Mike Rezi Nissan Atlanta turns its BDC's voicemail problem into complete visibility
Case Study
Customer snapshot
Micah Rowland, Internet Sales Manager at Mike Rezi Nissan Atlanta, spent nearly 14 years working his way up from a sales floor "green pea" to building the dealer group's service BDC from scratch, at one point supporting call handling across four locations.
Before Numa, the BDC ran a tight, script-driven inbound process, but Micah had rerouted the store's official voicemail line to his own desk phone, since no one else reliably checked it.
A large share of the team's non-duplicate calls were basic status checks and routine requests, oil changes, tire rotations, battery checks, work that was crowding out the outbound recall, parts follow-up, and marketing calls the BDC was supposed to be making.
Since adopting Numa, voicemails have nearly disappeared, and freed-up agent time turned into meaningfully more outbound calls per day, on top of a documentation record that settles "I called five times" disputes on the spot.
Micah and dealership leadership were initially skeptical of putting AI on the phone at all, believing service required human-to-human interaction to work.
Micah Rowland has spent almost his entire car business career at the same dealer group, starting in sales, moving briefly into sales management, then building something the group didn't have yet: a service BDC.
Over the years that role expanded to cover internet sales, cross-department training on the tools every store ran, and eventually a call center handling inbound and outbound communication for four locations at once. Today he's the Internet Sales Manager at Mike Rezi Nissan Atlanta, though the systems and processes he built for service still run under him.
A BDC That Was Good, But Stuck
By the time the group started looking at Numa, Micah's team wasn't struggling from a lack of process. They had an inbound script that kept appointment booking consistent, inter-dealership communication down to a science, and a clear sense of what needed to be escalated. What they didn't have was enough hours in the day.
"We eventually ran into a point where it seemed like we were focusing too much on inbound communication and not enough on outreach, and not because we wanted to. Every time I put down the phone, I immediately had to pick it back up."
— Micah Rowland, Internet Sales Manager, Mike Rezi Nissan Atlanta
A meaningful share of that inbound volume wasn't new business at all. It was the same customers calling back about cars already in the shop: an update that hadn't come, a repair that was taking longer than expected, a bill that came in higher than they'd been told to expect. "It was all the things we don't want to hear on the service side," Micah said. "People buy their cars and they leave happy. People have to bring their car in for service, and that's when the frown starts."
By his own estimate at the time, a large portion of the team's non-duplicate calls were for routine work. "At one point, over 45 percent of our calls that weren't duplicate calls, the fresh ones, were just for a basic oil change and the service that came with it," he said. He's quick to note the exact number is a couple of years old now, but the underlying pattern, most of the phone's volume being status checks and routine requests rather than new opportunities, hasn't changed.
The Voicemail Nobody Checked
The clearest symptom of the problem was voicemail. Every agent had a direct line, but the messages piling up behind that red light almost never got returned quickly, if at all.
"People inherently don't check their voicemails, ever. That red light on the voicemail might not get checked for a couple of hours. So when we first built our call center, I put my personal office phone number as the company voicemail line, because I knew the voicemails would get checked every single day if they were sitting at my desk."
— Micah Rowland, Internet Sales Manager, Mike Rezi Nissan Atlanta
That workaround said everything about the gap it was patching. A single manager's desk phone was standing in for a system the dealership didn't have, and it's a gap most service departments carry in some form, whether or not they've found a workaround as direct as Micah's.
Convincing a Skeptic, Including Himself
Neither Micah nor the ownership he worked under started out sold on AI answering dealership phones.
"We both believed in a human-based business, meaning customers need that human-to-human interaction, otherwise the process is not going to progress."
— Micah Rowland, Internet Sales Manager, Mike Rezi Nissan Atlanta
Two things pushed the decision forward anyway. The first was straightforward cost-effectiveness. The second was staffing risk: a BDC role that opens up doesn't get backfilled overnight.
"If there's turnover on your team, whether it's career growth, family circumstances, or it's just not the right fit, and it takes 7 to 14 days to bring someone new in, how do you keep from missing business in the meantime?" Something that could keep fielding calls, documenting them, and still booking an appointment during that gap looked, in Micah's words, like a win-win rather than a replacement for his team.
What Changed on the Ground
Once Numa was live across the call center, the shift showed up first in the voicemail box that had defined the old process.
"Since we've had Numa, I think I've received fewer voicemails than I have fingers on one hand. And it wasn't because Numa didn't catch the call, it was because the customer called a number that wasn't connected to Numa."
— Micah Rowland, Internet Sales Manager, Mike Rezi Nissan Atlanta
The bigger change was documentation. With customer communication captured in one place, disputes that used to be unresolvable had an actual record behind them.
"Numa captures the audio, captures the notes, and gives us an internal space to message the customer or message each other and keep that documentation active. What Numa's done is bring those systems together as a central point. At the end of the day, outside of someone approving work on their MPI, all of my customer communication is going to be in here."
— Micah Rowland, Internet Sales Manager, Mike Rezi Nissan Atlanta
That record settles the exact kind of dispute his team used to have no way to close.
"When a customer says, 'I've called five times,' we can see in Numa whether that's true. Numa brings an extra level of visibility to the customer interaction that we didn't have before."
— Micah Rowland, Internet Sales Manager, Mike Rezi Nissan Atlanta
The pattern here isn't really about the phone system specifically, it's what happens once every channel a customer might use writes back to one record instead of several.
With inbound volume no longer consuming the whole day, the BDC's other priorities, in order, a customer's last visit being handled without turning into a heat case, parts-order follow-up, and outbound recall and marketing calls, started actually getting worked. Micah pointed to a specific example: a 1,000-piece mailer offering a discounted oil change.
"If 1,000 customers get a flyer for a $29.95 oil change, not only are they getting it in the mail, but I can have one agent make 30 calls that day off that manifest, 30 more calls than they were making before. If each agent is making 30 additional calls on top of the 70 that's typically required of them, that's way more opportunity."
— Micah Rowland, Internet Sales Manager, Mike Rezi Nissan Atlanta
Micah ties that freed-up capacity directly to appointment growth. "We're seeing more ROs written because the communication is cleaner," he said, growth he considers the clearest sign the change is working, since in service, more appointments written generally means more profitable opportunities for the store.
"Worth Its Weight in Gold"
Asked how he describes Numa's value to someone considering it, Micah didn't point to the call volume it handles. He pointed to what it makes visible.
"The way I always promote it is ultimate visibility into what your customers are saying and how they're communicating with you. I think the brilliance of this tool is that everything is documented. The fact that I can give someone on my team their own Numa number, and that call gets picked up, and that text gets picked up, that's worth its weight in gold. It gives you better context for how to approach the next call or the next follow-up."
— Micah Rowland, Internet Sales Manager, Mike Rezi Nissan Atlanta
For a BDC that used to run its most important safety net through one manager's desk phone, that shift, from a personal workaround to a system everyone can see into, is the change Micah keeps coming back to.
