Mike Rezi Nissan Atlanta's BDC Was Running on a Desk Phone Workaround. Here's How One Record Changed That.
Case Study
Customer snapshot
Micah Rowland, Internet Sales Manager at Mike Rezi Nissan Atlanta, built the dealer group's service BDC from scratch and still oversees call handling across four locations.
Before Numa, the BDC's real safety net was a workaround: Micah rerouted the store's main voicemail line to his own desk phone, since it was the only number he knew would get checked every day.
In the last 13 complete weeks, Numa's Caller Rescue Rate at the store is 78.5%, up 3%, and repair orders written are up 236% over the same period.
Freed-up BDC capacity turned into 31,389 outbound messages sent in that window, up 37%, and more than half of all customer communications, 54.4%, are now handled without a human needing to touch them.
The number of customers the AI Appointment Agent engaged and successfully booked grew 53% to 1,376.
Micah Rowland has spent almost his entire car business career at the same dealer group, starting on the sales floor, moving into sales management, then building something the group didn't have yet: a service BDC from scratch.
Over the years that role expanded across internet sales, cross-department training, 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. The systems he built for service still run under him.
He's also the person who, for a stretch of time, made his own desk phone the store's official voicemail line, because he knew it was the only number that would reliably get checked every day. That workaround tells you everything you need to know about the problem Numa was brought in to solve.
A BDC That Was Good, But Stuck
By the time the group started evaluating Numa, Micah's team wasn't struggling from a lack of process. They had a tight inbound script, clear escalation paths, and inter-dealership communication across multiple stores dialed in. What they didn't have was capacity.
The culprit wasn't call volume in the abstract. It was the composition of that volume. "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," Micah said. The remaining volume was largely customers already in the shop, calling back for updates that hadn't come: repair timelines, unexpected costs, status checks that should have never needed a call in the first place.
The result was a BDC that was permanently reactive. Every agent who finished a call immediately picked up another, and outbound work, recalls, parts follow-up, marketing campaigns, the revenue-generating activity the BDC existed to produce, kept getting pushed to later. Later rarely came. "We eventually ran into a point where it seemed like we were focusing too much on inbound," Micah said, "and not because we wanted to."
45%
of fresh inbound calls were routine requests, oil changes, tire rotations, status checks, before Numa
The Voicemail Problem Nobody Wanted to Name
The most visible symptom wasn't call volume. It was voicemail.
Every agent had a direct line. But voicemails behind the little red light had a way of sitting untouched for hours, not from negligence, but from the reality of how a service BDC operates. You come in at 8 AM and the person standing in front of you is the priority. The voicemail waits.
"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
It was a workaround that worked, and it revealed a gap that most service departments carry in some form without ever naming it.
"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 dashboard backs up what Micah describes anecdotally. Over the last 13 complete weeks, Numa's Caller Rescue Rate at the store sits at 78.5%, up 3% from the prior period, the gap the desk phone was patching, closing further.
Convincing a Skeptic, Including Himself
Neither Micah nor the ownership above him started out comfortable with AI handling dealership phone calls. The belief was straightforward: customers need human-to-human interaction, especially in service, where the emotional stakes are higher and the margin for a bad experience is thinner.
Two things changed the calculation. The first was straightforward cost-effectiveness. The second was staffing risk, and for a high-volume BDC, it may have been the more persuasive argument. "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?" A system that keeps fielding calls, documenting them, and booking appointments during a staffing gap isn't replacing anyone. It's making the operation less fragile.
What Changed on the Ground
The bigger change once Numa was live was documentation. With customer communication captured in one place, disputes that used to be unresolvable had an actual record behind them. "If it's not in the notes, it didn't happen," Micah said, "that's what I train my agents on." The conversation that used to require checking several separate systems, the CRM, a scheduler, internal chat, call tracking, now has a central record in one place. That shift shows up in the numbers, too: more than half of all customer communications, 54.4%, up 54%, are now handled without a human needing to touch them at all.
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.
"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
That's not just a story anymore. Outbound messages sent in the last 13 weeks reached 31,389, up 37% over the prior period.
Appointment growth followed. The number of customers the AI Appointment Agent engaged and successfully booked grew 53%, to 1,376, holding a steady 76.9% booking rate on the customers it engaged. Repair orders written over the same window climbed to 5,559. "We're seeing more ROs written because the communication is cleaner," Micah said, the number he keeps coming back to as the clearest signal the change is working.
236%
increase in repair orders written in the 13 weeks measured, the number Micah points to first
"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
That visibility isn't just a talking point. Across Numa-flagged threads at the store, the team's response rate sits at 93.8%, near-total follow-through on the conversations the system surfaces for human attention.
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 the whole team can see into, is the change Micah keeps coming back to.
If your BDC's most reliable system right now is still a manager's personal cell phone, or a spreadsheet nobody quite trusts, this is worth 15 minutes.
