Michaels Subaru jumped from the 50th to 90th percentile in appointment satisfaction just 3 weeks after launching Numa—cutting call chaos, boosting sales time, and giving advisors more control of their day. Read More ⟶
Chad Brintnall is the Service Director at Michaels Subaru of Bellevue in Bellevue, Washington. He’s been with the company for 29 years, starting as a technician and moving into shop and then company management. Now, he manages a team of 52 people from service advisors to support staff and technicians.
Chad is a self proclaimed “competitive person”. He says “I always want to be the best of the best, and I want my team to achieve their own success in their own areas.” He monitors multiple measures of success, like CSI, NPS and sales volume, and is constantly on the lookout for ways to improve.
Before Numa, Chad and his team tried to use an outsourced BDC that was supposed to help remove the burden of calls. They said they could answer calls, help answer questions and book appointments. Instead, Chad says, “It was such chaos that we ended it in about 3 months. It was expensive and they didn’t know my business, which caused huge problems that my team had to clean up.”
Instead of removing work from his team, it actually ended up creating more work, and making the customer experience worse. The service was costly – racking up charges to the tune of $2.50 per minute for a total bill of about $4000 a month. Chad knew they needed to make a change. He went looking for other solutions that could help offload call volume, improve the customer experience and help his team be the best.
Chad heard about Numa through Subaru’s national business conference. He was having lunch with a few other Numa users and what he heard piqued his interest. He says, “I was curious about the concept of using AI to help us manage our calls more strategically.”
Numa’s AI agent platform is the first AI Agent platform built for dealerships. AI Agents are the ultimate team member in your dealership. They know everything about your customers, use data to constantly improve, can be trained to take specific actions on their own, and they can handle more interactions around the clock than any human team.
Numa’s AI agents are trained to do things like:
Chad was particularly impressed with the dashboard. With the help of the data that the dashboard provides, he says, “I can see the big picture of what’s happening and I can react to it.” It gives him more visibility into customer sentiment, calls missed and current queues than before, allowing him to monitor the state of his team and make goals for improvement.
It didn’t take long for him to see some big improvements. “It only took me a week to see that Numa is better than I anticipated,” he explains, “I started seeing messages disappear, seeing people respond quickly. I stopped having to remind people to manage their queues and respond.”
Not only does Numa offer visibility into the data that helps inform decisions, but it also introduces more accountability, both for the service advisors and for the AI agents themselves. Other AI solutions can feel more like a “black box”, offering a solution to recover missed calls but not much else. With Numa, you get to see everything – call transcripts, customer sentiment, calls missed, calls recovered and more.
With all of that visibility, Chad and his team now have everything they need to improve.
“I have more control of my day.”
Chad was particularly excited to hear what his team thought about Numa. He says their experience was immediately positive. “The learning curve was so simple,” he says, meaning that his team was up and running in a matter of days, not weeks or months like other solutions.
Overall, the general feedback from the team was “I have more control over my day.” Instead of being stuck answering the phone all day, they can leave it to Numa and then check their queue to return calls that need their attention. It also allows them to be more proactive and prepare for calls by getting answers to customer questions ahead of time, cutting down the time each call takes to answer.
Chad says, “People aren’t caught on the phones all day, they’re spending more time with customers. When my team gets to spend more time with customers, they get more time to develop sales, increasing the money spent by each customer.”
One of the key ways that Chad and his team measure their customer experience is through the Subaru customer survey. After implementing Numa, They noticed a big bump in their ranking for “appointment process”, which measures how satisfied customers are with the process for calling and scheduling appointments. He says, “We went from the 50th percentile at the bottom of the list to the 90th percentile, at the top.”
That jump happened just three weeks after implementing Numa, showing an immediate impact to the customer experience.
Looking to the future, Chad and his team are excited to continue to implement Numa in more ways. He is excited by their initial results and plans to get the team’s ideas for more ways to integrate Numa for even more improvements.
Numa has nearly 1000 dealership customers like Chad and the team at Michaels Subaru of Bellevue. See a demo today and start putting Numa’s AI agents to work for you.
We struggled with CSI before Numa, now we have hit the CSI mark 7 out of the past 8 months.
Jeff Clear
We hired a BDC backup to respond to Numa Sales Inbox, she's selling average 15 cars a month by just responding to the conversations in Numa Sales Inbox.
Arisha Walker
Numa is an integral part of how we communicate with a customer... Tearing it out would be like tearing the transmission out of a car.
Eric Frost
No more hold music. No more unanswered voicemails. Your customers are top priority.
