6 Reasons You Should LISTEN to Phone Calls

The phone is a critical point of contact in your dealership. It’s one of the few tools that connects your business inside and out.

Have you ever considered how your store handles calls? It probably seems like calls are constantly going in and out, so you may not think about the need to manage them. Once one finishes, there’s another one coming.

That may be the case, but how your staff handles phone calls plays a major role in your success. Was the right information given? Was the appointment requested? Things like this can make or break you. So how do you manage your staff on the phones? You LISTEN.

Here’s why you should L.I.S.T.E.N. to calls in your dealership:

L – Link communications. Let’s say the receptionist answers a call with a customer asking about their vehicle repair status, “Is it ready for pickup?” Your receptionist has no choice but to transfer to service. Once the customer gets through, the advisor is forced to ask “Who was your advisor?” or “Which vehicle is yours?” The advisor then scans the department for just the right person who can update the customer. Sounds like a long process, right?

Linking communications eliminates gaps in your process and ensures all departments are connected instantly with valuable customer information – saving time all around.

I – Receive intel. Do you know how many calls you’re getting per day? Do you know when the frequency increases? What about missed calls?

Listening to your phone calls provides actionable information to help you make better business decisions. To enforce better results, you can determine how many people should be covering the phones at any given time, and who exactly should take on that influx of business.

S – Refine strategy. Your dealership spends a tremendous amount of money on advertising and getting consumers to call your business. In fact, for every one car sold, $633 in advertising expense is tied to that deal.¹ With that amount of advertising dollars on the line, you need to know exactly which campaign is driving business.

When you listen to your phone calls, you can determine the success of your advertising efforts so precious ad money isn’t wasted.

T – Teach employees. Not only do you need to know how your staff is handling calls, but your employees need to know how they are doing too! Could they have asked for the appointment sooner? Could they have asked more or better discovery questions?

Listening to phone calls allows you to share the play-backs as coaching opportunities to improve your staff’s skills.

E – Evaluate performance. Do you know if your salespeople are performing follow-up? If so, when and what was the result? What about voicemails? Are you tracking how quickly they are returned?

When you listen to phone calls, you can better evaluate how successful (or unsuccessful) your staff is at managing their leads, enforcing more accountability so you can see better results.

N – Nurture your reputation. Have you ever experienced a customer blaming your staff for delivering inaccurate information? Or maybe you received a bad online review that described your dealership as rude or unprofessional when they called in asking a few questions?

Listening to phone calls allows you to maintain your reputation and your CSI score. Your reputation is literally on the line. You can verify what happened during an interaction and use the recordings as a backup if needed.

All you have to do is LISTEN. With a real-time phone management system, listening to calls is even easier. You can listen to calls as they’re happening live, presenting you with even more opportunities to improve your business. The results that will come out of listening to phone calls are sure to drive success.

¹ NADA Data

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