
Scenario – You receive a report from your call center that more than half of the people who visited your dealership last Saturday purchased or plan on purchasing somewhere else.
What Now? – Whatever is causing potential customers to buy elsewhere must be reversed immediately. Usually some combination of price, inventory availability and customer treatment is the culprit.
Lesson Learned – Sales people, in general, do a poor job of being objective when it comes to gathering customer information. Few sales people will ever know, much less admit, that a potential customer bought elsewhere.
Scenario – You receive a call center report that over the course of one month, only two customers identify an expensive billboard on a heavily traveled road as the reason they visited your dealership.
What Now? – Discovering that word-of-mouth and dealership events like rides and barbeques bring far more new customers to the dealership than an expensive billboard makes a complicated business decision easy.
Lesson Learned – Properly trained people can extract the kind of information that makes decision-making and management much more precise for the dealership owner or manager.
Scenario – You receive a call center report that five customers in the past month are furious at your dealership for being told a certain motorcycle was in inventory that actually was not.
What Now? – Finding out who is luring potential customers to the dealership through deception and promptly putting a stop to it will do wonders for a dealership’s reputation.
Lesson Learned – There is a wealth of information that can be learned from customers and potential customers after they leave a dealership. Find some method of gathering that information.
Most sales consultants will perform at least some of these key skills inefficiently:
• Inbound & Outbound Telephone
• Follow up of Unsold Opportunities
• Proactively prospecting current/previous owner base
• Consistent customer contact for increased loyalty
These issues are the justification for call centers. If call center personnel are dealing with similar issues, it is surely a matter of training.