Case Study: Car Dealership Revs Up Sales with Cisco, Metropolis

The Client. McCluskey Chevrolet is the highest volume General Motors dealership in Cincinnati, and prides itself on providing customers with the highest quality vehicles and service. For example, the 40-year-old dealership keeps its service department open until 3 a.m.

The Problem. An outdated Cisco Call Manager system was disrupting the McCluskey Chevrolet customer-service ethos. The company needed to streamline its sales and service departments.

The Solution. Keith McCluskey, CEO of the car dealership, called his channel partner, Derek Rutter, a sales specialist at Cincinnati Bell and Technology Solutions (CBTS). CBTS proposed that McCluskey Chevrolet upgrade its 4.x Cisco system to the 8.5 version. This would accommodate new features such as one-number reach. But McCluskey needed more. He wanted a reporting platform that would give managers and executives insight into call volumes; he also wanted to be able to track business better.

Rutter showed McCluskey a contact center product but it did not provide all the functions the dealership needed. Then, a CBTS sales engineer recommended Metropolis Technologies’ OfficeWatch. Metropolis, a Cisco partner, specializes in telemanagment software. McCluskey agreed to update Call Manager and install OfficeWatch.

The Call Manager project took Cincinnati Bell engineers a couple of months. Then, Metropolis added OfficeWatch, working with the CBTS team to define call paths and configure the application.

The Results. The updated Call Manager and newly installed OfficeWatch have streamlined McCluskey Chevrolet’s sales and service departments. For example, the dealership now can review inbound calls, which increases employee accountability and lets supervisors monitor follow-up efforts. And now, department productivity reports go out each day at 8 a.m., copying upper management. That way, salespeople can track their progress and see the direct relationship between more appointments and more car sales.

The ROI on OfficeWatch is immediate," McCluskey said. "We picked up enough profit to offset the cost of that right away, and the Cisco upgrade provided us the foundation we needed so the software worked properly. Our ROI should be well over 300 percent in the first year due to our ability to provide better monitoring and help our sales associates earn more income, which in the end, is good for the dealership."