Are Your Service Advisors Taking Advantage? (Service Drive Revolution)

Top five things advisors take for granted.

You like this list?

I do. I think this is genius. So, top five things service advisors take for granted.

Number one.

Service history. How important is the service history on a car?

Man, I. When I was an advisor, it was my go to.

Right.

I even tried to sneak looking at history before I went out to meet him.

And the reason I have this one at the top is this is the one that will undo a sale really quickly. So you have a good customer that comes in and you're busy, you're rushed. So all sudden, you go, technician gives you the list, and the car needs front and rear brakes. This, this, and this. And then you call the customer and you lead with the first thing, which might be the brakes. And then Mr. Johnson says, oh, hold on a second there, sparky. Didn't you guys just do my break six months ago? And then what happens to that entire conversation when it could have been prevented by doing what? No.

Checking history.

Checking history, Absolutely. So there's millions of dollars.

Two questions right there. I didn't know which one you wanted me to answer.

I did.

No bueno in history.

Yeah, I do that a lot. Sometimes things come out of my mouth that I just have no clue what I meant to say.

I knew that too. So no bueno.

No bueno History. Service history.

Okay.

What.

So when you would check history, what were you looking for when you were an advisor?

Well, yeah, I'm always looking at maintenance and things such as, you know, timing belts, brakes, suspension. And I just want to make sure that we don't duplicate things. And it's one of those things. This is your paramount rule, which is, you know, stay in one place, build your clientele, build your loyal following of Rich uncle. Rich uncle. Absolutely. It's all there. And if you move around a lot, the challenge is you've got to do more work to find the service history because you just don't know your clientele. But this can happen, too, to seasoned advisors that take things for granted.

So, yeah, you know what else I used to do is I would call the other places that they would get service of somebody. Like, say I recommended something like, well, I think I had that done over here. I'd be like, do you mind if I call over there and ask them what you had done so we don't overlap?

Absolutely.

And we can update your maintenance book, that sort of thing. So I would actually call other places. Oddly, other places aren't that helpful.

Yeah. That's interesting.

The gesture was nice.

Yeah. Well, you just have to be pretend to be Mr. Johnson?

Oh, I never thought of that. Could you just see how your criminal mind.

The dark spot on my soul is coming out to light.

Now, the thing too like that I loved about history is you could tell if somebody else had helped them, like another advisor.

Right, right. Well, one of the things I look at is patterns, and you'll notice you'll see gaps in the time that customers come in. Maybe they come in every 18 months or 24 months. And where, you know, what is it, Chuck?

Where have you been taking.

Well, I just go to the quick lube for service.

Quick lube? They're putting poison in your car.

I didn't know that.

But you see where we're going with that. So this is all very important. It's all about the history. And obviously you have things like Carfax, but Carfax doesn't give you the full detail on the invoice either. I want the invoices. So this is a great thing, when you talk about. This is going to kind of transition us into point 2. Talking about petting the dog, Asking the customer if they have their service records is a great question. Because if I ask you that question, I'm telling you that I care about you and your vehicle and I want to see the history on it, but I just want to help you take good care of your records moving forward. And. And that's a huge competitive advantage that advisors are missing today.

Well, also, you're giving value to the records, which then you're giving value to maintaining and fixing your.

Exactly right. Yeah, absolutely.

Because the thing in everybody's mind is, well, if I ever wanted to trade this in, there's more value if it's been maintained, right?

Absolutely. For sure.

Okay, Top five things advisors take for granted. Number two.

The relationship. And this is sad. I think this is Human Beings 101, right? Human Behavior 101. We take relationships for granted, but it's very easy to take a good customer who is a key thrower that throws the Amex at you, says, don't call me, just fix it. I don't care what it costs. It is very easy to take that relationship for granted too.

I think more than that is the one they take for granted is that first oil change or early on when they don't need a lot of stuff. And I. I always thought I make my money by them not needing anything early on and making friends with them, because then when they do have a problem, I'm their go to.

Right.

And so a lot of times the. The relationship is neglected early on because it's like I remember watching advisors with like trip over each other to get to the old Vanagon bus or whatever because they knew that it was 2000 bucks and it was the coolant hoses were leaking or whatever. Like they knew. Right. But nobody wanted to ride up the brand new Subaru.

Right.

But.

I always looked at that completely different.

Like well and you know, in the.

In a couple years they're gonna need their right maintenance or whatever. Right.

Well, in a dealership setting that's a huge advantage advisors can capitalize on is those new customers that are coming in. Maybe some advisors don't want to deal with them because there might be some warranty issues or some minor things they've got to deal with. And you don't really make, you know, you don't have a big sale with it. But I look at it, how do I provide that five star experience for the client that time. So then that sets the stage for what they want and they will come back and see you.

You know, on that subject, something that I've heard a lot on strategy sessions that I've done lately is pay plans for advisors where they bonus them on hours per hour.

Okay.

I like, I don't understand why anybody would do that. Because the thing that happens is they don't want to go out and write the the smaller jobs like the oil changes. They avoid them. Even if you think they're not, they are. If you believe that pay plans.

Direct behavior. So if you believe that a pay plan affects the behavior of somebody. Right.

Oh, it's going. Yeah.

If you believe that in concept, then understand by having an hours pro bonus in your pay plan, your advisors are going to avoid the newer customers that need oil changes. And it's a big reason.

So now you're building a business that isn't customer centric. It's focused on what the business can can extract out of the customer, which is how many hours can we sell you on every ticket. So yeah, we said we used to have. There was one pay plan I worked at back in 2010 that we got a bonus based off of our average repair order. And the advisor that had the highest arrow got like a $500 bonus that month. Well, we did smog checks. So guess what happened every time a smog check will come in.

Oh, got to go to the bathroom.

We all got out of the car. Right. Because I mean if it passed it was a $50 ticket. So that would just got to check.

On a car in the shop.

Yeah. And you can manipulate your aro or hours per ro, selecting who you work with and saying no, but you're not providing the service that the, the client client really needs.

Top five things service advisors take for granted.

Number three, you knew what's coming.

Parts.

Parts. It's not the parts. Come on, we gotta give parts a break here. It's not something.

Put that in there. Because I knew you'd want to pick on parts.

I don't like to pick on parts. I love to pick on parts. Especially the parts manager who's sitting down listening.

Service advisors might take parts for granted.

You know, make them do parts department job for a week and they would never come back to the service drive because they realize they don't have to work.

They get paid in so much trouble for that.

Yeah, you get paid for screwing things up. Supposed to have eight of these parts. I have six. Oh, well, don't worry, it's on backorder. It isn't really on back order. We just forgot to put the order in. You know, what about this though is, here's the thing that this leads to is what they really are taking for granted is the technician's time.

Parts is.

Parts is. You've seen the lines out back where the technician has to wait for the parts, right?

Oh yeah. You know, the tone is like, oh, these, these technicians, they're ungrateful, whatever. Meanwhile their time is burning. You're just lighting money on fire.

Absolutely. So. Absolutely. Technician time is something that we do take for granted.

And so number three is technician's time.

Number three is parts manager's fault.

But it's technician's time. But it's technician in reference. When we wrote the list was in reference to advisors because the list is top five things advisors take for granted. The technician's time.

Yes.

And so the idea behind it was they don't get good descriptions. They don't actually put their hands on the noise or the rattle. They don't go for a test drive with the customer. It's just, you know, customer says it rattles. Right.

Well, you got to realize that every minute of your technician's time is going to generate revenue or should generate revenue. And as an advisor, your job is to tell that story to the on the repair order so the technician can read it and get to the root cause as fast as possible. And if you don't do a good write up, that's huge. And then also, you know, in the independent world we use, you know, book time is one of the things that we use a Lot of to estimate our jobs out. And you've got to take into so many different factors. Condition of the car, the history of the vehicle, and value your technicians time and fight for the time. You got to understand this. Technicians only get compensated on one thing. What is that one thing?

Time.

Time. So they don't make anything on part sales. So if you give a half hour away, you're essentially robbing from your technician. And our job is to protect that.

Same thing with diagnosis. Right. You got to get them enough time. Like I don't the thing. I think we talked about this before. No vehicle has ever been fixed for an hour. I mean, right? Maybe it has. But truthfully, most of the time, if somebody comes in with a problem that has to be diagnosed, it's never less than 500 bucks, unless it's like a clip or a fuse or something.

So I tried this out.

You know, you talked about my repair authorization.

Yeah, yeah. So we had this Ford Ranger come in. What year? Does it matter?

Yeah. 72 or 88. 88. Okay.

20 years old. And how many miles?

200 plus.

All right.

Yes, we're up there. You can't open the outside door. You got to leave the window down and get in from these.

So.

Okay, so what is your thinking going into that? So the. It's a 1988 Ford Ranger with 200,000 miles on it, and.

The door doesn't open?

Right.

The door handle on the outside doesn't work.

Doesn't. Doesn't work from the outside.

So what do you. What do you know in that scenario? How much does that cost to fix?

That's a couple hundred bucks right there.

Couple hundred bucks a minimum.

Yeah, just to do the outer handle. So.

So what'd you do?

Well, he asked me how much a diagnostic test was. I said, well, we do things a little bit differently here. We're focused on your solution, not just selling you a diagnostic test. So do you want me to fix your truck? Absolutely. How much to fix my truck?

We got to take the door panel off, right?

Well, that wasn't even what he brought the car in for. He brought it for a check engine light diagnosis. So we have two concerns now. Right.

Okay, so what's the scale of the.

Check engine light you're looking at? To start with, our level one test is 191.51 for that package, which includes up to an hour of the technician time. But I asked him, does he want me to fix his truck? And he said yes. How much would that cost? So guess what number I Threw out there. Thousand bucks, $15,000 and I'll fix your truck. And he laughed. He left. It was great. It was a great icebreaker. And he says, what are you gonna do for $15,000? I'm gonna make it run perfect. I'm even gonna have it painted. I might even put a set of new wheels and tires on it for you. You're gonna have a brand new truck when you get back there. But if you want $7,500 down, I'll have it done in three weeks for you. Does that work? He said, well, I don't want to go that far into it, but what are we looking at to get the check engine light fixed? And then I said, well, the level one test is 190, 151. He said, oh, that's easy. So the power of contrast really worked there for me.

So you used it a different way.

Just a little different. But it was fun.

I probably would have had him sign for a thousand there.

I think so.

And I would have him signed for about a thousand.

But the car hearing you talk about that and I think it's. I'm seeing more dealerships do this because I. Some of the harder cars that we get all. When we get really busy, I'll sublet them to dealers and let them die again. Then I'll fix it. And I'm seeing the dealerships catch on to that now. So on electrical stuff, I'll get a call back from the advisor and like, hey, Jeremy, it's gonna be like a thousand bucks for us just to tell you what's wrong with us. I'm like, okay, you guys have listened to some of our classes here, but yeah, it really got my mind around to it. Whereas every time we have to make an outgoing call to ask for more money, that's a negative experience for the client. So I'd rather start a little bit higher and be able to make it a positive experience. I really like setting the stage on that a little bit.

I would always, if I knew kind of that it was going to be around 1500, I'd say 1700, because I liked it to be lower than what I said.

Absolutely. Yeah.

So.

And that is one advantage I'll give concede to the dealerships is they have the pattern.

I think it applies to independence even more. Because sometimes older cars, it isn't as clear and you know, you're not working on Ford Rangers all day, so you work on a Ford Ranger, then you get a Hyundai or a BMW or something, and it's a different kind of car you might not know. You might not know that power steering racks go on BMWs or whatever it is, right? You just don't know. Thank you so much for watching this clip of Service Drive Revolution. Now you can catch the full episode on YouTube, iTunes, or Spotify or wherever you consume your podcast. If you have any questions, go ahead and post them in the comments below. Make sure you subscribe and hit the bell icon so you're notified when we post new episodes. I'm Chris Collins and you can find me on Facebook and Instagram @chrisbulldog Collins and I'll see you again on the next episode.