[Phone Skills] Gathering Customer Data on Service Calls

Picture this … Your dealership’s owner gives you the go ahead to send out an expensive advertisement perfectly designed to get your phones ringing and bring customers into the showroom.  Anxious to get this mailer out the door, you dig through your Dealership Management System’s (DMS) database to compile a list of appropriate addresses.  A couple days after the mailer is sent out, the post office delivers a bin full of returned pieces to you.  Ugh.  As you sift through them, time after time you see “no longer at this address” stamped across the front.  All you can think is how much money was just wasted simply because you used DMS information that is out of date. 

Maintaining your DMS doesn’t have to be difficult.  In some cases, the hardest part is training your Service staff to ask appropriate questions while they have a customer on the phone.  One of the easiest ways to get this type of information is to offer the customer something in return for sharing it.

Below is a simple sentence that has been found to work effectively to maintain current customer records in auto dealers' CRM:

“To ensure that you are getting the valuable coupons we send out periodically, as well as any important safety information on your vehicle, please let me verify your contact information.”

Here is a sampling of 12,973 Fixed Ops calls:

On average, only 26% of calls to service are utilized to maintain accurate customer records. Take a minute to ask yourself how much money you could save by investing some time with the people who are handling your Service calls?  Teaching them the importance of gathering up to date contact information can make a vital difference to your advertising ROI. 

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