9 Mistakes Service Advisors Make | SDR #280

Welcome, everybody, to the big show. Today we're going to talk about the biggest mistakes service advisors make. It's a really good list, and I am sure most of them are going to have you nodding your head, going, yep, yep, that is one. Also, we get into a nice little childhood story on how Christian's family lived on $50 a week.

We're going to go through the plight.

The plight and. And your journey with coffee and much, much, much more. Coming up on this edition of Service Drive Revolution.

You want to tell everybody about your hidden side talent?

I have a hidden side talent?

Making coffee.

Oh, yeah. So hold on.

We went. We've come a long ways. Everybody in his coffee.

I think two. There were two pivotal events in this journey of yours.

Okay.

The.

One would be when we went to Washington.

And I took you to Vivace.

Yes. It was a great experience.

And your girlfriend put sugar in the beautiful, beautiful coffee.

And I saw how sacrilegious it was.

That's really funny.

But you experienced the. The. What would you call that? Like the. The pinnacle of coffee.

Yeah, it was amazing.

And then I think you were embarrassed when you told me the coffee was good in. We, you know, we care about things that most people don't pay attention to. But we were trying to figure out, when we have people here at the library, how can we serve good coffee on a mass scale? And the team that we use for food and coffee and that sort of thing suggested this one machine.

And we bought two of them because they hold like, I don't know, 50 cups of coffee or something. They're big machines, and it has a filter in it, so it's kind of like filtered coffee, but it's percolated also. It's an interesting way that the machine does it. But we ordered two of the machines, and they didn't want to use the good, the expensive coffee to kind of clean the machine. So they made a couple rounds of coffee with, like, Folgers or something very.

Cheap dealership, like coffee.

I'll call it cardboard.

And.

You, I. You came in with a cup of coffee when they were testing it. So this is like days before an event or we had people here. We were testing, making coffee. That's how much we care for. We didn't want to test on the live.

Who tests coffee days before we do?

And so you come in the library with a cup of coffee and a smile. And a smile. And I said, oh, is that from the. The fancy machine thing that we bought? And you're like, yeah. And I go, how is It. And you're like, it's great. And so I was like, oh, okay, cool. That I'm, you know, I'm excited. We're testing it and we're, you know. So then I go out there a couple minutes later, and I pour myself a cup of coffee, and it tastes like dirty underwear.

That's probably. It's probably fair.

And so your palette has gone from dirty underwear is acceptable to the. To this gourmet. And those are the two pivotal moments in your coffee journey.

Yeah.

Vivace on Capitol Hill in Seattle.

And how would you. How would you explain that? It's hard to put into words, really.

Heaven in a coffee cup? A little bit.

Yeah.

It was really amazing. And you don't. Sorry, Claudia. You don't put sugar in it. You literally just drink it as it's intended.

Well, you certainly don't put sugar in it before you taste it.

Yeah.

Like, if you. If you drank a little bit and you felt like, oh, I need it sweeter. But a lot of us are just conditioned to put cream and sugar and stuff.

Yeah.

Because it's habit. Right.

Putting pepper on things before. Yeah, same thing. So it's good.

And so once again, dirty underwear. I think that's pretty funny.

Yeah, that's hilarious.

Drink up.

No dirty underwear in there. That was good. That's hilarious.

But, yeah, you were very surprised at the contrast when I came in your office and I go, christian, this tastes terrible. Like, what are you talking about? You're like, oh, but also.

For a long time, there would be an amazing pot of coffee and you would do the Keurig regularly. So that is a little indication of. Now, I don't know. Are you doing the Keurig or are you doing this?

Only if, like, if emergency. Yeah. Like, if it's 3:30 and I'm like, I just need that one.

You don't want to make a whole thing. Yeah.

So sparingly is what I would say. And then at home, I'm always doing a fresh ground, so I just started French pressing. Yeah.

See, now you're. Now you're in the deep end of the pool.

I must be. Yeah. And I will tell you that, like, I enjoy making this coffee. I like grinding the beans. I like making sure the measurements right. The water, the whole thing. Like, it's.

Let's. Buy. Let's buy a coffee roaster.

Okay. I think that'd be a lot of fun to roast our own coffee.

Let's not buy it in California, though.

I don't think you'd want to do Anything that could be.

Let's go to Wyoming.

Wyoming. You can. You can coffee. You can coffee roast till the, till.

The cows come home, can ship it to California.

Yeah, it's good.

What's in the news? Chris Jones.

So we've got a couple of things I thought were really, really interesting. The first comes from Automotive News. There's some statistics that I thought that everybody would. Whether you're a dealership or independent shop listening to this thing, I thought there was some stuff going on here. This is for. From Kim Saylor. She wrote this article for Automotive News. She works for cdk. So they see a lot of information and they did a recent survey. So.

The first thing was about defection and customers when they buy a car and how likely are they to come in for service. And last year, 37% of customers said that they would not consider coming into the dealership for service. This year that number is up to 46% would not consider coming to their dealership for service. So darn near half.

So that was pretty interesting. They also talked about the net promoter score surveys that they do, which is where you'd recommend the service to a family or friend. And we were at a terrible 44 out of 100 before. We've moved up to 45. And then independent shops went from. None of them are good, but 49 to 56. And then independent chains are at 46. So that was interesting. But essentially what it says is that this is all kind of fixable stuff, that the customer is looking for a place that they can call home for service for their car, but they are not picking the dealership necessarily. So I thought that that was kind of interesting that they did that much studying into this stuff. But just kind of understand that half of your customers aren't thinking about coming to you for service. So you cannot get to them early enough after the car purchase or during the car purchase. So now's the time to start to get your customers to come in. And then the second thing that I wanted to talk about, this is just a tragedy to me. I don't know how anybody else feels about this, but, you know, Ford just got over that UAW strike, and now they're laying off 9,700 workers because they don't have parts to finish F150s. So they laid off a bunch of workers in the F150 plant. Imagine that. Like, I just, I kind of feel for those families because when you're laid off, obviously you're not making as much money. And when you're on Strike. You're really not making as much money. Like, I remember when my dad, who was part of the. He's part of the ibew, which didn't make much sense to me because he worked in a factory. International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. So somehow there's a union. Yeah, the IBEW is what it's probably more commonly called, but he was a member of that. I always thought he should be with the United Auto Workers, but he worked for a company that got kind of absorbed by Caterpillar, So they made paving equipment that, like, you build roads with and everything. And. And I remember, like, when he had to strike and he went on the picket line, like, literally, he. His paycheck was $50 a week is what he got. It was, like, the return from his union dues and everything, which I think were 50 bucks a week anyways. So, like, imagine living off of minimal funds. You go back to work for a month, and then you get laid off. Like, it's just. It's. It's not a good thing. But 9,700 temporarily laid off UAW workers from Ford because they don't have parts.

So may you get your parts really quickly. They'd already shut down production on the Lightning, but that was the. That's the F150s with the regular engines, with the ICS, so kind of a big deal.

Did you. The Fed was on 60 Minutes the other day. Did you watch that?

No.

So they keep coming out with these employment numbers about it going up. No, they. Employment's the highest it's ever been in 50 years or something.

Unemployment's down if employment's up, right?

Correct. Yeah, but it doesn't make sense on the.

On the street. Right. So if you run an ad for somebody, let's say for marketing, how many people out there are looking for a job for that?

500.

Okay. If you run an ad for a technician, how many are out there looking for that? A few, but not many. Right. Because technicians are in high demand. So skilled workers, like technicians, plumbers, cooks, like, those sort of.

Jobs are. There aren't enough people to fill those jobs.

Yep.

But there also is a category of jobs where there's more people than there is demand. Correct?

That's exactly right.

And so the. The numbers don't. I don't understand.

There's, like, two problems. One is we have a shorter shortage of skilled workers, and we're not really doing anything to lean people that way, or kids. Right. We're not doing anything with immigration, where we're like, hey, we'll Go to Mexico and set up vocational schools to be tax and give them visas to come here like we've done in the past when we were short on labor.

That would be a big help.

But there's people out of work and things are more expensive than they've ever been.

Right. Like the health care, rent. Like everything's more expensive than it's ever been.

And so I don't know, I just don't understand the, the economic numbers that we hear in the news. And then what we're actually seeing in front of us seem like they're a world apart.

They really do seem that way.

It seems to me like people are suffering more than they ever have to make ends meet. But we're saying the economy is great. The economy might be great for the affluent, but it does not seem like it's great for the middle class.

Yeah. I mean, you could make a case though, you know, the. I think what you're kind of referring to is that like some internal positions we've been hiring for is that we got people that were, they were applying that were so far beyond qualified.

Yeah. They're willing to take a step down just to get a job.

Just to get a job. And I almost think that that kind of, I mean, upper class. Yeah, you're right about that. These are like upper middle class people though. Like they had executive type.

I think that middle and upper middle class is where they're the big crunch. They're getting stuck. And you know, you just talk about how buried people are in cars, how much you're talking about a mortgage that's unaffordable now with interest rates. Health care, like it wasn't that long ago that it, you know, health care was 300amonth. Now I, I think, like it's over a thousand. Like it's nuts.

Yeah. If you're trying to do a family, it's, it's way more than that. It's insane. Like it's a, it's almost someone's full time job depending. Right. Like if you.

Yeah, whatever.

15 bucks an hour, if that's minimum wage, is $30,000 a year and it's $20,000 a year to insure your family. Like the, the math just makes sense.

Yeah. So then the, the, the employment number. It's kind of like when you talk about the homeless crisis here in California is they label it as one thing. But the truth of the matter is, is it's a bunch of different things that are the one thing. So you got people that are mentally ill, you got People that are drug addicts, you got people that are down on their luck. You got vets with pt, like, you have to triage. The different. You know, each person is their own individual.

Story, I guess, in a sense. So you can't just say homeless or the homeless problem or, you know, they here, they. They look down on calling it homeless. They want you to say the unhoused, which doesn't change anything. It's the same thing. But.

Okay, I would say whatever makes them not want to do it anymore would be what we should call them.

But long story short, it's not an easy fix. And they keep, they keep a pro. They keep throwing money at it like it's an easy fix. And it's, It's. It's a little more complicated.

They throw it at the world. Worse it gets.

And I think it's the same thing when we talk about employment numbers and inflation and that sort of thing is what, what I'm experiencing and what they're saying are too. It's way harder on the ground than what the narrative is on tv. And I don't get.

Doesn't add up.

Not at all.

People are having a hard time.

Yep.

Do you agree with that?

Yeah, I think that we're, we're, you know, as a, as a country where we're buried in our cars and we're soon to be really buried in our houses.

Yeah.

I think that this is. It's gonna get worse before it gets better. Is everything that I'm seeing.

But that affects, you know, it affects people.

Yeah.

And people, even people that want to get out of the house because they can't afford the payment are going to assume a bunch of debt because the house. House prices are going to go down. Right.

A lot.

Here in California for sure. But I think nationwide, there's going to be a correction.

Yeah. It's a bubble.

Yeah. It's going to blow.

Okay. Let's talk about the biggest mistake service advisors make.

This has been, by the way, the fastest pre production we've ever had in terms of coming up with things for a topic. Because it took us, between the two of us, two minutes to come up with this, plus more what we're about to go over.

And so loosely, there's seven of them, but some of them have subcategories.

There's one, there's one specifically. That's like five categories, but yeah.

Okay. So I'm just gonna go in the order that I have them. And it's not really specific to anything. It's just how we we kind of came up with it. So.

The first mistake number one that service advisors make is that they don't stay in one place and build a customer base.

So you know, you stay in one place, you collect customers. I talk about that at the beginning of Millionaire Service Advisor that I had a rich uncle and my rich uncle bought me a house and cars and sent me on vacation. That rich uncle was my customer base, my key throwers. So if you're a service advisor and you've been doing it five years and you stay in one place and you do, you know, everything you're supposed to do, pretty much most of your day is going to be key throwers coming up and just being like, hey Chris.

No stress, hardly any he heat cases. It's just, it's the way that it was built.

But intentionally staying in one place and building a customer base.

Right.

You, if you connect really deeply with one or two people a day over three or four years, it's a huge customer base. Number two is their relationship with the technicians.

So they don't cultivate a relationship with the technicians. They don't, they don't treat the technicians with the respect that they should. They don't collaborate with them. They're just kind of a necessary evil.

More often than not, it's actually not even collaboration or working. It is adversarial is what I would say. Yeah, they're working actively working against each other.

Yeah, I don't know how many times.

Six pack of some sort of microbrew. It's so easy on a toolbox to.

Just have a little bit of genuine interest.

Number three is they focus on the vehicle, not the people. So they think that the job is about the car, but really the technician's job is about the car. If we had the customers pull right into the shop and the techs deal with them directly, would it be a better experience and easier? Yeah. And so the advisors mistake their role as it's about the check engine light when really it's about little Tommy getting accepted to a private school or you know, the Seahawks new head coach or you know, your, your 16 year old daughter dating a guy with what do you call those things? Plugs in their ear? Yeah, it's more about that, it's more about the personal stuff, not the vehicle.

Gauges, Gauges, gauges.

Have you ever thought about getting gauges?

Maybe at one point in my life.

There'S something, there's some things, there's some things I, that were never on the table.

For me that was one of them.

Well, I think I was a little, I'm a little older than gauges. Not too many people are doing gauges. But I'll tell you what they were doing.

Piercing their ears.

They were piercing their ears. I'm not, I'm, I'm not against that.

Eyebrows.

That's weird. But what about the nose?

Yeah.

What about the people that have the, the hoop in their nose?

Like the bowl thing?

Yeah. Like a cow.

Yeah.

What do you think about that? Was that ever on the table in your punk rock?

No.

Number four, service advisors. Biggest mistakes. They don't tell the truth.

Yeah.

So this one has subcategories.

So many subcategories.

So the first one that I had along that was. They sell out of their wallet.

Yep.

So instead of telling the trust customer the truth out of what's wrong with the car or the condition of vehicle, they will only present the stuff that they think they would buy or see value in.

And that goes back to number two with the taxes. When the technicians take the time to do an inspection and then you as an advisor are deciding what you're going to present and not present it is in the long run, disrespectful to the tech taking the time to do it.

It's super. I, I love it because it's so interesting to me. Oftentimes those advisors, when I get into conversations with them, they love to use one word and they say the word ethics. And I think that not telling somebody something about the condition of their car is the most unethical thing that you can do. And they'll want to talk to me about how unethical it is to present preventative maintenance to somebody.

Whereas what do you instantly think when somebody brings up ethics?

That they're cheating on their wife.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Why is that?

I don't know. Because, like, what that thing that they, they say is usually the biggest secret.

No.

Yeah. But why cheating on their wife?

Like, I don't know, cuz the ones.

It's a pretty big jump. Cheating on their taxes.

Yeah. Also cheating on. I, I think if you cheat on your wife, you cheat on your taxes. Like, I would be really worried about Che.

Would you cheat on the golf range?

Yep.

You lie about your golf score?

Yeah. You, you, you say I got a four on that when you got a 12. Yeah.

That's.

You're cheating on your wife too.

Yeah. I agree though. Whenever somebody says they start, they start randomly doing a resume statement about ethics. You're like, why'd this come up? Like, who said not to be Ethical?

All you did was ask. The alignment interval.

Yeah, it's like.

It's like the person that says, you know, well, I. I never lie. You're like, everybody's lied. Like, that's a joke. There's times you should lie.

I think you're the one that told me that, like, we're conditioned to lie from a very, very young age. Right. Like when we're told we're going to Aunt Barb's house.

Yeah. When your wife says, honey, does my butt look big in this lie?

Looks great.

Her feelings are more important than. Than.

You know, you don't need to tell everybody their baby's ugly. Yeah, there's no reason.

No, but you have to tell them the truth.

But people that say, like, I never lie. It's like, okay, well, either you should lie sometimes or you're. You're hiding something. Yeah. You're cheating on your wife. That's where you go. Okay, what else about tell the truth? What about with the customer under promise over deliver, like, oh, yeah, I can have that done in an hour. No, no, it's two hours. Oh, I can have it done today. No, it's gonna be Wednesday. The parts department doesn't have apart or what? You know, you're. You're trying to. You're trying to please instead of telling the truth. Just like all the people that have a hard time with the repair authorization. Like, people get so stuck on. What do you mean? Tell the customer the truth up front? No, we. We tell them later. We avoid the truth in the beginning.

Right.

We lull them into a sense of distrust, and then we're honest with them.

But heaven forbid we just get it out of the way and. Yeah.

So funny.

Anything else? To tell the truth. Cheating on their wife. That was pretty funny. It was funny how quick you said that, man.

I don't know why I made that connection.

That was an. That was an instant.

Reaction. Okay, number five, they don't control the things they should control.

Okay, that's great. I have that down here as lose control.

Yeah. So what sort of things should an advisor control? First of all, they should control customers perception.

Okay, great.

They should control timing. They should control the customer's experience. So when I was a service advisor, when I called somebody to tell them the. The vehicle is ready, the biggest question on that call is, when are you coming to get it?

Always.

Is there any chance you could come 30 minutes earlier? Because I'm going to be gone at that time or whatever it is. But I don't just like, I don't want another advisor writing up my customer. I don't want anybody else delivering my customer. And so controlling every aspect of the customer's experience is.

I mean it's an art form in a sense, but it's.

Also the only way to guarantee the results.

The second you hand that to somebody else, it's just never going to be as good as you would do it. Yeah, it's just a task. It's like delegating tech ads to hr.

Number six, consistency. So how many times do we go into a service department and the.

Results in the customer experience in the service drive are only.

Determined by one thing.

Luck.

No, the mood of the service advisors that day. So if they're in a good mood, it's going to be a good day. If they're in a bad mood, it's going to be a bad day. But the, the actual customers needs have very little to do with what, what is going to happen.

Okay.

So we're, we're performing out of emotion and not out of professionalism. You know, just, just good old fashioned responsibility.

And it's all consistency. It's all about us. When we're just changing it based on our mood. I know you got to focus on the thing you're good at. Like I'm really good at sleeping. Right. And I'm so good at sleeping, I can do with my eyes closed.

Number seven. They diagnose on the drive.

Yeah.

Can you unpack that? That one was yours?

Sure. I think that the diagnosis on the drive, I think the most common advisor that I see, this is the advisor that used to be a technician. So they've got a weird thing going on there. Well, they used to be a technician and maybe they know, but the truth is at the end of the day you have to kind of assume a different role and there's just nowhere to go. If you're right, then there's no value to the technician in the shop. And if you're wrong, you've unopened, unearthed a can of worms that you'll be digging out of for the whole visit because you were wrong. So there's just no advantage to diagnosing on the drive other than to make yourself look or feel smart is the only reason that you would die. Diagnose on the drive.

And then the last one is they assume the customer is crazy.

Side note, no empathy.

Yeah. So I think that that probably is the one thing that I, I probably have coached. And then also as a manager, I would say I had a different opinion on it than I did. As an advisor, I kind of wish I would have got this punchline a little bit earlier. But like, you think about the top 20 things that someone wants to do in their life. Going and taking their car to a car dealership is nowhere on the list of 20 things they'd rather do in their life. So, like, for someone to actually make a call and then have to sometimes, like, make a modification to either how they go to work, how they get home from work, what they do with the rest of their day to bring their vehicle in for a noise that happens.

They'Re not crazy. There's. There's a thing that they believe. Now, could they be not as educated as we'll make them when they come in? But they're not crazy. There's a reason that they're bringing the car in and they don't. It's not that they don't have anything better to do.

It's great.

And I think you have to recognize that at the end of the day, if someone comes in for a concern, our job is to address the concern. They're not crazy.

Biggest mistakes service advisors make. Number one, they don't stay in one place and build a customer base. Number two, they don't have a good, healthy relationship with the technicians. Number three, they focus on the vehicle, not the people. Number four, they don't tell the truth. Number five, they lose control. Number six, they aren't consistent. Number seven, they diagnose on the drive. And number eight, they assume the customer is crazy, lacking empathy.

Pretty good list.

Yeah. That was fast. That was great.

Thanks, everybody for joining us. We will see you next time on Service Drive Revolution. Thanks so much for watching this episode of Service Drive Revolution. We're uploading new stuff every day, so make sure you subscribe and click the bell icon so you don't miss out. If you have a question you'd like us to answer on the show, call 8333 Ask SDR and we'll answer your question on the show. That's 8 3, 333 Ask SDR. For special deals on our books and training, head over to offers.chriscollinsinc.com now that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.