How many sales dollars is your dealership losing from poor phone skills?
While it is true that the internet has taken up a large part of the consumer’s buying journey, the phone is still key in a prospect’s car buying process. Phone calls are still the initial point of contact with your dealership for 25% of all consumers.1
During their discovery process, consumers will often call a car dealership looking for more information before stepping foot into the dealership. It is important that your dealership is prepared with experienced call handlers to not only answer all incoming calls, but also to get the caller to come into your dealership.
Well, improve phone skills and follow up with these possible lost leads, of course!
With that being said, knowing that the ultimate goal of a call handler is to book callers into an appointment, it is evident that auto dealerships are failing in this aspect.
How many of your leads are slipping away?
CallSource data2 shows that 71.88% of dealerships’ total bookable calls end up in a missed opportunity – meaning no appointment was booked. That’s almost ¾ of your inbound prospect calls!
These aren’t people calling in for directions or for some unspecified reason – CallSource call analysts label calls into a bookable category only when it is evident from the phone conversation that there is an opportunity to set an appointment with the phone prospect.
When over 70% of these interested consumers aren’t verified to come into your dealership, how many leads are you letting slip away to your competition?
Improve your conversion rate, improve your ROI
Further, most of these missed opportunities are in your sales department. Almost 60% of total bookable calls are missed sales opportunities. Based on an average sale price of $2,200, that’s over $13,000 in missed sales for every 10 bookable calls your dealership receives.
What can you do to improve this missed opportunity rate? Well, improve phone skills and follow up with these possible lost leads, of course!
CallSource cannot only record calls and improve phone handler performance; we can also alert you within moments when a possible lead does not book an appointment with your dealership.
Contact a CallSource representative today to learn more about our DealSaver program and start recapturing your missed opportunities.
Reference:
1. http://press.autotrader.com/download/2016CarBuyerJourneyStudyBrochureFINAL.pdf
2. CallSource data based off of 3 million sampled and completed automotive phone calls over 2 years.
