Ultimately, providing a better phone experience begins with your technology and your people. Before you can even think about improving your processes, you need to make sure you have your people trained on how to handle the phones and get your phone’s caller ready.
Millennials now occupy the primary demographic for car buying. In fact, in 2020 millennials beat out boomers in car purchases for the first time and 80% have stated they plan to purchase in the next five years. A group that is comfortable with a convenient shopping experience, millennials want a transparent buying experience and an essential part of that is being able to provide a satisfactory phone experience. Contrary to popular belief, millennials do want to talk on the phone, but dealers need a different approach. Millennials don’t want sales fluff or smooth talkers. They want results and they want them quickly.
You get them by transforming calls into customers. Did you know that phone calls convert 10-15 times more revenue than web leads and call retention is 18% higher than web leads? The secret to converting millennial customers revolves around a great phone experience.
How can you turn millennials into customers? Here are some tips.
Bring Your Phones and Your Reps Up to Speed
Ultimately, providing a better phone experience begins with your technology and your people. Before you can even think about improving your processes, you need to make sure you have your people trained on how to handle the phones and get your phone’s caller ready.
Train Your People
Buying a car is a unique experience. It differs from other retail because it involves a major purchase. The good news is that people often come to you with an average of 17.6 hours of research already under their belts. Armed with that kind of knowledge, the last thing millennials want is to be met with an apathetic phone rep with little people skills and a lack of knowledge. Train your people to become active, engaged listeners and you will have a far great chance of converting those millennials.
Use employee scorecards. This helps your phone reps take an active role in their training and allows them to clearly identify their strengths and weaknesses with actionable takeaways.
Teach applicable strategies. Help phone reps understand what callers are looking for and give them clear instruction on what millennial callers want to hear. See below for some of those strategies.
Review past calls. Have conversations and determine what phone reps did well and what they could do better.
Prep Your Tech
A full suite call monitoring solution optimizes the caller experience with the following.
- Phone health checks: Prevents dropped calls, long wait times, outages, and misrouted calls.
- Missed opportunity alerts: Notifies dealers when a sales opportunity was missed so they can follow up immediately.
- Action alerts: Notifies dealers when an action is needed, such as voicemail return or text follow-up.
Deliver Instant Gratification
When a millennial reaches out to you and leaves a voicemail, they fully expect to be contacted quickly with answers. Millennials are digitally enabled, performing lots of digital research before reaching out. Rest assured, they have only called if they are closer to a purchase and they are seeking information they haven’t been able to locate in their search. This group wants to feel valued with instant gratification. Here are a few ways you can deliver that.
Return the call within one hour of receipt. Don’t leave them waiting. They may very well move on to another dealer.
Have the information they need prepped and ready. If they are calling to check on inventory, you need to know if something is available before you call so that you can address their concerns immediately.
Get straight to the point. Avoid off-topic and disjointed intros. Return the call, state your identity and provide your purpose for calling. They’ll appreciate that you find their time to be valuable.
Be transparent. Millennials don’t want to see any hidden charges snuck into the pricing. Be upfront about charges and you will foster trust.
Provide clear direction and next steps. Don’t leave your call hanging. Give your millennial customer a clear takeaway and tell them how to move forward in the decision-making process.
Offer an incentive. Respect the fact that they reached out to you and upgrade the buying experience for them.
Create a Frictionless Call Experience Using Cross-Platform Functionality
One of the best ways to fully prepare for any conversation is to have each lead documented as closely as possible in your CRM so you are informed about every interaction they have with your dealership. If you are returning a phone call from Millennial Caller A and you don’t know that they have an existing service relationship with you, Millennial Caller A is going to feel like you are uninformed and inefficient.
Use cross-platform functionality to tie your systems together and you will greatly improve the customer experience. Using call monitoring, digital advertising, and DNI, you can ensure call details are tracked and determine where leads originate. This information will help you meet millennials where they want to be and create a seamless experience from web research to call to purchase.
Take these steps and you’ll find yourself pulling ahead of your competitors with more millennial conversions.
