As showroom traffic slowly drops and customer habits change, your sales team’s phone skills are becoming more important than ever for maximizing revenue and hitting monthly sales goals. Customer service, in-person appointments, long-term loyalty, and higher sales and service engagement are all critical benefits you’re relying on your team’s phone skills to deliver.
The average customer spends about eighteen minutes on any given customer service call, and a whopping 97% say a business’s customer service impacts their brand loyalty. Clearly, your team’s phone skills have to be top-notch. With so much on the line, how can you get the most out of your training investment?
Without a doubt, bringing in a phone mystery shopper is the fastest and most effective way to get real-world feedback and training tips that directly translate to increased sales and repeat business. If you’re not leveraging mystery shopping at your dealerships, here are seven reasons why it’s time to change your strategy.
1. Address Needs and Close Deals
Customers who initiate a phone call are known as “high-intent” customers, meaning they’re already interested in a purchase and are looking to move down your sales funnel. Your sales team’s job is to identify what they want as quickly as possible and give them the answers they need to close the deal.
However, a few missteps here or there on a call can be the difference between a win and a loss. By mimicking a real customer interaction, a phone mystery shopper can identify areas where a salesperson is leaving revenue opportunities on the table and generate tips that will benefit your entire team.
2. Keep Customers Coming Back
Customers who use an outside source for service and financing are much more likely to shop somewhere else when they look for their next car. One of the easiest ways to build loyalty is by connecting buyers with in-house service and financing options, and the best opportunity to do that is during those early sales calls.
A phone mystery shopper makes sure that your team never forgets to include all the deals and benefits your dealership offers and highlights these areas in your phone scripts. Not only does that make the most of your existing revenue streams, but it ensures that you’ll have more repeat customers down the line.
3. Get an Accurate Look at Your Team’s Skills
One of the hardest aspects of a GM’s job is evaluating skills in the workplace. The problem is, it’s not as simple as just standing over someone’s shoulder and taking notes. Every boss knows employees don’t behave the same when they know they’re being watched, and the observer effect ruins the evaluation.
Mystery shopping finds out how your team is actually performing—not what they do when they’re nervous or trying to impress you. Those real interactions are what affect sales, and a phone mystery shopper will find out exactly what’s going on under the hood.
4. Compare to the Competition
A phone mystery shopper doesn’t just look at your business. They can (and should) evaluate your competitors as well. That will allow your training partner to find key areas you can take advantage of as well as places you need to improve.
5. Improve Compliance
When it comes to company policy and legal regulations, you simply cannot afford to operate outside the margins. A phone mystery shopper confirms your team’s compliance with these non-negotiable items. There’s nothing worse for a customer than getting conflicting information when it comes to issues like financing and product information. If they’re confused, or worse, don’t trust you, they’ll definitely hit the road.
6. Stay on Top of Customer Trends
Customer habits and priorities change over time—especially in the automotive industry—and staying on top of it all usually requires a dedicated training partner who keeps you up to speed on the latest facts and figures.
As your team adapts, a phone mystery shopper can track how well new information is being retained and how effectively it’s being delivered. After all, learning takes time, and a few follow-up mystery shops are often all it takes to drill down on the most important details. The faster your people get comfortable, the sooner it will translate to a boost in sales.
7. Drive Appointment Rates
Internet car and truck purchases are increasing, but only account for 3% of overall sales. The overwhelming proportion of customers still prefer to buy cars from real people, and with showroom traffic falling, that puts more pressure than ever on your team’s phone skills to bring customers to your door.
Unfortunately, the average dealership only converts about 20% of phone calls into appointments, and it’s often for one simple reason: your team forgets to ask! By using well-designed phone scripts focusing on appointment setting, the top dealerships are hitting rates of at least 60% if not higher.
One of the most important benefits a phone mystery shopper delivers is an evaluation of your team’s effectiveness in booking these appointments. Once you see where you’re falling short, you can get this major KPI up to where it should be.
Connect with a Winning Phone Mystery Shopper
Here at Phone Ninjas, phone training and mystery shopping are our bread and butter. Our clients routinely see their in-person appointment rates from phone traffic triple or even quadruple. It’s just one of the many aspects we work on with all our clients to build their business and bury the competition.
Our training program is a complete system that supports your team from beginning to end. We start with a mystery shopper to get a baseline of your phone performance. Then, our VP of Training, Mike Hoyser, conducts an initial training session with your entire team. Finally, our Phone Ninjas go to work, coaching your employees in individual sessions on a weekly or monthly basis.
Once the training is complete, we send in a phone mystery shopper to evaluate your team’s skills and highlight areas for improvement. With the results in hand, we follow up with shopped employees with further coaching to make sure they’ve mastered every detail.
To find out what Phone Ninjas can do for your dealership, reach out today for a free demo and two free mystery shops. We can’t wait to meet you and start training your team for success!
As the COO | Partner of Phone Ninjas, Chris delivers leadership, coaching, and mentorship to 55 team members providing software sales and phone skills coaching. He fosters powerful partnerships and collaborations with leaders across various business sectors, establishing expectations, communicating vision, and escalating performance to maximize productivity and effectiveness.
Chris is an innovation-driven business executive with over 25 years of experience delivering leadership to teams of up to 75 overseeing development, launch, and sale of website lead acquisition, reconditioning process software systems, and technology that support automotive dealerships across the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
