How an Automotive Business Development Center Can Help Support Your Sales Team

admin | Automotive BDC, Customer Service | automotive appointment scheduling, automotive bdc, customer service, dealership customer service, service bdc

The sales team at a car dealership is comprised of multiple positions with multiple responsibilities throughout the company. Some positions you may find at a dealership that play a role in the sales process include sales associates, sales managers, and the general manager. And while these positions are primarily focused on driving dealership success, they are still responsible for elements of the customer service strategy. This might include answering the phone when they aren’t with an active customer, greeting customers on the lot, or even grabbing a bottle of water for a service customer waiting for their vehicle. And while all of these tasks certainly keep team members busy throughout the day, not all of them are actively generating revenue for the dealership. That’s why moving customer service activities away from the sales team is a great way to create more bandwidth for those employees to tend to the sales process and develop a truly seamless transition between the sales and customer service teams. Let’s dig into a few of the ways in which an automotive business development center can help support your sales team. 

What is a Business Development Center?

In the automotive industry, Business Development Centers (or BDCs) work alongside sales and service teams to manage incoming calls, schedule sales and service appointments, and perform outbound campaigns that generate sales and service leads. Additionally, BDCs can help improve customer retention, conduct satisfaction surveys, and handle general or overflow call volume. By removing these tasks from other teams, sales and service staff can focus on what they do best and dealers can rest assured that no ball is being dropped in the process. 

Answering Calls and Managing High Call Volume

An automotive business development center can help alleviate heavy call volume by answering calls that otherwise could pull salespeople and sales managers away from customers. BDCs, like Customer Traac, become masters on the subject of your dealership so they can answer questions, resolve inquiries, and even relay specific details regarding car service needs and timelines. This removes a lot of the time spent by sales teams on customer service issues that can pull focus away from the selling of cars, which in-turn opens up availability to make more sales and keep moving inventory.

When your dealership sales or service teams are getting a high volume of calls for questions on top of inquiries, it can get messy. Additionally, consider the times of year when you typically experience an increase in people purchasing cars as well as servicing them. These increased call volumes can be a lot to handle, and outsourcing them to a team that is equipped to manage these seasonal shifts can aid your dealership in its busy season. A BDC can take those calls and turn them into schedules for the sales and service teams that keeps everyone busy but not overloaded. 

Follow-up Calls

Following up with customers about their purchase, their vehicle’s maintenance schedule, returning calls with issues, and other customer service tasks can be left for the BDC to handle in a timely, and efficient manner. This way, salespeople won’t have to worry about keeping track of customer voicemails, emails, or disrupting sales efforts to make these follow-up calls. Additionally, follow-up calls can bring a lot of recurring business to the dealership. It’s a tactic that can easily fall by the wayside if salespeople aren’t getting responses or calls back after a week or two. A BDC that remains diligent in reaching out to existing or potential customers have a very high chance of turning calls into appointments, future trade-ins, or even a good review. 

Scheduling Service Appointments

BDCs will know a car’s suggested service maintenance schedule based on the make, model, year, and when the customer purchased the vehicle. This means they can make and maintain a full schedule of service appointments that improves customer retention and creates a full schedule for the service team. 

An automotive business development center can help create a ripple effect from the initial sale, and takes care of all the supporting activities associated with it. Customer Traac starts at once after a sale and can start outbound campaigns, pre-schedule service appointments, and alleviate call volume from the dealership. 

For over 30 years, Customer Traac has provided outsourced business development center solutions for dealerships across the country. We know that when your teams have more time to focus on what they do best, your dealership grows. Reach out today to learn how we can help your sales team sell more cars and create lasting customer relationships.