Every successful business owner knows that every team member is critical to the success of a business. Breakdowns anywhere in the flow of customers from first contact to conversion can have a major impact on your bottom line.
Because they directly turn marketing into revenue, it’s tempting to focus all your dealership’s training efforts on your sales team. However, you can’t afford to overlook the critical role your reception team plays in routing calls and setting up your salespeople for success. They’re the first point of contact for most of your customers, they route all phone traffic and answer important questions, and they set the tone for the entire experience people will have with your business.
Training your receptionists to perfect those initial interactions is key to your dealership’s success, but with so many wide-ranging options for training, how do you pick the content that will take them to the next level? Don’t worry! We’ll break down important topics to make sure you know just what to look for in any training program.
Introductory Videos
Once you’ve hired a great candidate, you’ll need to familiarize them with the skills and procedures your team will be using as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is what transforms raw talent into a top-flight car dealership receptionist who will present your brand uniformly at a high level of quality.
Video training is also a great way to introduce fundamental concepts and ensure a new reception team member’s skill set is complete. Videos are useful tools for imparting a lot of information quickly, although you have to ensure follow-up coaching to fully integrate the skills.
Here’s a wonderful introductory training video put together by Phone Ninjas founder Jerry Thibeau, a storied veteran in the automotive industry. He expertly presents the basic skills receptionists should rely on as the foundation of their daily work.
Detailed Training Videos
Once the fundamental aspects of personal presentation are in place, a more detailed series of videos can drill down on the nitty-gritty details that are key for delivering consistent customer service for any car dealership receptionist.
Here’s an excellent video series by Mike Hoyser that presents a great flow template for a variety of different reception scenarios. They cover step-by-step training on incoming customer phone calls, one of the bread-and-butter parts of any car dealership receptionist’s daily work scenarios.
- Greeting
- Generic qualifying
- Specific qualifying
- Get contact information
- Ask for an appointment!
- Drive towards closure
- Directions to the dealership
Notice that this series of videos could easily be presented as a single video, but it’s not! This is a deliberate choice, and very smartly done. Mike’s decision to break up this video allows you or your training personnel to engage in roleplaying and back-and-forth with employees between videos. Also noteworthy was Mike’s decision to keep the segments short—about five minutes each. That’s the ideal length of video to maximize attention and absorption.
No matter what training videos you ultimately settle on for your dealership, make sure they follow Mike’s example here: shorter videos that allow for good engagement and interactive activities in between segments.
Use Great Scripts
Some veterans might grumble when it comes to using scripts, but the truth of the matter is, scripts only limit their customer service skills when they’re badly written and poorly implemented. A great phone script strategy helps them make the most of their talents, and when the advantages they deliver translate into happy customers… they’ll thank you!
Scripts are also powerful tools that allow businesses to unify and streamline their customers’ experience. They’re critical for raising your customer service game above that of the competition, and they help your reception team do their job without having to rely so heavily on their on-the-fly improvisation skills. After all, they’re already going to have to do plenty of that!
Here are a couple of critical points for getting the best out of scripts:
- It’s extremely beneficial to coach your people on how to use these tools. They need to know how to deliver them in a natural fashion and keep them fresh over time.
- You should train your people with the scripts they’ll be using on the job, not generic scripts they’ll never use on a real call.
You can write your own scripts, but this is an enormous investment of time and money. That’s why most dealerships prefer to outsource this work to experts—especially owners who have multiple dealerships to coordinate. If you’re looking to expand your footprint in the business, learning how to engage an excellent consulting and training partner who takes care of everything so you don’t have to is an indispensable part of the process.
Coach Your Team
One-and-done car dealership receptionist training is like cramming for an exam: you may pick up a few pointers, but without regular check-ins, in a short time your reception team is going to forget most of what they learned. That’s why short-term training is a low-yield proposition for your reception team.
Shorter sessions of learning spread out over a longer period of time is the ideal training approach to maximize your spending. This is called spaced learning, and it’s been proven in 200+ studies to be—by far—the most effective way to learn.
Getting Your Reception Team on Point with Phone Ninjas
Phone Ninjas has paired the top techniques and tactics in the automotive business with active coaching strategies to produce one of the best training programs in the industry. Our dedicated team of experts can flexibly adapt to your training needs, from basic consultations to weekly sessions to ensure your team members soak up every last bit of information.
We then follow up this coaching with mystery shops to make sure your team is delivering on the strategy during actual sales calls. We follow up with shopped employees to celebrate success and work on any remaining small deficiencies.
Our results speak for themselves. Most dealerships only convert about 20% of incoming calls to showroom appointments. Our clients routinely see at least 60% conversion rates, with some clients clocking over 80%! And don’t take our word for it—our clients will tell you how much we’ve improved their business!
Contact us today to revolutionize your car dealership receptionist skills right away! We’d love to show you a demo, as well as offer two complimentary mystery shops.
As the Vice President 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.
