Growing Your Car Count

Oct. 1, 2016

A Q&A on how tracking inbound phone calls increases high income car count

Call tracking is a value added feature you could use to help track your marketing and advertising dollars. You may be thinking…I already have a business telephone number that I’ve been using for years. Using call tracking does not require you to change telephone numbers. It is simply a unique number (toll-free or local) that routes to your existing business telephone number. See how it works: https://mudlickmail.com/call-tracking/.

Bottom-Line Benefits of Using Call Tracking:

  • Helps you understand where (zip codes, neighborhoods, regions) you should be spending advertising and marketing dollars, which promotional offers produce the right type of response and which demographics generate the highest repair order tickets.
  • Allows you to determine if your marketing campaigns are generating a response from your ideal prospects and/or customers.
  • Automatically tallies metrics such as the number of calls you receive, missed calls, call durations, peak call times, etc. which can be valuable insights in achieving staffing and management efficiencies to improve the customer service experience.
  • Automatically records and stores each incoming call. This gives you greater control over the customer acquisition cycle and how service writers handle and prioritize phone leads; ensuring shop sales are maximized on a day-to-day basis.

Call tracking can be easily implemented and can play a key role in discovering business needs, operational gaps, and wasted spend on marketing and advertising. By far, it is one of the most efficient methods for evaluating the performance of your marketing campaigns. Finally, call tracking can also provide baseline numbers to help you determine your cost per lead and your cost per sale.

Q: How can call tracking help me improve customer service and grow customer loyalty with my high RO customers?

In addition to the data call tracking provides, sophisticated advertising and marketing vendors offer an extra layer of sophistication which automates call listening. In other words, your inbound phone calls will be automatically listened to and scored based on a number of attributes related to customer service, customer agitation, shop compliments, competitor mentions and more.

  • Conversation analytics takes a deeper dive and reveals more about the characteristics of the callers. Using sophisticated speech recognition technology, our call analytics feature analyzes words used during the call and extracts useful bits of information based on those words. For example, conversation analytics can identify keywords or phrases that can be used to improve your shop and become more competitive.
  • Conversation analytics also evaluate the performance of your front counter staff fielding calls, offering insight into “missed opportunities” or calls that could turn into appointments with more front counter coaching. For overwhelmed shop owners, conversion analytics is a perfect way to glean more insight about your prospects without having to find the time to listen to each call.

Q: Are call tracking and conversation analytics standard features offered by most advertising and marketing providers?

No, both features are not standard offers. Direct mail advertising generates the highest return on marketing dollars for automotive service shops. To give an idea, call tracking is a standard feature offered by direct mail companies; however conversation analytics and automated reports are not. Mudlick Mail’s all-inclusive prices bundle these features into their flat-rates.

Tim Ross is the President of Mudlick Mail. He has 15+ years of automotive service sales and marketing experience. Tim holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Dayton. He has spent the last eight years building Mudlick Mail into one of the fastest growing small businesses in the USA! Mudlick Mail specializes in automotive service marketing and has partnered with thousands of shops in North America to develop sustainable sales growth. Tim hosts a series of learning webinars for shop owners, covering a range of topics on front counter responsibilities, operations and marketing. Visit Automotive.MudlickMail.com for FREE shop owner resources and tools.

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