Somebody Get the Phone

May 14, 2010

Somebody
Get the Phone

Bobbled
calls irk customers, hurt dealership business

 

By Steve
Finlay

Ward’s
Dealer Business, Apr 1, 2010 12:00 PM   

 

The
telephone dates to 1876, back when Ulysess S. Grant was president. So why is it
so hard for so many people to master the art of the phone call?

 

On a
personal level, that lacking can irk or hurt the person on the other end. But
on a professional level, it can damage business, repel customers and gouge into
potential profits.

 

That is
particularly true for car dealerships, where the telephone is a vital, but
often misused tool.

 

“Handling
phone calls has always been a challenge for dealerships,” says Ralph Ebersole,
a dealership veteran and consultant for Cars.com., an online marketplace.

 

As a
communications tool for cultivating customers, the phone ranks right up there
with the Internet and customer-relationship management software.

 

Ironically,
the telephone is crucial to dealership online sales efforts. That’s because the
goal at most dealerships is to get customers off line and on the telephone at
some point in the process.

 

Dealership
misuse of the phone ranges from not answering it promptly, to putting callers
on hold too long, to misdirecting calls, to lousy conversational skills.

 

Michael
Tyman, a former dealership manager and now CEO of Professional Success, a
training firm, regularly listens to outbound and inbound dealership phone
calls.

 

His
conclusion: “We’re not doing a good job of training people to listen.”

 

Customers
convey how they want to be sold, but to grasp that “you need to listen,” he
says. “If you are answering their questions and paying attention, it enhances
the sales prospects.”

 

He says it
is imperative to route calls to the proper location, and quickly, “so the customer
is not lingering on hold.”

 

The
Internet is important, but so is the phone, says Joe Webb, a former dealership
manager who runs DealerKnows Consulting.

 

The earlier
a dealership can get a prospect off line and on the phone “the more we can lead
them down the path towards buying a car,” he says.

 

Proper
phone procedures and skills are vital, especially considering that most people
prefer to use the telephone over emails, says Mitch Golub, head of Cars.com.

 

“We’re
seeing phone calls as predominant,” he says. “It’s the preferred way to contact
a dealership.”

 

On its
website, Cars.com has toll-free telephone numbers, unique to each participating
dealership, so Internet users can call about vehicles that interest them.

 

The system
signals a dealership staffer answering the call that a Cars.com customer is on
the line. Accordingly, they are considered hot leads. Yet, some of those calls
get misdirected or enter phone limbo.

 

“Here you
have a customer on the phone, someone who has picked out a vehicle and is as
qualified a lead as you can get, and the phone is not being answered at the
dealership or the call is going to voicemail or going to the service
department,” Golub says.

 

In such
cases, “you have qualified customers, but not a process to deal with them,” he
says. “No matter how much you promote your website, so much of success comes
down to the process in the dealership.”

 

Cars.com’s
toll-free phone system allows dealers to access recordings of conversations.

 

The system
also times the calls. “That’s important, because if the calls are under 30
seconds essentially they go unanswered,” Golub says. “If a dealer is getting 50
calls under 30 seconds, we can work with them to solve that problem.”

 

He recalls
a vexed dealer approaching him at a National Automobile Dealers Assn.
convention. The dealer beefed that Cars.com phone leads were ineffective.

 

“We looked
at the call information and determined the calls were going to an inactive
voice-mail box,” Golub recalls. “When the dealer saw that, he said, ‘I’ve got
to go back to my dealership and talk to some people.’”

 

Chip Perry,
CEO of AutoTrader.com, says a recent customer survey indicates 80% of people
who visit a dealership show up without contacting the dealership beforehand.

 

“Of those
that do establish prior contact, 80% do so by phone, yet we’re so focused on
Internet leads and clicks,” he says.

 

On the
other hand, the vast majority of car shoppers — more than 90% by some estimates
– shop and research for cars online before heading to the dealership. “They are
influenced by the information they found on line,” Perry says.

 

He says
dealers report on average that it takes 13.5 email leads to generate one car
sale, compared with 8.5 phone leads and 6.5 customer walk-ins.

 

Considering
that data, he wonders why some dealerships and industry experts place such an
emphasis on emails. “There is this sense that the Internet changes everything,
but does it?” he says. “Dealers say, ‘What can we do to get more emails?’ I
say, ‘Why do that?’”

 

When
customers get close to buying, “most of them pick up the phone and call the
dealership,” says Shawn Veronese, Internet sales director at Crevier BMW in
Orange County, CA.

 

Most
customer phone inquiries center on vehicle selection, loan interest rate and
“whether they can get approved,” she says at a recent National Remarketing
Conference.

 

Terry
Hoisington, general manager of Henderson Chevrolet in Henderson, NV, says his
dealership has established a hot-line number for customer phone calls. “When it
rings, our people know it’s an important call.”

 

The
dealership realizes the “extreme importance” of phone calls, he says. “We have
our ‘A’ players handling that piece of the business.”

 

“The
biggest problem can be answering the phone,” says Tony Giorgione, digital
director at United Family Dealerships in Las Vegas. But some calls that get
answered don’t go well.

 

Unfortunately,
he says, “calls normally come in at the busy time of day when our best sales
people are out in the showroom with customers.”

 

Forty
percent of the time a properly handled phone call will result in a customer
appointment at the store, Giorgione says. “We don’t want to pre-qualify them
too much over the phone. But we to want to collect (contact) information during
the call so we can follow up with them.”

 

Paul
Johnson, president and CEO of Kelley Blue Book, a vehicle-value guide, has
winced while listening in on some customer-dealership phone conversations.

 

He recalls
one in which the caller was transferred five times before getting “a
salesperson who didn’t speak English well, didn’t acknowledge the dealership
had a particular vehicle on the lot and then said they didn’t have the
vehicle.”

 

That’s not
all. “The salesperson was rude in the process,” Johnson says. “Think about the
damage done. All the brand-building by that dealership goes down the tubes.”

 

Of course,
today’s phones aren’t just phones. They are multi-functional devices for
different forms of communication and information gathering. Girorgione says he
sees shoppers at his dealership “using their smart phones to price out
vehicles.”

 

Dealer
David Pilcher of National Car Sales in Indianapolis, IN, says his store
receives more phone calls than emails from customers seeking vehicle
information.

 

Many
dealers struggle in dealing with the problem of improperly handled phone calls,
he says. “It’s a dealer issue, frankly.”

 

And it’s a
serious one, according to studies, such as one cited by Anna Zornosa, general
manager of the Cobalt Group’s Dealix.com, a sales-lead provider.

 

“Of 3,000
phone calls to dealerships, 24% went to voicemails that were not fully working
or not working at all,” she says. “It can be really bad.”

 

It also can
be costly in terms of lost revenue, notes Jonathan Ord, CEO and chairman of
DealerSocket, a dealership CRM provider.

 

He cites a
study in which 30% of calls to dealership service departments either go
unanswered or go to the wrong person. “That’s hundreds of thousands of dollars
a year in lost business,” he says.

 

His firm
offers a call-center service that fields those phone calls for the dealership
and sets up appointments.

 

Employing
an able switchboard operator goes a long way for a dealership concerned with
its communication skills, says consultant Skip Thompson, whose late father,
Joe, was a 45-year Chrysler dealer in metro Detroit.

 

He recalls
his dad telling staffers, “Don’t you guys get it? The switchboard job is not an
entry-level position.”

 

AutoNation
Inc., the country’s largest dealership chain, has established a process on how
to handle a phone call. Some of it is common sense, a human quality that is
sometimes uncommon.

 

Here’s what
AutoNation came up with:

 

    * Answer quickly.

    * Be nice and knowledgeable.

    * Answer questions willingly.

    * Get contact information.

    * Cue the next action, usually setting up a
dealership appointment.