Appointment Co-Ordinators are usually looked at as a non-production employee, who just handles customer service inbound calls, some administrative tasks, and books appointments.
But, you can take this non-productive position, make it productive, and more than offset its own expense, and become revenue-generating.
The idea is to create a sudo-Sales department within your Service Department by getting everyone on board with the philosophy of “Educational-Based Selling”.
Your Appointment Co-Ordinators are the first point of contact with customers. They continue to serve the customer in the same fashion, but they educate customers using your Schedule Maintenance Guide to help customers understand what is needed at the current service interval, while they are at the dealership getting service.
Converting your Appointment Co-Ordinators into their own department that has goals, and metrics, isn’t hard, but it takes some time to move from V1.0, where they basically just book appointments. To V4.0, where they are a full-blown customer service sales department of their own. Similar to a Sales BDC, but a Service & Parts Department version.
The average dealership with training, and goals, can have its Appointment Co-Ordinators pre-sell appx $1,000,000 annually of parts and labour. You’ll find that about ~5% of those pre-sales won’t actually follow through on a closed work orders, but that’s out of their control – unless they are manipulating their metrics/pay plan.
To get the phone to ring more, you have to do outbound campaigns, just like your Sales BDC does with your Appointment Co-Ordinators, whom are formally called “Service BDC Reps”.
You’ll find your average Appointment Co-Ordinator without any goals, or management tracking, will do about 45 -80 customer touches a day. 45 on the low end, and 80 on the higher end.
But, if you set expectations, and pay them accordingly, they can do 150 customer touches per day.
This would consist of inbound calls, outbound calls, texts, and emails. They can do more, but they either manipulate the distribution of contact methods (ie. just send a ton of emails, and no calls), or they manipulate process (ie. hang up on ring 2 if no one answers).
The average Appointment Co-Ordinator who doesn’t have any expectations or calls, would be hard-pressed to even see $40 average per appointment booked. This is an average of all appointments, from retail, warranty, maintenance plans, and even recalls.
It starts with;
- tracking what they’re doing,
- having a formal time and mileage-based recommendations from your Maintenance Service Interval Guide for them to sell from,
- training of processes, and expectations,
- set their goals, and
- track all of it.
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Let’s say you wanted to retain your current customers, and get more new & lost customers in the Service Drive Thru.
How would you do it in volume?
Do it with an Outbound Service BDC. Dealer eBDC