Service BDC - is it treated like a profit center?

[Brendan Dolan]

In my years building BDC's, I noticed a pretty sharp breakdown between sales BDC's and service BDC's. Sales BDC's were thought of as pure overhead, so wham, accountability. Active managers, everything tracked and measured, % of lift calculated, etc. I used to charge my sales BDC's against the stores advertising budgets, so we pushed like crazy to get every last dollar out of them.

Service BDC's? Most I found were a room with phones and people answering inbound calls. Rarely did our stores, or recent acquisitions in our group, have any accountability in the service BDC. If both BDC's were combined, I saw a lot of metrics on the sales side, but again, a lack of "what are we getting out of this" discussions happened on the service side.

When I'd take over a service BDC, I'd immediately assess:

• Agent down time
• Inbound vs outbound calls from our VOIP servers
• Average length of call
• Total number of calls
• Total number of BDC entered appointments in the scheduler
• No show rate

What I usually found is my agents were slammed in peak times, and then basically twiddled their thumbs in the afternoon, until inbound vehicle status calls and pick ups started. Most stores had a 4:1 inbound to outbound call ratio, and most agents handled 1-200 calls a day.

I'd immediately start to work on agent down time, and I'd first attack:

• Word track use to get the most number of appointments out of an inbound call
• Appointment confirmation calls/texts to lift the no show rate
• Proactive status and pick up calls/texts to calm down the afternoon rush

Once their workload was a bit more balanced, we'd start working on the harder stuff:

• Declined service op code calls
• Lost soul calls

Both of those calls required quite a bit of training. You're calling people who aren't expecting you to either ask for more money, or listen to why they aren't coming back (moved away is easy, sold the car is easy, Bob is rude and pissed me off and I hate him is a hard call, and usually gives the agent phone reluctance). Those calls usually worked better when I'd either stand over their shoulder, or used our VOIP system to listen into the calls, and then I'd use our chat software to give them advice while on the call.

After all of that was nailed down, we'd being to track all of our successes with inbound calls, our outbound calls, and track our lift of total appointments, increased shown rate, increased hours per RO with declined service customers showing up, and retention increases with lost souls coming back.

Sounds like a lot of work? It sure was, but it was the difference between having five girls in a room with some phones, and an active profit center that I knew lifted the net of the service drives.

To open up the discussion, what things do you monitor and measure in your service BDC to ensure you are generating profit and not just answering phones?