Take the First Step to Phone Excellence

Step #1

Never allow your staff to choose between a customer in person and a customer on the phone.

Your customer will always lose.

Showroom Receptionists are often facing the main entrance, and are the first person to be seen by a customer coming in. Too often they are unable to greet, or even make eye contact…
Service Cashiers often are tasked with answering service calls while attempting to provide a great service vehicle delivery…
Calls are too often blindly pushed to Service Advisors who are sitting with customers…
Sales Representatives are often busy with customers when paged, and too often make the mistake of taking the call.

I am haunted by Glenn Pasch’s article "Wow a Real Voice. It Freaked Me Out", where he said referring to the title of the article... 'Sounds funny saying that but as Gary Vaynerchuk said at a recent conference, (paraphrase) 'Your grandparents are better suited to do business today than you are. They understood relationships and common courtesies and focused on people first.'

Study these numbers and ask yourself if this could be you, and how important is it to your bottom line?

phone handling skills caller reach agent

3 members like this

Comment

You need to be a member of DealerELITE.net to add comments!

Join DealerELITE.net

Comment by Mr. Natural on May 27, 2012 at 8:02am: Hi Chip...

I often wonder what criteria our stores use to pick what person will sit in this "point" position at any of our stores. It's like it really doesn't count. Indeed, our receptionist is the first face a customer sees when they walk into the store. Even if we get the right person for this important position, somehow, the duties and importance of this job just don't seem to get imparted to this all important receptionist.

I remember back in the early 90's, in my last few months as a salesman. If I was not with a customer or already on the phone, I'd be sitting there, the page would come: "Sales line three please, sales line three." My hand flew for the phone. Often it was a race. Sometimes: "Good morning, this is Gillon, how can I help you?" Other times, silence...one of my fellows had beat me to the call. I'm quite sure it was rare for a phone up to wait for more than 30 seconds from the receptionist answering, until the salesperson picked up. I'm sure that in those days, the percentage of "caller does not reach agent" was 0%

Today, from time to time, I listen to incoming calls. It's terrible! If I were a customer, I would hang up...but that's me, people seem satisfied with a lower level of service these days. And I should say, that there's more going on here than poorly trained receptionist, but there's more.

What kind of impression is this front line person making on that customer who walks in the door wondering how they are going to be treated? I remember hearing (was it Jackie Cooper?): "The first ten words out of your mouth mean more than the next ten thousand!" This applies to more than just the literal words, it's everything. You might paraphrase it like this: "The first ten seconds in front of anything, mean more than the next ten thousand."

Our stores pay between $200. and $400. for every single person who walks through the front door. Who calls in wanting to talk to a salesperson. Why are we so often dropping the ball with this step? It's a critical juncture. The sale will either proceed or be lost right at this moment...Wait a minute, could this be true? The receptionist is one of the steps in the road to the sale? Oh my God! This whole thing is a much more significant dynamic than I had imagined.

Wow, this is a bigger, more complicated issue that I thought. And I am only addressing the fringe issues. I might have even missed the mark here. What were we talking about? Nice post Chip.Sorry I wandered so far off topic. I gotta' go, I forgot I had a customer on hold.