Real Podium customers with real business impact

The phone never stops ringing. We started tracking how many phone calls we miss, and it's just overwhelming. It's not a personnel issue. They're doing everything they can. They're going above and beyond. There was just too much of a load.

Voice has made a deep impact early on in the business. We've seen of a 100 calls, and that doesn't mean those are all scheduled intent, but 58 appointments scheduled autonomously on a Monday by the Voice AI agent. Since we launched, Voice AI has taken over 3,000 calls, 91% of those without human interaction. Our Voice AI's name is Ellie and she's one of our employees, one of our people and yeah, we love her.

Ellie tries to get as much detail as possible at the time of appointment or when the guest comes in. We're able to start way ahead of where we would have normally started because we have all these questions already answered. It's a very specific diagnosis, not there's a noise coming from the car during startup. My service advisors are spending less time on the phone and more one on one time with our guests when they're actually in the building.

My agents have a lot more time to do out bound and their daily duties and they also have more time to focus on other customers that need more attention.

Our other software companies, if there is an issue, it's always coming out in the next update. Podium, especially with LA, is able to update it on the spot. In thirty years of doing this, I haven't seen anything make an immediate impact that's bigger than what she's done. Anything you tell her, you only have to tell her once. To be able to train a new employee to have years of experience in one day is a game changer.

I think that the biggest asset of Operator is it becomes your employee that knows every aspect of your business. It has access to all of the critical information needed to build reports, to make suggestions, Things are gonna grow your business. It's not just giving you information. You can then say, yes, I would like to make that change.

Go ahead and do that. One of my stores that's booking out a couple weeks to schedule an oil change, operator identified that the booking rate was lower at the start because of it. So I'm able to have a conversation with operator. Well, what can I do?

And we ended up making a word track pivot to let customers know upfront before we pull the schedule. We saw the first week about a 20% increase in bookings just by making the word track change that operator had suggested to us. As you give operator more context and more visibility, what becomes possible is endless creativity. Because we're never satisfied at Van Horn.

We could have the best percentage you've ever seen and we want it higher. So we are constantly leaning on Operator to be a resource to help us on that path.

Being in an accident is one of the most traumatic experiences you can have. So we want to be able to answer the phone. We want a very human presence. We want a very empathetic process.

When you look at it from the perspective of I'm supporting fourteen stores, then I just grew by five hundred and thirty eight stores. How do you find people and train people and get them used to every single carrier procedure, every single Crash Champions procedure in a day? It can't happen. So you have to find a balance between human capital and codifying that knowledge into a platform that can grow with you and can fill in the gaps.

Sally is our custom AI agent that we've worked with Podium to really customize, to have the tone and voice that we want to work with our customers as well as with the call center. When we first launched text, we were getting anywhere between fifteen to twenty conversations a day, and now we are close to a thousand conversations a day with voice and text. So we've definitely expanded as we felt more comfortable with Sally's capability and her adaption to our tone and our business.

It was pretty clear that Podium had a product that they put a lot of thought into.

You know, we know right now in Agentyx that an agent is only as good as the data that it has access to. And Podium's platform could integrate with our platform that we've made a substantial investment in to help our customers get their automobile into a location as fast as possible so they can get it back on the road as fast as possible.

This month with podium, we're roughly at the same amount we were when we had a full staff room at call center. My name is Glory Hernandez, and I work here at Madera Toyota Chevrolet. When we lost our service BDC, we did lose about half of our appointments. Getting podium has helped bring in more appointments with having less staff.

A lot of people do request stuff at night too, so we do get a good amount of people putting in requests after hours, which I've noticed podium is just they're scheduling around the clock. One guy that had messaged after hours, we are already all closed. I had saw that he wanted to reschedule his appointment, and I was gonna do it at my house. So I, like, opened my laptop.

And by the time I got to it, she had already rescheduled that whole appointment. And it was quick, within seconds almost. You know? So it has helped.

And same with, like, our parts department. They also have been getting some requests in there too, so it's also helping that revenue as well. That's another thing too.

As long as we have the appointment, that gives everyone an opportunity to upsell. You know? So if they're due for a cabin filter, they can offer a cabin filter. So even if we just get that appointment, like, there's always, like, an opportunity there. She'd be like, you're also due for a break check. This this, or it's all like, okay. Go, Lucy.