In your business, employees who answer inbound phone calls are a key part of your sales team – they are the first impression of your dealership and are in control of convincing a caller to book an appointment to come into your location. Remember, if a lead doesn’t book with you, they will book with your competition.
How do you evaluate inbound phone performance? What tools and training are you providing your call handlers to make sure they are working to their full potential?
You may assume that since they’ve gone through some onboarding and training, they are equipped with all the tools they need. Or perhaps your call handlers have years of experience in their position, so why should you worry about their performance on the phone?
If you aren’t properly tracking employee performance or investing in their success, then you aren’t maximizing your employees’ full potential. Your employees need realistic goals based on data in order to create a baseline of performance and to set goals against.
This is where call coaching comes into play. Call coaches work one-on-one or in a group setting with your CSRs to continuously work on learned skills and guarantee that your employees are applying these skills to every phone call.
Now the question that you are probably asking yourself remains: How exactly can call coaching help my business?
1. Enhance brand awareness & first impression
When a potential customer sees or hears about your dealership and decides to call you, your marketing dollars have already worked to make the phone ring. It is up to your call handler to give a good impression and ultimately gain the caller’s business.
But here’s how you lose a customer: If a caller is met with a call handler who has a less-than-enthusiastic tone or is uninformed about your products or services or does not give that caller a great impression.
Call coaching ensures that employees apply the proper tone on each call and say and ask the right things. This, in turn, builds a rapport with each caller and forms a real relationship over the phone.
You’ve invested in every part of your business, why wouldn’t you invest in your reputation?
2. Increase appointments set and profitability
The ultimate goal of any call handler (whether they are aware of it or not) is to book the appointment of a potential customer calling in.
Think of how much one appointment is worth to your business. The number of appointments booked directly correlates with your number of sales. Now imagine adding even one additional appointment per week. What would that mean to you on a quarterly or yearly basis?
Better phone skills = more appointments set.
Plain and simple. The more appointments set, the more money for your business now, and in the future with returning customers and great referrals.
3. Decrease missed opportunities
It is nearly impossible to book 100% of incoming calls. But with better phone skills, call handlers will be able to set more appointments the first time around instead of hanging up with a failed attempt to book the caller into an appointment.
With better appointment-setting techniques that call coaches deliver to your employees, you are guaranteed to start increasing your appointment conversion rates and decreasing your missed opportunities.
4. Give management time to dedicate to other tasks
Although it is always recommended to continuously meet with your employees on a one-on-one and team basis, call coaching gives managers time to focus on other tasks.
Rather than spending your time listening to employee’s calls and delivering feedback, call coaches have much more time and expertise to deliver feedback on a much regular basis. As employees are meeting with their dedicated call coach, managers can focus on other tasks at hand and veer away from reactive work.
