Challenge

Missing Out on High-value Customer Opportunities

Many Big O Tires franchise owners or their managers juggle multiple aspects of their business themselves: supervising job functions, inventory control, customer satisfaction, and, of course, making sales. The demands of daily operations often cause divided attention. “Our owners and store managers are often too busy running the business to pay close enough attention to what’s happening to many of their most valuable sales-generating opportunities: The phone calls coming in,” says Don Helphrey, Director of Operations for Big O Tires.

Since calls equal appointments and appointments equal revenue, the company knew that calls were critical to its business. Because of this, Big O Tires was already using Marchex conversational analytics and reviewing call recordings for insights and learnings.

Helphrey explains, “Marchex tools are extremely valuable. Reviewing call recordings after the fact has helped us figure out where things go sideways on a phone call.”

But while listening to call recordings and utilizing Marchex Speech Analytics could help performance with future callers, it often couldn’t save the opportunity being analyzed given the timely nature of the customer need. What Helphrey and Big O Tires needed was a way to take action and capture those inbound call opportunities to successfully engage the customer before they considered and acted on alternatives.

Helphrey continues, “We asked ourselves, what if we could start doing this in real time? It could be a huge way we could help our franchises and our business. We viewed this as the next valuable step in our process of continuous improvement to help with store sales.

Solution

Real-time Alerts to Save Missed Opportunities

Big O Tires decided to launch a pilot program with MARCHEX SALES EDGE Rescue, an AI-infused call monitoring and scoring solution that identifies missed opportunities and generates alerts that enable store staff to take quick action to save the sale.

“The Sales Edge Rescue program cuts through the clutter and the noise of the day; it helps businesses focus on what’s important— the customer,” says Helphrey.

Big O Tires decided to run the pilot in 60 stores. They selected a cross-section of franchise stores to participate in the program. From single-store owners who work alongside employees every day to multi-store owners who employ store managers and even a large multi-store owner who has a dedicated operations team and call center, Big O Tires wanted all owner types represented.

The pilot program revealed the true scope of the customer service challenge resulting from mishandled calls across the stores. Highly motivated customers were calling Big O Tires stores and opportunities were being lost every day.

“The program revealed that customers were calling, practically begging to spend money at our stores, but the whirlwind of daily operations sometimes creates challenges in focusing on high value opportunities. Sales Edge Rescue gave us the way to give these customers a ‘Big O Yes’.”
– Don Helphrey, Director of Operations, Big O Tires

When the pilot was launched, the alerts were flooding in across the 60 stores. Opportunities were being missed every day at every location. In stores where more than one staff member received the alerts, response rates were better due to having more staff capacity to take action. While the large stores with dedicated sales and support staff were the most successful early on at handling the outreach to real-time opportunities, stores with more limited staff were often too overwhelmed by the daily workflow and the sheer number of opportunities missed every day. In partnership with Marchex, Helphrey applied the available filters within the Marchex solution to refine the number of alerts sent to the stores without a dedicated sales team to a number that was manageable. Delivering 8-10 alerts per day that focused on the highest-value opportunities – tire sales – proved to be the best fit for these stores, providing a manageable workflow that enabled them to create a better customer experience and close more business. With this program optimization, Helphrey saw a dramatic uptick in franchisee engagement and in sales at stores across the program.

Results

$100,000 per store in annual revenue potential

During the measured two-month period of December 2019 through January 2020, the pilot generated more than $1 million of revenue across the 60 participating stores. On average, this yielded nearly $17,000 per store during this limited period. This represents $100,000 in potential revenue per store per year on an annualized basis. Furthermore, during a time when it’s never been more important to take care of customers, SALES EDGE Rescue provided a valuable engagement tool as the COVID-19 crisis emerged. In the program’s latest month, which included the COVID-19 downturn, the issue resolution rate rose to 88 percent. Focusing on creating a timely customer response helped the business meet immediate customer needs.

“Our close rate has doubled during the present COVID-19 crisis using Sales Edge Rescue,” says Helphrey.

Because SALES EDGE Rescue implements a business process that enables a business to identify and rapidly follow up on mishandled conversations, it is providing high value opportunities at a time when businesses need them most.