Phone Ninjas trains associates to maximize customer contact

Kiran Kedar is regional sales manager for Phone Ninjas, Talk Options and Recon Ninjas.
Kiran Kedar is regional sales manager for Phone Ninjas, Talk Options and Recon Ninjas. | Contributed photo

Before Wesley Chapel Honda began using Phone Ninjas to train their service managers and sales team in the right way to speak to customers -- in a way that makes them want to come to the dealership -- they had a never-ending problem of training their phone associates and holding them accountable.

Now, according to Mike Speigel, the managing partner of the dealership, the dealership is seeing the results from the live training Phone Ninjas provides. 

"Our best dealerships that follow our program are upwards of 80 percent appointment-setting ratio," Kiran Kedar, regional sales manager for Phone Ninjas, Talk Options and Recon Ninjas, told Mega Dealer News. Those three companies train dealerships and their salespersons in best practices to correspond with customers.

Phone Ninjas has been around since 2009, recently adding Talk Options to the squad as a communication tool. It offers click-to-chat, click-to-call and click-to-email features that allow dealerships an easy and secure way to talk to their customers. 

"Obviously, there's always a bottleneck when it comes to service," Kedar said. "The customer talking to the receptionist and playing phone tag. So, this is streamlining this process to make it very easy to text back and forth. Customers can even pay their bill online before they come to the dealership. We're just trying to make everything as easy as possible for the customer, and as convenient."

As a whole, the three companies work to increase personability and efficacy within a dealership team. They're already working with over 1,000 dealerships and have co-op agreements with both GM and Subaru.

"A lot of dealerships are spending a lot of money on marketing, but their phones are not being answered correctly," Kedar said. 

The process begins with on-site or online phone training where service and sales employees are given the tools to succeed. They are provided with word-tracks to help use the correct verbiage to get the desired results. 

Then, Phone Ninjas goes a lot further than a lot of phone training programs by going into dealerships' call recording systems and pulling calls that actually happen between employees and customers to focus on building strengths and identifying employee weaknesses. 

"We want to make sure we're working with each dealership as an individual," Kedar said.