Calling Is Convenient Until It’s Not
Your dealership’s representative training, scripts, and follow-up process could be the best in the world. But one confusing phone line will undo all of that.
For customers, the fastest and most convenient way to get answers from a dealership is by calling them. But when your dealership’s phone lines are complicated, calling becomes very inconvenient.
Mistakes In Automated Menus
The mistakes dealerships make in regards to their phone lines are extremely common and easy to identify.
The first mistake is a long menu. A long menu forces customers to listen to long greetings, promotions, hours, and multiple options before they can reach a representative or make a selection. For example, a calling customer may hear choices like “Press 1 for Sales, Press 2 for Service”, but customers with more uncommon concerns are left with no direction.
Secondly, dead-ends. When customers call, they get transferred to full voicemail boxes, extensions that ring endlessly, or departments that never answer.
Third is long hold times. If dealerships do not have enough representatives working the phone lines, customers will have to endure 10 to 20 minute hold times before they get connected to a representative. And when the customers do get connected, they will already be irritated and impatient from the long wait.
Messy Phone Lines Mean Lost Customers
A 2024 study on the phone performance of nearly 3,000 U.S. dealerships conducted by Car Wars found that 31.8% of unconnected calls were the result of customers hanging up while on hold, with an average hold time of 3 minutes and 5 seconds. The data indicates that customers often evaluate their experience based on speed and convenience, and if your dealership’s phone lines are too long, complicated, or confusing, customers will lose interest.
The Mystery Shopping Process
If your dealership’s phone lines are messed up, mystery shop them to identify the specific problems.
Start by mapping out every customer-facing number and every route within the phone tree. Then call each of the numbers. Record the path, particularly noting how long the greeting and options were, any unnecessary promotional messages, how clear the instructions were, and how long you were on hold.
Take notes. And then, simplify.
The main menu should prioritize the most common customer needs: sales, service, parts, finance, and operator. Keep greetings short (ideally under 15 seconds) and be sure to remove outdated promotional material. Make sure that the option to speak to an operator is mentioned first. Narrow down how many steps it should take for a customer to be able to reach a real person. A customer should be able to reach someone in 2 to 3 options.
Next, eliminate dead-ends. Every extension should be fully active and answered, rolled to a monitored voicemail that provides clear next steps for the customer, or transferred to a backup operator.
Assign ownership to every phone line and make sure each department has enough representatives in charge of their phone lines so customers have a shorter hold time.
Even after patching up all immediate problems, repeat this process frequently. Phone lines should be reviewed whenever staffing changes, whenever dealership hours change, departments move, vendors change, or call volume spikes. Pinnacle’s Process Mapping Best Practices List provides extra guidance on the ideal length of your phone lines’ main menus, the procedures for getting customers transferred to representatives as soon as possible, and figuring out what and how much promotional material to put in your main menu. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us for a copy or for other similar frameworks – Pinnacle Dealer Services – Let’s Grow Your Dealership
Summary
If the phone tree fails, the entire process fails before your people ever get a chance to win the customer.
