Before launching Sales Performance Management during the NADA Convention & Expo, CallSource spent a year previewing the end-to-end call management system with a few dealers.

While the company found some encouraging results from the pilot testing — call-to-appointment climbed for the dealers above 30 percent; the industry average is 8 percent, CallSource said — a recent survey the company conducted among dealers had some results the company found a bit more concerning.

Yet it showed why CallSource finds enhanced call management so paramount for dealers.

The survey found that six in 10 dealers believe they do not effectively manage the increasing inbound call traffic, and a third say they lose at least a fifth of shoppers to competitors, the company said.

“While that number is disturbing enough, our research shows that the situation is even worse, with poorly performing dealers likely losing 8 in every 10 sales to another dealership,” David Greene, the vice president of the CallSource Auto Division, said in a news release.

The statistic Greene cites refers to an IHS/CallSource study. The research shows that among car buyers who bought a vehicle within 90 days of making a call to a dealership, 84 percent bought from a different store. 

“SPM helps dealers get in front of this growing problem because it trains dealership teams to effectively communicate with (and convert) customers, and it also helps dealers specifically identify where the pain points and vulnerabilities are in their team’s phone skills,” Greene said. “The reality today is that most don’t know what’s happening on their phones. And what they don’t know IS hurting them. SPM aims to change that, and, in turn, drive conversions, sales and profits.”

The increasing prevalence of smartphones plays a big part in the importance of call management, Greene said in an interview at NADA. 

The tendency of an online car shopper to sit at a desktop and fill in a lead form is “starting to dissipate,” Greene said.  He said the lead-form submissions among the large dealership groups that CallSource tracks were down roughly 30 percent last year, while in-bound phone calls climbed 8 percent.

If this seems counterintuitive, consider this: shoppers are becoming less patient, not more, Greene said.

They want immediacy, so click-to-call can be tempting, he said.

“When they click-to-call and they connect with a dealership, their expectation is that they’re going to have the same type of immediacy, transparency and authentic communication that they would be able to get online."

Unfortunately, Greene said, some dealerships simply haven’t adopted the necessary communication structure to accommodate such a shopper. 

He also points out, though, that many dealerships his company works with understand the importance of “having a structure for this new type of shopper” to meet that shopper’s need to get a quick and accurate answer on the phone.