Customer Contact Management Solutions

In January, UK registrations fell 13.3% to 157,363 units, but the UK car market remains Europe's second largest, behind Germany. This shows that, despite tougher times for car dealers, we still have healthy demand.

It is now more important than ever to ensure that every contact with customers is of the highest standard of service. The speed of response and quality of handling customer enquiries is vital to meet the already high expectations of the consumer.

Within the industry we must not fixate on the negative issues that we face, but move forward in a positive manner and embrace the opportunities that the customers are bringing to us.

The Background

A typical motor dealer tends to place responsibility firmly with the individual department to ensure that aftersales customer communications are successfully fulfilled. This function is then delivered by an administrator who has other priorities within their job role. Research suggests that a dedicated call centre could provide a more effective and professional service. Therefore, centralisation of the function for a dealer should be a main objective and to engage this into the business, it is essential that the dealer management system integrates this into the process.

There are a whole host of requirements that a dealer needs when creating a solution to meet their communication issues. The system developed by ADP to run within Autoline is a completely integrated aftersales solution. This has a simple process to book work into a Workshop Loading module, with management of courtesy cars alongside the ability to measure technician efficiency.

Customers who have seen the system have described is as a 'world class' aftersales environment IT solution.

Customer Contact Management Solution (CCMS)

There are very complicated solutions for call centre management and workshop loading in the market place, but ADP have developed a very simple solution that is user friendly and meets the dealers' business objectives.

The solution has been designed to provide dealers with a full contact and resource planning tool for the aftersales environment.

The main objectives are to : 1) Take the customer out of the market place and into the business cycle, 2) Take control of the dealership resources, 3) Ensure that all deals are maximised in the most efficient way possible

It is important to identify that good use of the system will allow non-technical advisor's to make communications with customers at a very confident level. The system can assist the user through a series of events such as a new customer enquiry, a review of a current customer's history and also provides the opportunity to up-sell during the communication.

With the CCMS system it is the responsibility of the dealer to identify the level of work that their resources will allow them to fulfill. The call centre then allocates the work via customer communication and up-selling. It is estimated that 0.7 advisor's are required to support one dealership.

This operation will provide complete uniformity across the operation, there will be no variation of business delivery at a regional level. The set-up of the system is simple, all that a service manager maintains is the following:

Walk-in booking
Loan car booking, simple diary allocation
Book a technician to a job - simple diary allocation
Weekly resource allocation template view
Wizards to allocate resources in the dealership
Monthly/weekly template
Amendable daily hours

Scripting is used to allocate a customer with their vehicle and to review and confirm these details. Mandatory information is required to ensure that full details are collected. Intuitive information is populated automatically to save time, which promotes a professional and efficient call centre service.

A single resource database is used, therefore the script updates the marketing database and creates the WIP within the integrated Autoline system. The script can be designed so that it is a full conversation or just prompts for the more experienced adviser.

Business Benefits

It is estimated that good use of the system can:

Generate 4,500 'winter health checks' in 3 months which is a 20% increase from non-call centre dealers
Add 25% extra revenue to each service by the call centre through upselling
£20,000 generated per week on vehicle health checks by just two advisers
Retail labour growth has improved by 20% where there is a call centre facility

Upselling

Facility to design promotions which drop into the script at the relevant time. Ability to set parameters to allow campaigns to be offered to certain customers dependent on vehicle details. Information can be sent to customers in many different formats.

Useability

No technical ability is required to use the product and calls can be answered easily with the use of amendable scripts and table files..