Are Your Current BDC Agents Efficient and Effective?

The cost of BDC agents has doubled in the past 20 years. On top of this, sourcing these agents have become much more difficult. The stakes are much higher these days to ensure that your agents are productive and represent your dealership well.

But do you even know where to start?  We will set aside training and listening to your agent’s calls because that should be getting done already. We want to focus on the metrics. There are dozens of metrics to choose from when seeing if your agents are doing what they need to do.

But what are the most critical call center metrics you want to start with to understand how you are doing? Let’s start with these three quick numbers you should know:

Daily Volume

How many inbound calls are your automotive BDC agents receiving each day? A typical BDC with enough staff has agents receiving about 70 inbound calls daily. Is it better if they take more? Not necessarily. That may mean dropping more calls and not getting to those outbound calls you need daily to grow the customer pay RO business. The critical number we are looking at here is outbound attempts. Again assuming that you have enough agents, an agent doing a blended mix of inbound/ outbound calls should be able to take 70 inbound calls and then make 160 outbound attempts each day.

BDC Agent Efficiency

How much should they be on the phones? You need software to track this in ways that a desk phone isn’t able to, and the high-performing BDCs expect their agents to be at least 80% efficient. To determine efficiency includes time on the phone and wrap-up time. The best-in-class stores reach 90%. Can they ever be 100%? No. Agents need training, take breaks, and frequently have other tasks or need to work with the service advisors, lowering their dialer efficiency.  Many BDC agents are on the phone as low as 40% of the time. To make your BDC profitable, you must start monitoring this.

Sales Lead Conversion Rate on Inbound and Outbound Calls

How about conversion rates? If your BDC agents are working efficiently and keeping their call volume up, the next most important metric is how they convert service or sales leads. To use service as an example, if your agents are focusing on customer retention and have an answer rate of 34%, they should convert about 9% per 100 attempts. Watch this number and benchmark the entire team.

And let’s throw in a 4th as a bonus:

Wrap-Up Time

A bonus? Let’s talk about the wrap-up time. An agent can be efficient in the software but still needs to get the volume necessary to grow the business. Take a look at the wrap-up time. The wrap-up is the time an agent takes between hanging up the phone and dialing the next. 30 seconds should be the max time, even if they look at the customer record before dialing. We see some dealers with much lower times. The wrap-up time is an excellent way to spot-check if the agent is looking busy but not busy.

Setting benchmarks for these first metrics will help your BDC level up. Once you’ve established baselines for these, you can dig deeper.