Interview with Heather Lewis
You are working for the number one Mercedes dealer in the country. The BDC idea and everything that you are about, has been key in making this happen ... would you tell us how that came about?
Heather Lewis
Fletcher Jones Motorcars
Business Development Director
Heather Lewis is the Business Development Director for Fletcher Jones Motorcars and has been with them for the past 10 years. Prior to joining Fletcher Jones Motorcars, Heather was with UDC and the House of Imports. She is married with 2 daughters.
Email: hlewis@fjmercedes.com
The business development center here at Fletcher Jones encompasses a wide selection of a variety of expertise anywhere from Internet marketing to service call center to in-bound calls to out-bound marketing to our clients and our client retention is all generated out of the business development center.
What is it that has made the BDC idea work here at Fletcher Jones?
What has made us successful has been the people. The process and the software helps us maximize our day to day activity.
The software from UDC Momentum has helped us generate revenue; it has helped us build relationships with our clients and has helped us stay focused in making sure that we are productive with our daily tasks. That is what is basically generating dollars at the store.
Would it be possible to take a typical situation and show how that happens?
You really don't have to guess or search for what you need to work on in any given day because it is all organized for you. From a thank you call to the client, to a so-called birthday call to a happy anniversary call to hello, it is perhaps time for you to start taking a look at your other options to an inspection call to a service appointment. There is very little thought behind how you should organize your day because it is pretty much done for you.
What do you do to make all of that come together?
The people aspect of it is where I really get involved. Of course the set-up of the series of processes – the reviewing of the e-mail templates that will go out, the scripting of what we should and shouldn't say but the people part is where I focus the majority of my time. The software perspective and organization of the day is something that once it is set up, it is just a matter of maintenance.
So the Momentum system actually puts all of this in place. How does that data get into the CRM system?
The data is generally either input by the sales representative or the business development center. It all starts with a prospect, if it is an in-bound call or an Internet lead or a lead generated from any sort of media or advertising, then it is usually 99 percent of the time, something that is input into the software by the business development center. From that point to the point of sale, it is handled by the business development center and a sales representative together.
What difference do you think the UDC Momentum system has made in the dealership?
The first thing that it did for us was to help us save an enormous amount of time and money by consolidating the 12 odd databases that we had in place and basically classing them all down into two; our DMS which is our mainframe and our CRM which is the Momentum. It really helped us organize, clean up and really understand where our clients were and what their value and worth was. Prior to the Momentum system, we had many different software making it really hard to maintain and know where everybody was. If we had to change an address we literally had to go from one software to the next and hope that we caught it in every one. Now it is just one.
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Describe your BDC center.
Actually, we have two business development centers. One at the store and one off-site. The off-site center is actually a centralized business development center that handles eight of our stores. From our California stores to our Vegas stores to our Chicago stores, we handle virtually all of their service needs from their incoming service calls to all of their out-bound marketing to any out-bound follow-up service call is all handled centrally. With the Revolution software we are able to do that and maintain it successfully without any thought. That is one specialty that we have here at the store. We have a business development center that is specialized between Internet, retention, in-bound and showroom traffic. Every individual in a department has a specialty in terms of what they work on every day through the Momentum software.