Hodges Ford Mazda Looks to the Future of Service

Many service personnel are in a bind. They are tasked with picking up inbound phone calls, communicating with belly-to-belly customers, and making revenue-generating outbound phone calls. Something’s gotta give. 

Hodges Ford Mazda, with stores in Florida and Georgia, decided to bring in expert help and contacted Proactive Dealer Solutions (PDS). Within a few short months, the group realized 100 percent inbound call connectivity and a 30 percent increase in gross revenue. Here’s how they did it. 

In 2021, a 40 percent missed inbound call rate and over-taxed service personnel propelled dealership management to act. They sought out PDS for help setting up an internal service BDC and training the BDC manager and agents. 

During intensive classes and follow-up weekly coaching calls, the dealership’s PDS Account Manager pointed out that the service BDC was not maximizing it’s revenue potential. The biggest challenge was that BDC agents were handling too many non-revenue activities, including answering easy-to-schedule inbound service appointment calls.

“Our agents productivity on outbound calls was only about 30 percent because they were struggling to also answer inbound calls,” explained Todd Oliviera, Fixed Operations Director for Hodges Ford Mazda.

The answer was to launch Brook.ai, the intelligent Digital Voice Assistant (DVA). Brooke.ai communicates in a conversational and natural way with contextual awareness and adaptive behavior, much like common DVA home devices like Alexa and Google Home. 

Brooke.ai not only frees service personnel and BDC agents from unproductive time on the phone, she also prevents potential customers from hanging up while they are put on hold for long periods of time. This is because she is able to answer hundreds of calls simultaneously and easily book appointments in an average of three minutes. A human takes around six minutes to complete the same task. 

Brooke.ai was placed “up front” on the group’s phone tree to handle all inbound service calls for oil changes and routine maintenance, answer routine questions, and pick-up after hours and overflow calls. Brook.ai integrated with the dealership’s Xtime online scheduling tool to seamlessly book appointments and manage daily schedules to maximize bay capacity. “Customers like the ease of the automated system instead of waiting on the line for a live agent,” said Oliviera. 

With Brooke.ai handling the majority of inbound calls, BDC agents were reallocated to revenue-producing outbound calls for proactive growth. The results were immediate. “We saw an 80% increase in outbound appointments in our first month with Brooke.ai.” said Oliviera. “Our agents have a lot less stress on a daily basis and the added opportunity to hit revenue goals and earn incentives, which they love.”

Additional results were just as impressive. Appointments for Declined Services marketing campaigns doubled month-over – month. The group saw more than a 60 percent increase in recall activities and three times more missed appointments were brought back into the drive. Profit also increased from 82.5 percent from 80 percent due to lower cost of labor. 

Equally important, customers liked this new way of doing business. CSI increased from 94.5 to 96.2. 

A DVA like Brooke.ai has the potential to completely change the way service departments handle inbound and outbound calls. Hodges Ford Mazda is reaping the rewards. Your service shop can look to the future and do the same. 

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To hear more about this topic check out our episode of PDS On The Rocks: Finding Success with Intelligent Call Routing for Service

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About the Author:

Tiffany Peeler is the VP of Sales & Operations for Proactive Dealer Solutions. Joining the Proactive team nearly a decade ago, Tiffany quickly became recognized for driving growth and retention with her expertise in developing and delivering effective coaching solutions. Today, Tiffany leads the sales and fulfillment teams with a laser focus in delivering industry-leading solutions to improve upon the customer experience and dealership profitability for over 1,200 North American dealerships. Tiffany was invited to speak at Nissan’s 2022 Dealer Digital Summits for the Mid-Atlantic Region and the Southeast Region. Tiffany was a 2018 Women in Automotive Conference speaker. 

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