Copeland Chevrolet Sells More Vehicles, Parts, and Service, with CallerCX Inbound Call Management & Training
16% of inbound calls to the sales and fixed ops departments within Copeland Chevrolet were not connecting, resulting in missed opportunities for the dealership. While a 16% call fail rate is better than the industry average of 20%, Copeland Chevrolet is in a region also home to eight competing Chevy dealers, all within a one-hour driving radius. This means that for Copeland Chevrolet, every call counts; the dealership couldn’t afford to lose even one missed opportunity. “There’s a lot of competition,” Jason Pappas, Executive General Manager explained, “if you blow it, you blow it.” To differentiate themselves among such close competition, Copeland also needed assistance improving the skill set of its five BDC representatives across sales and service, in addition to addressing call connectivity. Copeland had a legacy call tracking solution, but it wasn’t a helpful training or management tool. Missed opportunity calls weren’t alerted in real-time and a portion of the calls that did get alerted were often miscategorized as calls of concern. “We were getting too many alerts and had to listen to too many calls that weren’t problematic, which was a waste of time,” Pappas stated. “It also did us no good to get an alert four hours later. That just gives the customer a chance to call the next dealership.”
In May 2019, Copeland implemented CallerCX to transform inbound call data into actionable insights that would lead to improvements in call connectivity, employee skill set, and the overall caller experience, making Copeland the obvious choice for the dealer to visit in comparison to their eight close competitors.
Almost immediately, Copeland was able to uncover the root cause behind their higher than desired call failure rate through CallerCX. 91% of the failed calls went unanswered and then on to voicemail where the customer abandoned the call or declined to leave a message. Voicemail abandons aren’t always a bad thing, if a caller who has a relationship with your dealership and a specific representative is sent to voicemail and hangs up, you could infer that the caller is likely transitioning to contacting the representative on their cell phone versus leaving a voicemail at the store. Alternatively, when a prospect who has no existing relationship with your dealership reaches out, is sent to voicemail, and subsequently abandons the call, it’s a far greater cause for concern and typically results in a missed opportunity.
As a result of the visibility that CallerCX provided, Copeland was able to adjust communication and routing processes along with phone system settings to achieve a higher capture rate.
In addition to connectivity improvements, the advanced speech analytics within the CallerCX platform accurately pinpointed true missed opportunities and calls of concerns, triggering a text or email in near real-time to management. “It’s like the boy who cried wolf. When there’s too many alerts you ignore them,” said Pappas. “CallerCX is so accurate we only step in when it’s truly needed.”
Detailed logs of missed opportunities allowed sales and BDC managers to re-engage with appointable calls that did not result in an appointment. “They were required to access the logs and close out every alert daily, giving them ownership over the leads, which results in more appointments,” Pappas explained.
While launching missed opportunity alerts, CallerCX also served up a training video that targeted the point of error(s) from the call to the individual BDC agent. This powerful combination enables managers to recover missed opportunities stemming from poor processes and/or skills while at the same time, providing coaching and developing for employees to hone their phone skills. “Good phone skills are important for the store, but also for the employee,” said Pappas. “When employees are more confident and competent, it reduces turnover and enables them to provide a better experience.”
Overall, Copeland reduced call fail rate from 16 percent to 10 percent and grew its parts, service, and sales business. Service CSI scores went up due to improved phone skills and fewer call-backs. Management saved time because they did not have to listen to every call to find coaching opportunities. Parts revenue increased due to more efficient phone processes that allowed customers to leave messages instead of languishing on hold.
Follow Us
