Your Customers are Mad as Hell, and They Won’t Take It Anymore!!

Conquest and Retention are both driven by the Caller’s Journey

Great new is...we are clearly in recovery. The risk is, as Jack Jackintelle, President of the Rick Case Automotive Group, recently stated in his presentation to the Automotive Leadership Roundtable, is that we go back to reading our financial statements from the bottom up. There has rarely been a time as important as now to make the changes our returning customers are demanding.

These returning customers are measuring us from the distance of the internet and the phone more than ever. With Phone Contacts at least 7 to 1 over the internet lead, what is more important to sustained success than making that experience World Class?

Let’s Start with the easy part…Answer The Phone!

In this blended dealer sample of 24937 calls measured—fully one caller in three never made it to the agent or department they requested. The biggest offenders are on-hold hang ups and the dreaded cold transfer to Voice Mail that almost always results in no message left. Black holes in our caller’s journey. Before we move on to our phone skills focus, let’s fix our mechanics to allow our customers to talk to us.

Our customers are demanding the service our parents and grandparents received on the phone---a live voice responding to us in a few rings at most. We instead, have leveraged technology to allow funneling our most significant customer contact into a pipeline that allows us to have fewer people (read as expenses) involved. Yet, the opportunity cost may well offset the  expense here.  Auto Attendants, Phone Trees, General Voice Mail have been engaged in an effort to be efficient, but in many cases have become barriers that prevent effective communication with those that give us the gift of an inbound call.

Spend Less; Sell More

Why even think about spending any more in Advertising that draws phone calls if your phone metrics are challenged. If a phone call costs you $100 +- to ring, and you don’t answer 1/3 of them, do you want more calls that cost more money? What would you do if the call results below were yours? They very likely are….

Coming Next: Economically staff for success on the phone; Why "specialists" may be the best practice..