We’re fooling ourselves. We are doing it knowingly for our own peace of mind. We’re giving ourselves a false sense of security within our CRM by allowing certain actions to take place. We institute stopping the clock practices that actively work against our best interests. And we’re letting it take place.
CRM reporting determines how we feel our team is doing. We look at the metrics our CRM calculates and give ourselves a pat on the back for a job well done. This most commonly happens with the cancerous activity of “stopping the clock”. It is entirely too common for BDC agents and Internet teams alike retrieve a new lead from the CRM, click the phone call task and comment with a simple “sc”. This takes it off their immediate need to follow-up, while also showing an unrealistically fast response time in the system.
We look at our reports and see and average of a 3-minute response time. “We must be doing something right”, we kid ourselves into believing. However, as DealerKnows grades Internet/BDC agents and salespeople alike on their follow-up through our TaskTeacher software, we get to see the real numbers. In some cases, agents stop the clock for no reason at all. We show a 3-minute stopping the clock response time in the system, but are getting back just 10 minutes later. In other instances we see people stopping the clock and allowing 45 minutes to go by before the prospect is addressed again. Your CRM report would never tell you that, though.
Allowing stopping the clock activities to occur in our CRM gives us a false sense of security that our teams are doing right. But they aren’t. Not by the CRM, not by the dealership, and not by the management. Stopping the clock in a CRM is nothing more than promoting vanity metrics, but it will not improve your overall sales or performance. If anything, it is adding in one more step between reviewing the lead and responding to the prospect. It is wholly unnecessary.
In the end, we need truthful reporting based upon actual happenings or we will never know what aspects of our follow-up process need to be improved. Push for real actions. Strive to connect with customers legitimately from the start rather than worrying about some faux response time. You will have a better understanding of how your team can improve the customer experience, your CRM will house more factual information, and your customers will receive replies even faster.
