If your service BDC isn’t staffed correctly, It’s not working. According to John Traver, CEO and Principal of Traver Connect, dealerships need to be treating their service department BDC as a separate entity from their sales BDC. leave your front-end mentality behind so you can establish a process that catches every call and builds retention.
BDC and their separate telemarketing department in the dealership are depended on to facilitate the sales and service appointments. Yet, Not enough dealerships have the right emphasis and manpower to operate a BDC for their service department as they group it together with the sales resulting in calls missed or not facilitated properly. There is a difference between the sales and service departments which also means that there are differences between their BDC and how they should be handled. Every call whether inbound or outbound could be a potential profit or the loss thereof. The most common mistake that is made is when dealerships think they are efficiently staffed when in truth they are not. Many calls go unanswered an hour. If you do the math- that adds up. Hours become days that turn into months and ultimately make up a year. To the earlier point, if missed calls are money and they are happening at that rate and growing you could be missing out on a lot of money.
What are some suggestions to better operate this department? Start with understanding it needs to be seen as its own department with its own BDC team. Once that is adopted as the standard then make sure you are staffing it correctly. Having the right amount of people allowing each call to be answered will put you on the right path. But it doesn’t matter how many people are answering phones if they are not familiar, knowledgeable or comfortable handling those calls in a supportive manner. Spending time training employees to be organized, attentive and able to lead the customer through the process explain to them everything they can expect will strengthen your numbers.
