I disagree with most automotive vendors and “consultants” in general as the modern day manager that’s educated, skilled and takes his career seriously should be able to handle 75% of what they’re paying others for. But, human nature is what it is and thus, outsourcing makes supreme sense because the proof of ability is results.
However, as you point out, questions aren’t being answered, processes aren’t being followed and the quality of the engagement is getting worse. While it’s not scalable to “touch” every car for every single lead or phone up, there’s not much an in-house person can do that a virtual agent cannot when it comes to handling 80% of the inbound phone calls.
There are so many people that spew about giving away everything over the phone and over the web that they really don’t put what they’re suggesting into practice. The reason is they’re either a talking head or they realized it doesn’t work but justify pitching it as “it doesn’t work in my business but in the dealership it does.” Again, garbage.
I believe in total transparency and being entirely accommodating but if anyone spends 30 minutes or more on customer calls that haven’t previously purchased or aren’t investing the time to demo the vehicle properly then they’ll be spinning while the real sales pros are closing car deals.
A Virtual BDC focused on the inbound sales calls are setting double the number of appointments than the in-house average and have better show and buy rates. But if they have the very same show and buy rates, double is still double so 50% of double is still way better than the current option in most situations.
“Should” a dealership be able to handle phones correctly, yep. “Do” dealerships handle phones correctly, nope.