Mo' People, Mo' Problems — How to Train an Influx of Dealership Employees

According to the National Automobile Dealers Association, the auto industry surpassed one million employees for the first time since 2008.

This is awesome, but sometimes mo' people means mo' problems, as Notorious B.I.G. might say.

How can you efficiently train a flood of employees to provide top-notch service? Here are a few ideas that may help.

Give Them a Demo

To make sure new employees know exactly how to carry out their job duties, give them hands-on training sessions. Whether they're assisting customers on the lot or on the phones, they'll need to know how to provide excellent customer service. If you don't have time to sit with every new hire, you might need a little something to help you out.

One way to do this is to record phone conversations so new hires can listen to seasoned representatives handle calls. It's best to lead by example in this situation, so you'll know that your new employees are familiar with your call handling guidelines specifically.

Monitor Their Performance

Once your staff starts handling phone calls on their own, you have to make sure they're complying with your standards. You could spend your day monitoring every single call, but we're betting you don't have time for that.

Use speech-recognition software to scan your calls instead. With this technology, you can select keywords to be identified during phone conversations. You can then view reports of the words that are (and aren't) spoken, and address any service issues immediately. This can ultimately save you time so you can focus on the representatives who need to step up their service.

Teach Them How to Avoid Losing Leads

So your employees have learned the ropes and they're on the phones. But how can you be sure they won't lose prospects due to inexperience? Rather than sorting through calls and finding lost leads, let a call monitoring service do it for you.

A professionally trained staff will review your recorded calls to identify mishandled calls that may have led to lost business. You won't have to waste time listening to hundreds of calls to find one or two lost leads. You can even opt in to receive real-time text or email alerts when a call is mishandled so your team can call the lead back and recapture their business.

Mo' employees doesn't always have to mean mo' problems. For more tips on how you can provide better service, check out this post.