Car Dealer Call Tracking

What to check before you buy

For each candidate, ask how the call record reaches the CRM and DMS customer record. A recording that cannot be tied to a person and a repair order cannot be audited.

Get an answer on how the scoring is defined and whether you can change the criteria. Who reviews a sample of scored calls to check the machine against a human?

How long are recordings kept? Recording carries consent obligations that differ by state.

Check how the product handles the announcement, and what it does with calls from all-party-consent states. Include the service drive.

Calls to the service department are often the largest untracked source of lost revenue in a store. A product that only handles sales phone-ups leaves that gap open.

To size the problem at your own store, ask for two numbers from any provider's trial. The first is the share of inbound calls not answered by a person, by hour and by department.

The second is the value of a service appointment from your own repair-order data, not a national average. Multiply them and compare with the subscription fee.

Vendors quote a few hundred dollars of service revenue lost per missed call. Your real figure depends on your labor rate and customer-pay mix.

A tool that cannot show these two numbers for your phones during the trial is not ready to measure anything else.

Questions to put to every car dealer call tracking vendor

• Is the connection read-only or bi-directional?
• Who pays each integration fee?
• What breaks when either product changes?

Other categories dealers compare alongside Call tracking & intelligence: Chat, text & conversational commerce, and Phone systems & contact center.