Training a Dealership BDC Representative for Success

Employee training is king for any business. Uniformity, quality, efficiency, and value of customer service depend on it, and those are the business drivers that lead to meeting monthly goals and growing your dealership. 

But so often there is little time for owners or GMs to research proper training techniques and implement them. The fact is that consumer trends are moving targets, and finding the strategies and tactics that deliver results increasingly requires dedicated in-house business development centers (BDCs) and expert training consultants to maximize their efficiency. 

Whether you’re starting a BDC at your dealership or just looking to keep your existing team on point, there are a few secrets you’ll need to know. That’s why we’re walking you through the finer points of training a BDC representative for your dealership, ensuring you don’t lose time or money with false steps or inefficient training methods.

Deep Mastery Takes Time

You’re definitely going to want every BDC representative to have a black belt in phone skills and customer service, but most will need some mentoring and training before they’re a certified ninja on the phone. Just like martial arts, developing mastery takes constant practice and evaluation, and it’s why training programs that operate in short or infrequent bursts usually fail to deliver a return on the investment. 

You’ll want a program that’s efficient and delivers the kind of steady improvement that leads to performance—without breaking the bank. 

The most effective and affordable training regimes follow this structure:

Initial Training

This first session or two introduces the foundational concepts and techniques that your BDC representative will be using on every single call. There are many ways to do this initial prep, and most of it can be done in groups to maximize efficiency:

• Videos: You can produce your own or outsource. In either case, stay away from the boring podium lecture format. Color, captions, animations, whiteboard demonstrations, and humor are all proven to increase engagement and retention.
• Game-type simulations are excellent for modeling learned knowledge.
• E-learning tutorials and presentations are valid tools, and they can be done from anywhere.
• Live (including remote) teaching sessions by trainers or managers.
• Printed materials: While less effective than videos or game training scenarios, they can be useful when paired with follow-up coaching.

The structure of the session is just as important as the content. Keep content to 3-5 minute chunks. This “microlearning” limits overload and maximizes engagement and attention.

In between these short bursts, engage in group role-playing, questions, activities, etc. Anything that engages employees directly will enhance learning and keep them much more interested in the training. If team members are up and moving around, even better! Movement is proven to increase engagement and retention rates.

Building Long-Term Mastery

No matter how amazing your initial training is, the reality is that most of the information will be forgotten over time without regular skill development sessions for each BDC representative. 

That’s not lazy employees or bad trainers! That’s human nature—and there’s no getting around it. 

This means that regular, recurring coaching sessions with individual employees are a must if you expect skills to grow and become durable. This may seem like a lot of extra work, but the best coaching consultants can actually achieve revenue-generating results in as little as one 15-minute session once a week. 

Ideally, these sessions should focus on actual calls the employees took during the normal performance of their duties. This means management or training staff will need to prep for these sessions by evaluating a sampling of the work of each BDC representative.

Finally, coaching should be kind, supportive, and constructive, and there’s no need to belittle people or punish mistakes during a course of training. Statistics show most employees learn 70% of the skills they need on the job, and you are not grading them on weekly performance. You are guiding an entirely natural workplace growth process. 

Checking the Training in the Workplace

While there are many ways to do this such as supervisor monitoring, receipt surveys, number crunching, etc., by far the best way is to use mystery shoppers. 

Mystery shops allow trained professionals to experience your employees’ skill deployment exactly as any regular customer would and evaluate their performance against a standardized rubric.

Like the weekly sessions, this evaluation is not a final exam, but part of ongoing training. These periodic check-ins allow coaches to determine if the training has been fully mastered and identify areas for improvement. 

Finding the Perfect Black Belt Training Partner

Training your dealership BDC representative from a white belt to a certified master takes time, patience, and a lot of insider knowledge about what it takes to run these appointment-setting powerhouses. Unfortunately, most GMs just don’t have the time and know-how to take on the job.

This is where Phone Ninjas can be a lifesaver. Our proven training program embraces all the elements we’ve discussed above. A live or virtual group learning session kicks off our services followed by individual weekly coaching sessions to efficiently and reliably build up your team’s skills until they are durable and natural. We then perform our own mystery shops to check how your BDC representative team has implemented our training and meet with shopped employees to correct any issues. Listen to what one client’s BDC representative had to say about Phone Ninja’s training!

Best of all, we’re so confident you’ll love our model that we’ve decided to contract with our clients on a month-to-month basis. Use us when you need to, and not when you don’t. You don’t pay for services that aren’t needed on a given day, and aren’t locked into long-term contracts!

Reach out today for a free demo and two free mystery shops!