This is the 1st article in the series Manage your BDC like a Call Center

Every department needs boundaries so the employees know their responsibilities.  This department I would argue has the ability to impact every inch of your business with a higher magnitude than any other.  With that great power comes the need for 100% transparency of its actions.  It is also fair to hold every other department to the same 100% transparency standard and dealers all across the country are already doing this.  Let’s be honest though this is a high dollar investment with high expectations, not to mention a few people in the organization may choose to keep their head buried in the sand to the need for improved customer communications and fight this change.  The response to that must be this, if customers are your most important asset than their experience with your organization should be giving top priority.

"The simple answer is when you decide to make it the communications hub of your organization."

You can measure this by tracking how customer make their way from person to person when they call.  You will find the long holds, multiple pages, repeat callers and poor communication skills.  Typically we blame the person who handles the last call, but if you had to wait 10 minutes to get an answer how pleasant would you be to set an appointment or come in for service.  Let’s de-personalize this and blame the process.  Phone training only goes so far, the most highly skilled person in the world will still be at a huge disadvantage if the customer is already frustrated.

Before you start purchasing technology and creating process you first need to understand the metrics and how you can build this communication hub with the end in mind.

These metrics cover the preliminary phone KPIs you will need to manage your call center production.  (list does not include other areas of information including lead levels, conversions, call scores, CRM data etc.  You will need to add that information in to get the full picture of your teams performance)*Items in blue require some additional segmentation and algorithms to develop

In addition to the metrics you will also have to define the dimensions you will slice the data by. The dimensions would include:

• Time - (calls this hour, day, week, month)
• Assignment - (specific agents, extensions, teams, shifts, locations/stores)
• Source Information - (website, cars.com, retargetting, email campaign)
  
  

Next I will discuss how you take to to the next level from here by adding automatic call distribution with advanced call metrics.  Here is that article

Jon Berna - Driven Data Consulting - http://drivendataconsulting.com/