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Hall Automotive Improves Customer Service, Cuts Operating Costs with inContact's Hosted Call Center Software

A few years back, Virginia Beach's Hall Automotive, one of the fifty largest new car dealerships in America, centralized its sales- and marketing-related customer contact activity within a single corporate call center.

And it's not your run-of-the-mill auto dealership contact center - it handles an estimated 300 toll free numbers, many of which are associated with a specific dealership location and its specific marketing campaigns, promotional programs or functional groups.

During the first five months of operation, the group was handling about 1,700 inbound calls and placed about 11,000 outbound calls per month on behalf of nine of their 16 stores. "We spend over $10 million annually on advertising and 60 percent of our business is repeat business. We dominate in our market," said Randy Brobston, business development director for Hall Automotive and senior manager in charge of the call center.

The company uses an industry-specific CRM package, AutoBase, but the database and the call handling technologies were not integrated. "Every outbound call was hand-dialed," said Brobston. Hall's inbound technology was "a little hunt group routine" developed by their IT department.

Brobston knew his group had a 60 percent abandonment rate for inbound calls. He knew there was a problem.

"We started by looking for a predictive dialer. We looked at all kinds of tools. Most were very expensive and complicated," Brobston said, finally selecting inContact's hosted call center software to improve its customer contact operation.

Using the inContact outbound Power Dialer, overall monthly productivity grew from 11,000 outbound calls per month under the manual method to 21,000 calls per month, Brobston said, noting a number of inbound features within inContact, such as the ability to associate a call routing process to a specific toll free number.

That feature is combined with the ability to assign one or more skills to each rep and to determine which reps are available prior to ringing a phone, which helped raise inbound call handling productivity from 1,700 calls per month to 6,500.

Brobston says he's finally able to see with clarity what his team is doing, monitor the call activity in process and quickly answer the marketing department's question regarding how many calls came in on a particular campaign.

"Now we can move on to the next level and use this information to determine such things as the ratio of calls to appointments and develop performance stats on each of our agents."

Hall Automotive's success with inContact's hosted call center solutions is the focal point of a recent webinar, "Conquering Call Center Villains," which was presented on March 25.

During the event, Corran Ashby, contact center manager, Hall Automotive, talked about how the dealership was able to quickly, easily and affordably migrate to a complete "customer centric" system that interfaces with multiple CRM and back office systems - as well as how inContact's hosted call center software, with its advanced features and functionality, helped increase production by 350 percent while reducing the price-per-call from 83 to 23 cents.

In addition, Jason Williams, senior product manager, inContact, talked about some of the most common call center villains - including how they can suck away valuable time, resources and money - and how inContact's hosted call center platform, with its all-in-one architecture, can help call center managers defend themselves against these menacing nemeses.

To access the free archived version of this informative webinar, click here.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David's articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Patrick Barnard

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