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GM Internet Lead Response Time - OFFICIAL thread

Alex Snyder

President Skroob
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May 1, 2006
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Alex
Currently I'm using Izmocar's ILM program to stop the clock on these leads. I'm doing that because it's free for me for a while ;)

I have one salesman tasked with responding to GM leads and he answers them on his blackberry. Even with his super-human ability to answer leads at literally all hours of the day, we're still at about a 1:14 average response time.

As a comparison, our hyundai dealer uses a way more relaxed method of returning calls where the sales manager gets the original lead and hands them out round robin. Hyundai fortunately only counts leads during business hours, so our average there is 40 minutes.

Hopefully GM takes away the 24 hour clock at some point. The stigma of always needing to be available will make salesmen burn out faster than anything else I can think of.
 
New member here...signed up just for this thread! I need to give you guys my sob story and ask for your help. Apparently I'm doing something very wrong.

I'm the lone internet person for 5 franchises (3 new car and 2 used). Part of my job is to respond to the GM leads and stop the clock. After that point I distribute the leads to the sales manager and he round-robbins them through the department. We WERE using Cobalt LMCC for this and only able to respond to leads during business hours, when I was at work. (for some reason my Mac at home cannot use LMCC tool). Our response time was around 11 hours and only 57% were responded to (according to their system, I have proof that I've responded to 100%). I was told I'd need to answer these 24/7 from my windows mobile smart phone. A quick call to OneSource told me that 1 person at the dealership could respond to email leads from cell phone to stop the clock. We have since quit using Cobalts LMCC and started paying extra for GM's Lead Management Tool. Again, I took this on and have been responding to leads anytime I'm awake or not at my desk via my phone. I was under the assumption that everything was in order and our response time should be down under 5 hours (easily).

This morning I received a report showing that our average response time was over 15hours and only 97% had been responded to. Assuming a worst case scenario, a lead that comes in at midnight and is not responded by me until 9am is only a 9hr penalty. In order for this figure to be accurate it's saying I'm going days at a time without responding to people. This is NOT the case. I had a 3 day weekend last week and responded to EVERY lead from my cell phone within minutes. I feel the problem may be in the fact that it's not counting any of the leads responded to by phone.

Just an FYI, my average response time when I'm at work is 3 minutes. Of course that's not what the GM of my dealership sees when this report comes out.

What am I doing wrong? Will my CRM (autoraptor) be on the "approved" list by GM? I'm not using A.R. to respond to these leads yet...but would like to. Could leads be going into a de-funct Cobalt LMCC that I'm no longer using and be holding us down?

Is anything glaringly obvious that I need to change?

Thanks so much.
Matt M.
 
Matt
I am not 100% sure about the GM lead tool but you should be able to pull a report that shows you when every lead came in by name and when you responded. Match that to the report you are getting from GM make sure they are the same. I think GM sends you an alert that tells you that you got a new lead and also sends you the actual lead in a seprate email. Make sure you are responding to the lead and not the alert. Lastly open up your old LMCC tool and make sure you do not have any new leads in it, if that is the case you need to get the leads pointed into the correct ILM (i would not expect that because if you are getting any leads into the GM tool they should all be coming there). Take a look at this post that Alex wrote a few months ago it covers what could be happening as well.
Dealership lead routing procedure for CRM and ILM
 
Well first off matt, I hope you're getting paid for that extra hassle.. DAMN that's a ton of work!

The first report you want to look at is the one that GM uses for your official times.

Go into globalconnect, to GM Certified Internet Dealer under the Sales workbench (get your PSC to add it if you don't have it) then click the reports tab at the top and look at the Monthly Lead Performance report. This is where GM gives you the official numbers that you are held accountable for in a nice pretty PDF. Unfortunately for me it's friggin january and earlier haha. Hope you can at least see february.


Next step is to find GM Lead Management also under the Sales workbench. This will have much more detailed reporting. The first report is SFE Digital Performance. This will again, give you an overview but it will give you values based on each quarter.
The next one to look at is SFE Leads Not Responded to. This one is huge, any lead not responded to will skew everything else. So with this report you can figure out exactly which customers weren't responded to according to GM and you can usually figure out where the problems are.
If you need more detail on this, the Leads Not Responded to Detail report is harder to use, but definitely gives more detail.

Finally, look at the Dealership Leads by Source and see if there are any problem areas that need to be addressed.

Also, call up GM CID support at 888.462.8976 x4 ... make them help you find the right reports!
 
Thanks for the input guys. As I mentioned earlier my report this morning showed a 15+ hr response time. Since that time I have had 2-3 leads come in and they were responded to immediatly (I'd estimate about 7 minutes). I pulled the report again to start checking off names and found that our response time is now down BELOW 11hrs. AND our % responded to rate went up from 97% to 98.8%.

We had issues in January and February where our previous internet manager was the one being tracked. Even though I had 100% response rate under MY name it showed only a 2% responded to because they were tracking his name. Supposedly this issue has been resolved moving forward but I feel that we are still being heavily penalized for all of the leads from the first 2 months. I say that because my report is from Jan1 to Current.

Does this sound right to you guys? Am I over-thinking the process or am I really THAT slow on responses??
 
An update to the situation. I spoke with OneSource this morning after a 5 lead weekend. 4 of the leads were responded to in under 7 minutes. The last lead was 35 minutes on the dot. When I arrived at work this morning and logged into the LMT I noticed all 5 customers were still pending as new. Nothing had been "stopped".

I quickly send out another template to stop the clock and call OneSource. I was told they are having big problems with smart phones not stopping the clock. I informed them that the sole reason we're paying extra for their service is to be able to do that. I pulled up the Outlook "sent" folder on my cell phone and was able to go through about a months worth of GM leads to prove my quick response time. I was told I'd be credited for the ones I could prove on the phone but other than that they would escilate my call to "level 3" and someone would be in touch.

This helps a VERY little bit but does nothing for the first 2 months where they were crediting the OLD internet manager instead of me even though I was doing everything properly.

March 25th ends the 1st quarter and I highly doubt we're going to be bonused in the amount we should due to errors on GM's part and their faulty system.

If their system isn't going to accurately track these instant responses then we'd be better off not even trying to use their system and just jump feet first into a single CRM solution instead of the 3 I'm currently using.
 
That is extremely disappointing Matt, I hate to hear when the vendors own solution just doesn't work compared to 3rd parties. I wholeheartedly recommend jumping ship but definitely do your research first! A single solution for lead management makes things so much more simple.

Get lists of approved/verified CRM's from your different brands and start there :)
 
I've been very happy with AutoRaptor so far and according to them they are an authorized GM SFE service provider. I don't know how long that will hold true but with GM making rules they can change them at any time without any warning and there is precious little we can do about it.

I feel partially vindicated in that I'm able to prove to my superiors that the blame doesn't rest on my shoulders (at least not solely) and that I am not a moron who can't operate email properly!
 
Unfortuneatley Matt in OneSource you need to move your lead out of the "Pending" status in order for it to stop the clock in GM's eyes. The great thing about doing business in today's digtal space is that you have more options than ever before. I would recommend that you explore these options and place yourself in a position where you are working smart vs. hard. And make sure that whichever vendor you decide to go with is certified through GM. My response time year to date is 23min with a low of 17min in Jan. FYI I am a iMagic user. Good Luck Matt!