Building an Automated Calling Flow between the Tekion & Car Dealerships
Year
2023
Industry
SAAS
Enterprise
Role
UX Strategy
UI Design
With Tekion’s rapid growth, streamlining manual processes and boosting efficiency became crucial, highlighting the vital role of the CRM team in maintaining seamless dealership onboarding and support.
This case study explores how automating the calling process between Tekion and car dealerships streamlined onboarding, reduced missed calls, and elevated dealership satisfaction, making interactions more efficient and responsive.
🤔 About Tekion Corp -
Tekion provides a cutting-edge SAAS platform designed to transform the automotive dealership experience. By leveraging cloud technology, Tekion helps dealerships streamline their operations, from sales and service to customer relationship management.
The platform offers end-to-end solutions that enhance efficiency, improve user experience, and enable real-time data management, giving dealerships the tools they need to operate more effectively in today’s digital landscape.
Various product lines -
Automotive Retail Cloud
Automotive Enterprise Cloud
Automotive Partner Cloud
The ARC product features various modules that dealerships can subscribe to based on their specific needs.
Here are some of the features-
CRM tool: Helps manage customer relationships and provides insights.
Inventory and services management: Allows dealerships to maintain inventory, services, and daily operations.
Payroll system: Facilitates salary processing, tax calculations, and employee management.
Service schedule: Assists in organizing customer service appointments.
Financial management: Supports accounting and financial tasks for the dealership.
and many more…
🌟 Tekion Automation Platform: Backbone of Tekion
As seen from the above image, TAP covers all the modules as per the customer journey -
CRM: From getting the customer’s leads to onboarding them
Implementation: Managing the resources and implementation for that dealership
Support Portal: Taking care of the support tickets and feedback coming from the dealership, and
Account Management: Helping them create a smooth customer experience so they can run their day-to-day operations easily.
Everything is captured and managed by Tekion’s internal team via these modules.
To manage all its internal operations, Tekion relies on the Tekion Automation Platform (TAP), a robust enterprise tool that serves as the backbone of its business. TAP enables the Tekion team to streamline workflows and run day-to-day operations seamlessly.
The platform consists of various internal modules, such as TAP CRM, Task Management, Feature Tracker, Support Portal, and Partner Success Tools, each designed to handle specific aspects of the business and ensure efficiency at every step.
🚗 Let's Understand the Current Scenario:
The Dealer Onboarding Flow:
The CRM and Sales Team at Tekion plays a critical role in identifying, engaging, and onboarding potential automotive dealerships as new clients. The team is responsible for filtering prospective dealers from thousands of interested leads, ensuring alignment with Tekion’s mission and values.
This process involves detailed screening and a structured onboarding pathway, requiring significant coordination between the Tekion CRM team and dealership representatives. Here’s an outline of the key elements:
Dealer Selection: From thousands of interested dealerships, the CRM team filters out those that align closely with Tekion’s mission, vision, and strategic goals.
Onboarding Process: To bring new dealerships on board, the team follows a specified pathway that requires multiple touchpoints, including numerous calls and meetings, ensuring both sides have a clear understanding of expectations and steps forward.
Data Tracking in CRM: Each meeting with a dealership needs to be recorded by the sales executive in Tekion’s CRM dashboard. This record-keeping enables managers to monitor the progress and maintain oversight of each account’s status.
The Communication Framework:
The Tekion CRM and Sales Team relies heavily on mobile calls to communicate with potential dealerships throughout the onboarding process. These calls allow the CRM team to address specific dealership needs, clarify Tekion’s offerings, and streamline onboarding logistics.
The primary use cases for these calls are:
Engagement with Potential Dealerships
Understand the unique needs and goals of each dealership interested in Tekion's products.
Introduce and pitch relevant Tekion products, explaining features, benefits, and pricing options that match the dealership's requirements.
Managing the Onboarding Process
Handle necessary documentation, paperwork, and compliance requirements as part of the onboarding steps.
Schedule and coordinate training sessions, inspections, and any other onboarding procedures to ensure smooth setup.
Address dealership queries throughout the onboarding journey, providing timely responses to clarify processes and resolve issues.
CRM Team-> Driving Tekion’s Growth:
From the above understanding, it’s clear that the CRM and Sales team plays a crucial role in Tekion's growth by:
Driving Revenue: By targeting high-potential dealerships, they directly contribute to Tekion’s revenue stream.
Efficient Client Onboarding: Their work ensures qualified dealerships are prioritized and onboarded smoothly, reducing downtime and enhancing satisfaction.
Building Strong Partnerships: Through tailored support and ongoing communication, they establish Tekion as a trusted, long-term partner for dealerships.
🎯 Therefore, it’s essential that these teams operate with speed, efficiency, and automation to maximize Tekion’s impact and growth potential.
🔴 Breaking down the Problem Statement:
To begin identifying pain points, I established a knowledge base to break down complex issues into their fundamental elements, following the principles of first-principles thinking.
I scheduled several 1:1 meetings with the CRM team, managers, and dealership users to gain a comprehensive understanding of the current scenario.
The primary goal was to:
Gather Insights: Understand the challenges faced by the CRM team and dealership users in the onboarding process.
Identify Bottlenecks: Pinpoint specific areas within the onboarding workflow that hinder efficiency and effectiveness.
Uncover User Needs: Explore the needs and expectations of dealerships to ensure Tekion’s solutions align with their requirements.
Let’s analyze the goals and the pain points of our personas-
1) CRM/Sales Representatives
Goals:
Streamlined communication with dealerships.
Efficient documentation processes to save time and enhance productivity.
Improved ability to manage multiple dealership accounts effectively.
Pain Points:
Manual Processes: The entire process, from making calls to recording interactions in the CRM, is manual, leading to inefficiencies.
Use of Personal Devices: CRM representatives use their personal mobile phones for calls, resulting in many missed calls and unattended inquiries.
Time-Consuming Documentation: Creating documentation after each call takes a significant amount of time, detracting from other essential tasks.
Overwhelming Workload: Each representative is assigned multiple dealerships, making it challenging to effectively manage relationships.
Manual Note-Taking: Meetings and important notes are recorded on paper, risking loss of information and making it difficult to access past discussions.
2) Managers & Stakeholders
Goals:
Real-time visibility into the progress of onboarding dealerships.
Efficient tracking of performance metrics for the sales team.
Enhanced ability to support and guide CRM representatives.
Pain Points:
Lack of Progress Visibility: Managers and stakeholders are unable to see the current status of any dealership due to the manual processes, hindering progress assessment.
Dependency on Individual Representatives: If a CRM representative is on leave, the progress on assigned dealerships becomes unclear, potentially causing delays.
Limited Insights for Decision-Making: Without comprehensive data, it becomes challenging to make informed decisions regarding resource allocation and support for the team.
3) Dealership Users
Goals
A smooth onboarding experience with clear communication and support.
Timely resolution of queries and concerns.
A reliable partnership with Tekion for ongoing support.
Pain Points
Decreasing Experience: The onboarding experience for dealerships is declining, with increasing dissatisfaction stemming from slow query resolution and poor communication.
Poor Communication: Delays in responses and unclear information contribute to frustration among dealership users during the onboarding process.
📝 Summarizing — What we have learned so far
The analysis of the CRM team, managers, and dealership users reveals significant gaps in current processes that hinder efficiency and satisfaction. Addressing these issues is crucial for enhancing the onboarding experience and communication among stakeholders.
🎯 A streamlined solution is essential for all stakeholders—sales representatives, dealership owners, and managers—to enhance communication, ensure efficient interactions, and provide timely support, ultimately leading to a seamless onboarding experience.
The following user stories highlight the primary needs of each persona:
As a CRM or Sales Team, I require an efficient communication system to interact & manage multiple dealerships.
As a Dealership Owner, I need a streamlined process for addressing queries to ensure prompt resolution and easy clarification of doubts.
As a Manager, I want to monitor the activity history of each dealership to effectively track their operations and provide timely support.
🧐 HMW's: Identifying Opportunities for Improvement
The "How Might We" (HMW) statements help us pinpoint effective solutions to the challenges faced by the sales team, dealership owners, and managers. By asking these questions, we encourage creative thinking and teamwork among everyone involved. Addressing these HMWs is essential for improving communication, boosting efficiency, and supporting Tekion’s growth.
Here are the key problem areas converted into HMW statements:
How might we ensure a seamless calling experience between the sales team and the dealerships?
How might we bring automation to the entire process, allowing the sales team to allocate their time and energy more efficiently across multiple dealerships?
How might we ensure that the sales team consistently updates activities within the TAP platform, enabling managers to maintain an overall view of ongoing operations?
How might we prevent missed dealership calls, ensuring timely and comprehensive resolution of their queries?
How might we enhance the dealer experience during the onboarding process to foster a positive sentiment and strengthen their interest in partnering with Tekion?
🛠️ Integrating a Calling Service to CRM Module:
After multiple brainstorming sessions and collaboration with stakeholders, our team identified the need to enhance dealership onboarding by integrating a calling service directly into the TAP CRM application.
To achieve this, we've chosen to implement the Twilio Call API as a backend service, enabling the sales team to make calls seamlessly within the CRM.
On top of this integration, we’ll be designing a user-friendly interface that brings the Twilio Call API’s capabilities to life, creating a seamless, engaging experience that simplifies onboarding for our dealerships.
This integration will create a smooth and automated calling system between the sales team and dealerships.
The sales team can easily dial and receive calls from dealerships directly through the CRM application.
All call metrics and data will be captured accurately and presented on a dashboard for managers to analyze effectively.
Once a call ends, an activity will automatically be created in the CRM application with all relevant details pre-filled, streamlining record-keeping and follow-ups.
Flow Diagram for Outgoing Call from the Sales team to Dealer User:
Flow Diagram for Incoming Call from the Dealer User to the Sales Team:
🔎 Diving Deep into the Solutioning:
The integration of the Twilio Call API offers several key features that will significantly improve our calling process:
Direct Integration: By incorporating the Twilio API, we will establish a smooth and automated calling system that connects the sales team directly with dealerships.
Reduced Complexity: This integration eliminates the need for external calling applications, enhancing user experience and reducing the complexity of the workflow.
Enhanced Focus: Sales representatives can concentrate on engaging with potential clients instead of managing multiple tools, leading to improved efficiency.
Automated Activity Logging: Each call's data, including metrics like duration, caller details, and key notes, is automatically logged in the CRM. This streamlined tracking ensures all interactions are accurately recorded for easy review and follow-up, allowing managers to monitor activities and quickly access critical information without manual effort.
Direct Dialing and Call Reception:
Easy Access: The Twilio API will enable the sales team to easily dial and receive calls from dealerships directly through the CRM application.
Quick Access to Recent Calls:
Single-Click Calling: Representatives can access dealership contact information and initiate calls with just a single click, simplifying the communication process.
Quick Responses: This immediate access to calling capabilities ensures that the sales team can respond rapidly to inquiries, maintaining a higher level of engagement with prospective dealerships.
Notes Creation for Call Documentation:
Easy Note-Taking: During or after a call, sales representatives can quickly add notes directly in the CRM, helping keep track of critical information for future reference.
Organized Records: These notes are stored alongside each dealership’s call history, ensuring easy access to previous interactions and any action items from the call.
Conference and Call Transfer Features:
Multi-User Conferencing: It allows representatives to add additional participants to a call, enabling collaborative conversations with other team members or stakeholders.
Efficient Call Transfers: Representatives can seamlessly transfer calls to other team members when necessary, providing dealerships with timely, relevant support without interrupting the conversation flow.
Accurate Call Metrics and Analytics:
Detailed Metrics: The Twilio API provides robust analytics features that capture key performance indicators (KPIs) for each call.
Centralized Dashboard: This data will be presented on a centralized dashboard, allowing managers to analyze the performance of the sales team effectively.
Informed Decision-Making: By identifying trends and monitoring sales activities, managers can make informed decisions to optimize sales strategies.
📈 Success Metrics:
Through thoughtful design and strategic product development, we achieved significant improvements in efficiency, dealer satisfaction, and overall onboarding success. Here’s a summary of our key success metrics:
Unattended or Missed Calls numbers from the Sales Team went significantly down by 30%
Sales Team were able to handle multiple dealer at a time from 5-6 dealerships at a time to 9-11 dealerships currently
Dealer sentiment went up by 45% during the whole journey of them getting onboarded
There was also a spike of more dealerships getting onboarded due to quick support from our end
🔎 Conclusion and Summary of Findings
In conclusion, automating the calling flow between Tekion and its dealership partners proved to be a transformative step toward operational excellence and improved customer experience. This solution allowed the CRM and Sales Teams to handle a higher volume of dealership interactions seamlessly, drastically reducing missed calls and minimizing the need for manual data entry.
The boost in efficiency directly contributed to positive dealer sentiment and an increase in successful onboardings, supporting Tekion’s vision of leveraging technology to redefine automotive workflows.
By embracing an automated, streamlined approach, Tekion continues to set a high standard for innovation, scalability, and exceptional service across its growing network of dealerships.
🙏🏻 Thanks for checking out this case study! I hope you found it helpful. If you have any questions or thoughts, feel free to reach out. Appreciate your time!
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