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Work at home BDC??

Hello Daniel,

I can understand why you may be concerned regarding a virtual, or work from home bdc and hope that I may be able to provide a different prospective. My name is Benazia and I am currently employed at a virtual BDC. Honestly, I love it. I've held this position within a brick and mortar site, however having been able to do both I've found that this method works best for me. A lot of what I've seen in other responses to your question holds true. There are several benefits to a virtual BDC such as a reduced call out percentage for the dealership and no commute for the employee. We have a very cohesive and interactive team that is results driven. Most industries are turning to more technological solutions in order to keep up with the competition and for car dealerships a BDC, whether you go with a work from home or traditional office is secretly one of them. We offer several services such as call flow overflow answering for locations that may just need that little extra help to full BDC offerings with inbound calls, web lead follow up, appointment setting, e-mail responses and more. We maintain a close relationship with the dealershipsame that we work for to ensure a seamless car buying experience for their customers and determine any other areas in which we can further assist. All in all I hope that you have been able to get enough information on this topic to make a decision.

I am a BDC Director for huge privately owned dealership and space has recently become an issue with our growth. I was pondering a work at home agent to eliminate this and create better attendance. Not that attendance is an issue but with people being at home the chances of them calling out or being late is minimal. Its a savings across the board for both the dealership and the agents. Let me know your thoughts. Thank you.

Daniel Colon
Greenway Automotive
 
I am a BDC for a family of 2 dealerships and I split my week. 2 day’s at 1, 2 day’s at another and the rest at home. I find I have much more success at home. There are no distractions. I’m too social for the office atmosphere and though I’m fantastic at my job I do my best work on my home days. Cold calls to “lost” customers or old leads. I take a day or two a week to schedule evening calls when customers will actually be home and this seems to result in more appointments, test drives and sales. If you find the right person I think it’s the best way to do it for sure. That person has to be motivated though so a bonus based pay scale would be ideal. I currently get a salary plus bonuses.
 
It sounds like you have the perfect environment to dip a toe in the water without jumping in head first. Could "home office day" be a motivational tool for your team? What if you only offered it to top performers and made it a coveted reward that others worked towards? You could set the stage for improved performance across the team and alleviate some congestion too. WIN WIN! If you are tracking the success metrics you'll quickly figure out who is capable of the perceived increase in freedom to perform and who needs the structured environment that clocking in at the office provides.

That's a good approach. Start small, and see how it goes.
 
We use some work-from-home employees where I work, which works with dealers on outbound calls, after-hours BDC staffing issues, and even a completely virtual BDC.

Our employees that work from home always do a great job, and we pay by hour! Our CRM logs their calls so we can keep an eye on what each employee is doing if numbers aren't being reached, but we've been doing this for years with success.

I've freelanced working from home, and there's a big difference between someone working from home on their own and someone working from home with clear expectations about what needs to be done. It's a whole lot easier to work from home when you've got expectations set by someone else compared to working from home and setting your own goals.
 
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I've seen it worked in the past and in my view the negatives of such outweigh the positives, by a large margin.

IF, and that's a big IF, you can find someone who is enough of a self-starter to make their calls, do their e-mails, and all the other fun stuff, you still have the problem of relationships, both with the customer and with the sales floor. The customer wants to meet the person they already have a relationship with, or at least someone familiar with the discussion (another BDC Rep). Not having that connection immediately puts up defensive walls that are higher than if they hadn't spoke with anyone at all. Even the largest centralized BDC's, where everything is offsite at another connected location, I've always recommended having at least one BDC person working out of that store in order meet and greet BDC customers. This also helps big-time with getting everything logged, and I don't care how much you protest or say that your store is different, virtually EVERY single dealership I have been at (and I've been in hundreds as a consultant) has an issue with all customers being logged properly. The number of exceptions I have seen can be counted on one hand.

Also, the relationship with the salespeople is important. They come to know the style of the BDC rep, it's a relationship of mutual interest, and I believe that the camaraderie is important. It's supposed to be a TEAM effort and an off-site worker, for this industry, owing to the personal nature of the customer interactions, removes that.

At the insistence of the GM, for one of the most experienced and high-performing Reps in the store, I recently made one final attempt to do this scenario, and her show count dropped by half. There were a myriad of reasons why, but the basic story is that she kept getting distracted by all the personal things that can crop up during the day, that she could put off to the side while she was on site.

So now I am stuck with a situation where my best Rep won't give up this scenario, I have to find a way to replace her production, and it may mean adding head count and all the expense that comes with it. The whole thing back-fired spectacularly, as I knew it would. From my experience, you will NOT get as much production as you would from an on-site person, so you better be ready with a plan to make up for the difference.

If you are going to go that route regardless, my advice is to set an escalating pay plan that forces the issue when it comes to shows and sold, so that if they don't hit the expectations or numbers that they achieved when they were on site, they take a pay cut. If they do the same, they make the same, and if they beat numbers they make more than they would have made doing similar numbers when they were on site. Put the carrot out there (I wasn't allowed to do it), to keep them on point.

Good luck.