10 Reasons Why Your Customers Leave | SDR #241

Welcome, everybody, to the big show. Today we're going to talk about 10 reasons your customers leave you. We're going to get into Christian's childhood issues.

That's a lead in every week. Yeah.

And a big, big dilemma coming up with the coaching meeting here this week. That and so much more coming up on this edition of Service Drive Revol.

If you're listening to this, you're not going to understand what we're talking about. But if you're watching, you are going to be very aware of the fact that this is the first time we're filming in the library.

And Christian told his first joke in the library.

Can't repeat it.

It's lots of snorts. Why can't I repeat it? I'm going to tell it. I'm going to pretend like I'm you and I'm going to tell the joke.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

And it's all. It's all in the setup.

Right.

Just to warn you.

So you work on your setup.

You know the punchline. So don't. Don't give me a different. Like, just play along like you're.

This is just a role play. I totally get it.

So, Christian, I'm trying to get in shape. I'm trying to.

Yeah. You. You're three trainers, right?

Yeah, yeah. I'm really. I'm watching what I eat.

Lot of effort.

Yeah. Are you watching what you eat?

Watching way too much. Yeah.

You're in a. You're on a. What. What's that joke?

The seafood diet. Yeah.

See it, you eat it.

It's organic, it's healthy.

So I'm eating a lot of vegetables. What do you. What do you think the mo. The healthiest part of a vegetable is?

The green part?

No, the wheelchair.

And see, you don't laugh. Like I don't laugh. No, because you can't laugh at your own joke.

No. Because you blew it.

Oh, what is the joke?

It's. What's the only part of the vegetable you can't eat? And it's the wheelchair. But you said, what's the healthiest part of the vegetable? And it's a wheelchair.

I blew it.

You'll get better.

Hey, it's not.

That's my eight week course. We'll get you setting up and tell the setup was great.

See, even when I try to do it, I can't do it funny. But it is all in the setup.

Yeah. Because you want to drive them. You want to drive them all the way over to the left.

Now, we have here in the library our first event coming up.

This week.

Very soon. Yes, this week. Days away.

We have a big decision to make.

I would think we have a couple.

No, one big one. Only one big one.

Yeah. I know the one that you're the most concerned about, and I think that it. I don't take that light.

That is the one that I'm concerned about.

Well, I think that it's about what you would do indoors, in the library. Right.

So our. We're having our coaching. Our quarterly coaching meeting here. So also the elite group is coming here. We have a pretty crazy thing planned for them also.

But we're going to have a tequila tasting in here on one of the nights. And the question is, during the tequila tasting, if we should smoke cigars.

Having that many people in here smoking cigars, I don't know. It would be a great way to test out this fancy evacuation system we have for smoking cigars. It never got too much in our old place. Right. This system's way bigger than that.

No, but I could walk into. I could walk into the red office and I could tell when you'd been smoking the night before.

So I kind of want that in here a little. I want it to smell a little like. Because we've got the leather wall. We want a little tobacco.

Yeah. My worry is for the inventory.

Yeah. The books.

Yeah. And I'm not trying to be a Debbie Downer. It's just something that pops into my head. But if those.

That's the decision we have to make.

Yeah.

Maybe we'll let you know how that.

But that whatever that air sucker outer thing is, that sounds like it's the real deal. Like when it was on earlier today. That's an industrial strength cigar smoke remover.

It's almost too strong because it takes all the air conditioning out.

Right.

We were literally.

We were air conditioning Los Angeles today.

There was an interesting thing the other day. So I think we're going on a week now. But Berkshire Hathaway did their quarterly.

Kind of. Is it quarterly or annually? Maybe it's annual. Stock shareholder.

Yeah. And the amazing thing about that is that Buffett was up on that stage with some guy that looked twice as old as he is. Did you see that feller? Those are next to him. I don't. Charles or something like that. He's very high up in the company. But like that guy looked old.

Like Moses old. You wouldn't call him high up. You would call him a partner.

Yes.

Yeah. Have you ever read his book?

No.

He's got a great book.

I couldn't stop staring.

He maybe is the brains behind the whole thing.

Oh, that wouldn't surprise me. He spoke quite eloquently. But continue on.

Back when I was a lot attendant. So we're going back many, many years. There was a technician in our Volkswagen shop.

He was a younger kid, and I don't know, we were talking about stuff. I was in a band, and.

Somehow it came up that he had inherited Berkshire Hathaway stock. And then he was explaining it to me, and back then, I think. I think it was like 50,000 a share or something. Crazy.

Whoa. Okay.

But if you imagine, I think he had 10 shares or something, so half million, then, if you can imagine, whatever that has done since then, it's crazy.

He doesn't have to work.

But they own. So Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffett owns the Van Tile Group. So he bought the Van Tile Group. I would speculate that they bought it more for the warranties. Right. Because they're. They're really their specialty. And how they've expanded his insurance.

Yeah.

But they're talking about that. So maybe kind of give everybody a little bit of insight into their feelings about the dealership business. Because I had a lot to say.

Yeah. So the. The thing I thought that was really interesting about what. What Warren said about it is he's like, and I'm an interested party in the dealership model. He's like, this affects me. And the scariest thing to him, he's like, I know what's going to happen to Apple in five to 10 years, but I can't tell you in five to 10 years what the dealership world's going to be like. And I'm a part of it. Whereas he's always been kind of known as being the prognosticator of business, and he makes some really good forecasts and everything like that. But he literally the guy that argues, too, like it's.

It's a high investment, low, low return or something.

Yes. So he was. I mean, if you read between the lines, it was like, it's not the best thing to get into right now. Yeah.

And so I want everybody to really pay attention to what I'm about to say next, because I think this is a turn in the industry that's going to happen.

That we've talked about for quite a while, but nobody really acknowledges it yet. But it's going to become very, very prominent in the sense of Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett both think of the dealership business in terms of what, like, how do they measure.

The dealership business.

For someone like that. A company, I would guess earnings per share.

No. So they're, we're just talking about the business on its own. On the side. The financial.

Oh, sales.

Yeah. So they're going to be like most car dealers out there. When they wake up in the morning, the first thing they think about is how, how many, how many vehicles have gone over the curb. Right, Yep. They don't understand the degree of money left on the table by fixed ops. Like if, if Charlie and Warren were really intimately involved in the business, they would be talking about how do we get more kids to be technicians? They would be talking about service. The one thing that I can say is if you're a person who's watching the news and hearing all these negative narratives about the car industry when it comes to fixed stops, and this includes parts and body shops, we're not going anywhere for a long time. These cars are still on the road. It doesn't matter if tomorrow a million new electric cars sold and we didn't have combustion, you know?

Yeah. Like if they turn the fossil tomorrow, it doesn't change service. No, I agree with that.

And so electric cars break as much as anything. Right. And so when are we as an industry going to focus on the things that, you know, really matter in the end, which is going to be this, the customer's feelings about the vehicle after the purchase.

That's right.

The retention. Right.

Maintaining the love affair.

And I think Tesla got that from the very beginning. Right. They didn't sit around and talk about, oh, you got to come to us or whatever. They, you know, they invested widely in a network that they controlled that, you know, when my Tesla breaks down, it's very easy. It's not that it doesn't break down, it's just way easier than when any of my other.

But literally you open the app and it does it all for you.

Yeah.

It is not very difficult to do service on a Tesla.

So it's just interesting that nobody's talking about fixed stops, when fixed stops is the future. And if you were really thinking about this as a long term thing, you would be investing in, you know, getting kids out of high school, all kinds of other things to create a better business opportunity and leverage in the marketplace because he has the technicians is going to win for sure.

You can't, you can't hire enough. I don't think at this point, even if you had to pay a little more at this moment in time and we're getting the return on it immediately, you would really quickly thereafter so.

So that being said, what else is in the news? I kind of stole that from the news, didn't I?

Yeah, but I didn't have the.

I've got to see that.

The. The one of our videos went up and it was titled Christians forced sales job or something.

I did see that.

And they don't know how to spell Christian.

Yeah, there was like.

So they put Christian, but it's Christian.

Yeah, it was. It was nine letters. That's a 17. Let.

How would you spell ChrisJohn?

C, H, R, I, S, T, I, O, O, O, O, O, O, N.

So it's like 11 letters.

Yeah.

You know what has been in the news a lot lately is. Is the artificial intelligence thing. And I've been doing some research on it, and I found actually, you know, it's really good for us to understand consistencies and limits and everything like that. But do you know what the exact opposite of artificial intelligence is?

The wheelchair.

No. Close. So close. But it's natural stupidity.

All right.

I love that people are, like, afraid that it's going to replace that, like if you. If you can be replaced by that. Okay. Like, I don't know. I'm not worried about it. So you can't replace this.

Face?

No, not at all. And these amazing segues. But. But that leads us into our first bit of the news. Guess which state. This is actually not a joke. Guess which state wants to pave its roads with radioactive material. You got a 1 in 50 chance and I actually believe he's going to get this right. Everyone at home.

What state is going to pave its roads with radioactive material? I think since there's 50 states, you can have three guesses if you need them.

Can you give me a hint? I don't like that you're so confident. I have no clue.

All right, so like.

So just on.

Pain here thing wacky. The first thing I think is California.

Okay. No, but good guess.

It would never get past all the environmentalists in California.

So then is it North Dakota?

No. What makes you think North Dakota? I love that.

No, no, they're just not Texas.

No. Okay, so this hasn't gone exactly how we thought it was going to do, but what I thought was obvious. You don't the state of Florida, like, that's just some.

That's the. Do you notice that everything now is like, negative Florida because the Democrats don't want Desantis to do good. It's toward every headline.

It's amazing.

Doesn't even make, like a lot of the times. The headline doesn't even match the article.

Yeah, it's true. I can tell you. I spent a lot of time in Florida, and I have a wonderful time. And it's. It's too humid for you, but I actually really like, like being there.

And it's a lot of trade. The. The humidity for the taxes we pay.

Oh, my gosh. That's the other big part. You get to. You get to keep it when you earn it down there. That's for sure. But state lawmakers have passed a bill which needs Desantis signature instructing Florida Department Transportation to use phosph gypsum as an aggregate material in road construction. Radioactive material, but it's a waste product of the fertilizer industry, so they're trying to repurpose it, which actually kind of makes sense to me. But, I mean, who doesn't want to glow in the dark at the end of the day? So, yeah, Florida. Chris's fourth answer. Florida. And then this just. I put this one in here because I haven't heard. Maybe I'm missing it, but.

If you hear. It's okay, Kosh. If you hear noise in the background. There's construction going on in the kitchen.

Yes.

They enjoy it. You're a part of the process.

I cannot wait to see the before and after videos. Oh, yeah. Like the. The work that those guys have done. I mean, this is a masterpiece in itself.

But I can't wait to see the statue of Lincoln out there.

Yeah. Even I really like. I think. Do we name him yet? The Matador.

Yeah.

What's his name?

The Matador. You want him? Chuck the Mat.

There we go. I got.

We had Chuck in the corner in the story. He's the Matador.

Yeah.

To be the manor.

I'd like to name him, but it's okay.

No, he's the Minotaur Manator.

That's a bull fighter guy.

Minotaur.

You said it three times. And I agreed with you, too.

Jeez.

That we can call him Pepe.

Call him whenever you want.

All right, so Pepe's in the corner. But. So I just remember reading about this for a while. UAW's got a strike in an Ohio battery plant that gets batteries for GM4. These are your regular low voltage batteries.

But did you see the thing on 60 Minutes about the lithium.

Mine here in California, like down kind of by San Diego?

No.

That they can produce three times the amount of the world's supply or need of lithium a year.

Wow.

They have some sort of hot springs there. And whatever's in the ground is high in lithium, and it's coming up to power these electric plants. All you're going to. All they're doing is adding on another thing before it goes back into the ground. They're extracting it, and their cost is very low. So it's supposed to be like the new gold rush down there. All these companies are going down there trying to get in on it.

Oh, yeah, we'll suck lithium out of the world really quickly. I have the feeling, do we need.

It in the ground and serve a purpose?

I'm not so sure.

Okay, now, this list that we're going to do, I'm excited about this 10 reasons your customers leave you, which is, we've done this.

It's been a minute since we did that. And I think that some of these things we have on there are very different than what we might have said a couple of years ago.

Now, they don't write a dear John letter. There's not a sad country song that they send you. They're not sending you a mixtape. You just never hear from me. They just stop, like, okay, Casper the friendly ghost gone.

So. So we've got 10 reasons here. And I don't think as I look at this list, there's. I wouldn't say that they're necessarily in any type of specific order, Although, number.

One, do you love coming up with these lists? It gives you a certain. It gives you a little ev.

I really get into, like, how I.

Try to be creative with your idea and you spend a lot of time on it and you get a big smile.

I do. All right. So number one, number 10 reason that. That your customers leave you is no parts, no call. So obviously, everybody knows in the industry that there are certain manufacturers that have a tough time getting parts, but we're definitely taking that out on the customer at the end of the day. So I can't tell you how many times I'll see surveys coming back. I'll hear, you know, service managers saying, hey, what do I do in this situation? But it's literally, we don't have parts, so we don't call them and tell them about ETAs and the parts because we don't know if we have anything. What's even worse than that is just as bad as the not having parts. Not calling the customers is a lot of dealerships I walk into, I'll go to the special order part bin, and it's overrun. And they don't have a good system for calling the customers, even when the parts get there. So it's just an attention to detail.

At the end tell how a business is ran by their sop. Shelf. I would agree with shelf.

Yeah. If it's lean and mean, that's usually how the dealership is.

If there's something on there a year olds.

Yeah. If it's dust, if it's one thing.

A year, there's a bunch of things that are here.

That's right.

So the next thing is. This is number, number nine. It's probably a little higher in the list than I, I put it. It just, it popped into me noggin a little bit fast. But another reason that your customers are leaving you is that you're booked out three weeks because you don't have enough texts. And I always think about like this. So when I'm explaining this to, to dealers, service managers, I'll say okay, so let's role play, let's role play this a little bit. So Chris, if, if you can be the customer and call me and say hey, I'd like to set an appointment. So go ahead.

Can you say ring, ring, ring, ring.

Hello, thank you for calling Bulldog Motors. This is Christian.

Hey, my name is Chuck and I would like to get my car, truck or car in for service.

Oh, perfect. Chuck. So I've got a. I hope Tuesdays are good for you because I have a Tuesday morning available in about four weeks. How's that sound?

Great.

Okay, perfect. I'm going to put you in there, Chuck. And you got a, you got a 2021 Silverado. Right. That's. How is that accurate?

Yeah.

Okay, great. I'll see you at 9am in four weeks. You'll get an email, I think. Bye.

You want to role play the next call I'm going to make?

Yeah. So I hang up. Now what happens?

I'm calling somewhere else.

Yeah. Immediately you're calling the next place. And even if they're only two weeks out, they win.

You can make a direct correlation between your no show rate and how far out your books.

Yeah. And I would guess don't ever think.

So that but it's like clear as day.

Yeah. And then what ends up happening is that you know, the production goes to crap because you don't have coming in what you expect. And it's just a mess. It's a mess amongst messes. So if you're booked out, you don't need more appointments, you need more production in your shop. Just remember that.

Yeah. And just think about all the people you're losing by not having that production. Yeah.

Now the, the next thing is I think that it's not a bad thing for the industry necessarily, but it's been fairly poorly executed. What I've seen. And maybe this is an automotive thing. I don't know if you've noticed this since you got into the business, but like we don't replace.

We don't replace like processes with process. We put process on top of processes. So it looks like a huge giant layer cake. And over the last, let's say five to 10 years, there's been some pretty cool technologies that have come into the business, but we're just putting it on top of all the other stuff. So I have a belief that a lot of advisors are suffering right now from technology overload and the customers are getting lost in that mix. Right. So I think that the hands down, the easiest way to communicate with customers is via text. And the stores that do that really, really well, they enjoy great communication, great CSI stores. But then there'll be where the system's sending a text, the advisor's doing a phone call, the, you know, the scheduler sending an email. And it's just like all these mixed messages and the customer is never receiving all of them. And on their side it just looks like we don't know what we're doing. So the technology overload and the manufacturers are requiring a lot of that stuff. I mean everything from video inspections to, you know, potting cars and doing the data drop like a key read on BMWs from a long time ago. But technology overload is another reason I believe that customers are leaving us.

So the number seven thing that I've got down here, and I've been preaching this for a while, I think you are a big fan of this too. But we're not setting the next appointment before the customer leaves.

Yeah, there's no plan and customers like plans. They like consistency.

Yeah. So I've got a.

When you're booked out four weeks, especially.

When you're booked out four weeks. So I've got a midlife crisis car. It's a BMW convertible. I really, really like the thing. It's actually going in for service today, which was really easy. I'm going to kind of talk about that.

But on I'm taking a tour buddies down here, right.

In Torrance. So I'm not doing it but, but it's going down the street. And the thing that I would tell you one, it was just as easy as the Tesla to make service appointment because I just did it through the app. And then the second thing is I bought that car on April 19th and service is due annually on that car. So on April 19, that car started telling me every time I started it that I was overdue for service. Now I only had the, I only had 7900 miles on it when it started happening. But that car was not going to let me forget. So if the car knows when service is due, the dealership can know when service is due. So I'm just curious to see what happens if they set my next appointment. I should have some sort of a thing saying I've got your next appointment set up for whatever 12 months from today is because.

Yeah, you want to bet money that they don't.

I don't because I don't think they will either. But I hope that they do. But, but it's a good opportunity to, to capture the next appointment. They don't have to worry about calling in and waiting because they wouldn't perceive a four week wait if they've already got the slot. So you're kind of jumping over that four week bookout thing. So that's number seven. I think number six is understanding the threat that from the dealership side, the understanding the threat that the independent shops can be because the only way they get customers is by marketing. And I think that we're just trying to make sure that the, you know, we can handle what's coming off of.

The faucet for granted. That we get it from the sales department.

That's right. We just wait for more.

Business has to market. They have to be good at marketing because that their business is service. They're not in a bigger thing. Right.

Yeah. And I think because of that they're more effective. They get in front of the consumer. And I think we have a lot.

Like let's say there's a, you know, because we do stuff in heavy truck. Like let's say there is a school that buys a bunch of school buses and then that school has their own technicians. Right?

That's right.

That's kind of how service departments are in a sense is they think about the cars that they're selling as the captive audience, but they don't think about the market as a captive audience. So you're, you know, you're specific to a brand usually, but you could be any makes, any models. Right.

And yeah, you have to mean it.

Even if you're just that brand, there's more of those in your market than you're servicing.

That's right. Yeah. You couldn't keep up with everything that's in your market. Yeah, that's great.

But if you booked out four weeks. Why? Market?

No, I wouldn't. It would just be making it worse.

Number five.

I'm really proud of this one. Just because the name I call this Wishy Washy Willy. You like all that alliteration? So this is the.

Reminds me of my grandma.

This is the advisor that tells customers about the stuff that they need and then, like, kind of pull it back right away. But, like, if you want to, maybe you should like these presentations of, you know, like, a car's seven years old and it's got 200,000 miles on it. We're like, you might want to get a coolant service, like, where they're just really not defined about what needs to be done on a car. And then it goes. It leaves the dealership. They don't do any of the work. Then it breaks. They take.