Customer Retention = Best Marketing

Welcome to the Big Show. We have a special episode for you today. We're going to talk about retention, but our team is here in the office this week, and so we thought we would invite them to come on the show in shifts. And so we'll just go around the table and introduce yourself. We'll start with you, James. Not Captain—

Captain James.

Captain James.

G.I. Jane.

Amber.

Vicki.

Adam.

Banana head.

Dylan.

Um, I've been called many things. I prefer Brian. Um, Mr. Brian, Dr. Brian is fine.

Brianna.

Um, Chris Collins. Welcome to Service Drive.

Service Drive Revolution.

So I'd like to remind everybody that this is a family show. James, yeah, why wouldn't I look at you?

A lot of guilty consciences. Brian.

Yeah, Brian.

I love him.

Brian's the most buttoned up one of everybody here at the table.

I don't know about that.

Have you guys had fun this week?

Yes.

Yeah, lots of fun.

Are you excited that Adam's taking everybody to Topgolf?

A little jealous. A little jealous.

We have to head home.

I hope he's paying.

That's—

or you, probably.

I am.

I'm not paying?

No.

Does that mean that you wouldn't go if I wasn't?

I mean, I was going with the assumption that you were paying. Oh, okay. I would have been disappointed if I paid.

I'm pretty sure I'll pay in the end.

Yeah, I'm sure I'll pay.

I'd be fine if James paid.

I just don't want to pay myself, you know?

Vicky, do you know how long we've known each other?

Since 1998.

Can you do that math for me? Can anybody do that in their head?

Any Rain Man around here?

27, 28 years.

27 years. Can you imagine?

Wow.

So then it's a couple of years longer for you, right, Jimmy? Was it like 2 years before?

A year or 2, I think.

So it's almost 30 years. Isn't that crazy?

Wow.

We're getting old.

You don't look old.

You don't look it.

Thanks.

I feel old.

Sometimes I feel old when I look at, like, you're walking through a department store and you glance over in the mirror, like, what the— how did that happen? Doesn't that happen to you?

That is not what I thought you were gonna say.

What do you think I was gonna say?

When you walk through a department store and you glance over at the clothes and the style.

No, when you see yourself in a mirror, like, unexpectedly.

Probably you're receiving—

I mean, is it kind of like, hey man, what's going on?

I was telling some of you guys, I think the other night I was in a hotel room. I got up in the middle of the night hungry. I'm just in underwear eating cold spaghetti at the desk. And I look over in the mirror, I'm like, oh my gosh, that's so sad.

Did you keep eating?

Yeah.

I made myself do it.

When we had that production meeting on Monday morning and they were showing those videos, I knew I was old 'cause I thought—

Which videos?

The ones that were—

What, the TikTok videos?

The TikTok videos. Yeah, the Hope. I thought, man, I must be old because that is not funny.

You not have TikTok on your phone?

I do not, but I have Instagram.

Do you have TikTok?

No, I don't have TikTok. I don't have TikTok.

I don't have Instagram either.

X is my only social media.

X.

What about you, Jimmy? What's the one with this? Instagram. I check it once a month whether I need to or not.

You have to have them all. Your kids are on there, aren't they?

They are. I'm not.

You're not watching what they're doing?

I don't need to. I trust them.

Wow, famous last words.

When did Facebook—

trust but verify is what I always say.

I do.

When did Facebook come out?

After—

definitely 2008-ish, right?

Ish, something like that.

Yeah, or two— well, yeah, probably a little early.

Even when it came out, not too many people were on it for a while.

It's really—

I think now it's just older people.

Yeah, it is funny. I mean, it's funny. My parents text, you know, it, uh, interestingly enough, a little side note, what did I do to everybody in the room this week when we were in here together? What did I do in reference to phones and computers?

Oh, you locked us up.

We put them in the locker.

Yeah, yeah, because it's, it's just crazy how you're trying to talk to somebody and they're on their phone. It drives me nuts. Especially when you're talking about something serious.

But that's manufactured, right? Like they, they wanted us to become this way.

Yeah, it's a dopamine hit.

Have you ever noticed how people, when they watch a show or a movie, they're still on their phone?

Oh yeah, I do it a lot. Actually, we do it a lot. And then when I think about it, I'm like, why the heck am I doing that? But I still do it. It means that whatever I'm putting on is probably not going to be that much. And like, I'm knowing that I'm not going to be that much engaged in it. Like sometimes I watch golf or just have something on.

When we're on a group Zoom call, you can see who's watching other stuff on their screen. Yeah. The reflection off their glasses, sometimes even off their eyeballs. So you can see like the screen colors changing and stuff like that.

Yeah.

James, what are you watching when we have our coaching calls?

Well, I mean, honestly, a lot of meetings. I mean, I think this happens in dealerships too. A lot of meetings could be done in 10 minutes.

For sure.

Meetings go way too long.

Yeah.

I think they call them like just having like even gotten to the point with standups, like 10-minute standup meetings where you don't even allow anybody to sit down and it's real quick, 2, 3 things, done.

I mean, there's days where I go from meeting to meeting and it drives me crazy because it's like all of this could be done in an hour and it's taken half the day.

It's unproductive a lot of times. Like we think we're, you know, trying to have a meeting to address something and it could be done in 5 minutes, but we drag it out and it just becomes unproductive.

Yeah, especially if you have good people, let them do their job. Like, there's no reason to micromanage everything.

I'm guilty of— if, if it's going to be a 1-hour meeting and we get to 1 hour and 10 minutes, I am completely checked out at that point. Nothing else is going in this head. I'm just resenting the fact that this thing went over 10 minutes over. I'm not looking at you.

Oh, you're, you're— it's on, but that's true. Yeah, like, I even think, uh, like a 30, 40 minute, if it's— if you've got like things to review, that's helpful. But I don't think anything after that. It's hard.

Yeah.

And then while we're doing those group Zoom— are we recording right now? Yes.

Um, what do you think we're doing?

Just having a conversation.

We would be eating lunch if we weren't doing this.

Is this going to be part of the thing?

Yeah, it's all part of the thing.

Now you're going to— is this a part of the thing? A part of the thing of a part of a thing?

Was he about to do a Star Trek thing?

Yes, you thought we were.

Yeah, for everybody, uh, just tuning in, James is a huge Star Trek nerd.

That's a good— nerd is a good—

Star Trek convention.

We have, yeah, a couple of them. One for sure.

We went to one in Vegas and then we went to one in Long Beach.

That might have been your first SDR live at the Star Trek convention.

Yeah, right.

I walked up to people and asked them what they drove and if they remembered their advisor. Yeah, what was their name?

That was a great video.

Do you still have it?

Yeah. I mean, I don't have a beard and I look like a little kid, but yeah.

Do you dress—

I mean, that's what's funny, like, literally, like, that was 20-something years ago. It's a long time ago. I mean, I was on YouTube before anybody.

That was the closest I ever got to William Shatner. Remember, we had to go get a picture.

Yeah, so I, I bought James a package where he got his picture with William Shatner and then Spock. What's Spock's name?

Leonard Nimoy.

Leonard Nimoy. And I thought it was like a cool thing, like you would get to meet him or whatever. Basically, like they sit in a chair like a mannequin. It's really them, but they sit in a chair like a mannequin and there's 300 people lined up and like you, you like have like 2 seconds. 'Cause I did a picture with one of them and I got you the package where you got your picture with both of them. But literally you stand there, they take the picture and you move. You never even make eye contact with them.

So they tell you just before you go up, Don't say anything, don't talk to him.

It's like taking a kid to go see Santa or the Easter Bunny or whatever.

Well, I mean, at least with Santa you get to sit on Santa's lap.

Oh, you didn't sit on William's lap?

No, that would have been great.

They would have just tackled you.

Oh yeah, you, you'd—

would you have tried? Like, if they allowed you to sit on—

the way they run it, you don't even have— you don't, you don't even know what's happening. It moves so fast. It's just, uh, if you got to— those packages aren't cheap either.

You should try to interview him. Like, he's huge on books. That guy's reading all the time.

Don't impose your interests on me. Yeah, can you imagine that conversation?

I would be here in a second.

What do you think his favorite book is?

His own books. Yeah, jeez Louise.

I went to a Walking Dead conference and you— yeah, Walking with the Walking Dead— and you got to get pictures. You had to pick who you wanted and a little bit more personal. Because they didn't think they weren't as famous.

The Star Trek thing is pretty, pretty, uh, deep, you know. The, the one thing that I remember is, uh, at the Long Beach Star Trek thing, they had this machine that would test your skill level of how much you knew, and James broke the machine. He answered every question correct.

Well, he scared me with the knowledge that William Shatner's— was wearing a toupee. Oh yeah, so long and I didn't even know it.

So what a silly thing to have a lot of knowledge on.

James, what do you do?

Star Trek is like life.

What do you do?

What do you do there?

Like, is there a large—

you don't want to know.

Wait, a Star Trek convention? Yeah, well, it's like a convention, so people have booths and they're selling memorabilia. I remember at one we went, he bought the bridge that he has in his garage, or had in his garage. So there's people, there's a lot of collectibles, so there's people selling that, and then you'll have a stage where people are talking So there'll be panels, there'll be, you know, different people from the show up there talking, and then there'll be different events and mixers. And wow, it's like a— it's like a 3-day weekend that people sort of— they like go to their favorite episodes. To be honest, like, the people that go to that stuff are, you know, very nice, fun, nerdy. Yeah, just super nerdy. But I'm nerdy, just not about that. Yeah, but still, you can, you know, you dress up. James, he didn't.

I do not dress up, but, but everybody else there is.

Yeah.

All right, would you dress up? Would you ever dress up, Cohen?

No, I'm too introverted to do—

you have a costume?

Sure, he does. I have some really cool—

does it still fit you?

No, but you know, Shatner's uniform doesn't fit him anymore either.

But James, didn't they redo— did they redo Star Trek?

Like, they're always redoing Star Trek.

Yeah, they're like—

there's a new one coming out now.

Yeah, they canceled it already.

What's going on? I think Force is not with us.

Look, Star Trek, that's the other Star Wars. Star Wars.

So funny. Did you see, uh, on Monday I kept saying Star Wars and he kept correcting me and I kept doing it?

You did it on purpose.

Yeah, it's funny.

How do you feel about Babylon 5 when that was around?

Oh, never watched it, never got into it.

I always heard there's a clash, not that I followed it, but I always thought that was interesting.

Okay, let's get to the, the question. So this question is really about retention, so we're going to talk about retention. Um, I work at, uh, BMW, Volvo, Porsche, Land Rover, Jaguar. I'm a Basically an internal service advisor. I struggle with finding ways to have customers return for service to the dealership when we aren't even actually the dealer. When customers purchase a car, we give them 3 free oil changes. Very rarely do I have a customer with the mentality that if it isn't free, I don't want it. Any tips on how to get Mercedes, Audi, Ford, Toyota customers, etc., to return to me for auto needs aside from the fact that I'm so amazing?

The first thing I think about is how you're treating the customer.

She's amazing. She said it already.

They what?

She's amazing.

Okay, well, we're having the question though. How amazing are you?

Yeah.

How much are we treating the customers? Are they wanting to come back? Especially if you're giving out free service. Are you calling them? Are you touching base with them?

How's the experience?

How's the experience? A lot of the stores in Canada, the Honda stores, they gave free service. And they were constantly coming back, but they were constantly touching them the time when they, you know, before they come back.

And—

Well, how many times do we see also that like, you know, if you ask some of these customers, they don't even know that they get free service.

Yeah.

They're not aware of it. Let alone know the service is free. So one thing right off the top that I would say is you don't treat a Mercedes customer the same as a Toyota customer. No, they're different. Like, I— your average ticket on a Mercedes is going to be way higher. I would probably be sending somebody to pick up Mercedes that were out of market, so I would be shuttling those in or sending somebody with a loaner to get them. A Toyota customer is going to come for the free oil change, so if it's free, they're, they're going to come in that way. But they're different. I would treat them differently.

Same with the Volvo customer, because she's an Audi.

I think that all falls into the same thing, for sure.

Luxury cars.

Yeah. So I mean, one thing that, that we kind of know that works is scheduling the appointment and actually calling them, not email, but actually just calling them and reminding them of the appointment. But make the appointment when you have them in, either when they're taking delivery or when they've come in for a service. Make the appointment for the next service, just like the dentist, and then call and confirm like a week before and remind them. Is usually pretty effective.

Yeah.

Sounds very intentional.

Mm-hmm.

I think a lot of customers who own a Mercedes, their second car is a Toyota, right? So you want to let them know that you're working on other brands of cars and you want to have that relationship with them where they're okay bringing in their kids' cars or really doesn't matter what kind of cars coming in. Sometimes techs don't like it. You know, they like, they think of themselves as a Mercedes tech and that's it. But they're more than happy to work on their spouse's car or their cousin's car that's a Subaru or whatever. Then it seems to be okay. So they'll get past that. But I think a lot of customers just are not aware that we're willing to work on anything that comes in, especially used cars that we sold, right? We already have a relationship with those people. And if they bought a brand that we're not selling, we should let them know we're there for them.

Yeah, it's also just way easier if you're calling them before they would call and make an appointment somewhere else, that you're saving them time. So just that little thing of, confirming with them a week out saves them having to make an appointment somewhere else and go somewhere else.

I used to have my service advisors call the customer ahead of time and not the BDC so they can start petting the dog before they even walk in the door. Oh, it's the first time you're here. Make sure you look for this. I'm going to meet you at your car. I see you're in here for this. No, you're not. Okay, let's make sure your appointment is correct. Let's make sure we have the special order parts. I'm going to be helping you. I'm going to take care of you. And then if they're coming in, especially for the first time, they're not They don't think that, oh my gosh, I'm nervous, more decision fatigue. And I know my advisor is going to be standing out in the driveway waiting for me.

Yeah. And you kind of want to do the math on that, like depending on how many cars you're selling in a month, you could divide that by the days in a month to see how many. But a lot of times, you know, you're only calling 3 or 4 customers in a day. It's, it's very manageable if you consistently do it versus waiting till the end of the month and you have 30 people to call and it's overwhelming. And so consistently doing it every day and just, you know, having a list of this sold 6 months ago or whenever they're due for service. That's the other thing is you got to coordinate is a Toyota and an Audi are due for service completely different. They have different intervals. So you have to line it up with the intervals for the brand.

And then how, you know, how's the handoff from sales to service, right? Like, We say we want to have a good handoff or we have a good intro to service, but how often does it happen?

Very, very, very rarely.

Exactly what they just purchased.

Yeah.

Be intentional with that. Yeah.

And this is how you make an appointment. This is where you come. All of that. Just taking away the unknown.

And I think over on the other side too, service advisors mistakenly treat that as an interference of their day instead of saying, this is a new customer that I'm going to have and own that customer. Oh, congratulations.

What kind of car?

What did you get?

It's your first opportunity to make a connection.

Come to me, here's my card.

Mm-hmm.

Or even scheduling the first tentative appointment. You know, if the salesperson actually brings the customer down, hey, let's see what interval, let's see your VIN, let's go ahead and schedule your first tentative appointment. If this needs to change, give me a call, here's my business card.

Yeah, I like that.

Yeah.

Now, it sounds like she is an internal advisor trying to get them back, so we can assume that she's meeting them, but if she's not? You'd want to introduce yourself, give them your card.

And I think that they— I think I see, I see, you know, some stores will— new car customers will bring them into, but I rarely see customers that purchase a sort of a pre-owned or a used car bring them to the service drive. And I think that's a real missed opportunity.

Yeah, huge, huge missed opportunity. The other thing that helps with this is having a high percentage of extended warranty sales that kind of require you to come back to the dealership. That works pretty good too. So depending on what extended warranty you're selling.

Mm-hmm. Up at this couple of the Honda stores I went to in Canada, they would give the customer free oil and filter change. But to get those, you had to do the rest of the service with the dealer. If you stopped doing the rest of the service with the dealer, you didn't get those free oil and filter changes anymore.

Keeps them coming back.

Keeps them coming back to do all the preventative maintenance. Which I thought was really smart.

Yes, for sure.

Yeah, that's good. Any other thoughts on retention?

I wonder if it would be a benefit if the Mercedes customer came in and you, at that point, you gave them a coupon for an oil change to bring in your other car that they normally wouldn't bring to you because you already have a relationship with them and they're trusting you. Maybe that's the opportunity to do that.

Trust us with your funds. Yeah, like that.

A lot of the time, they don't really know, right? Like, they have no idea.

Don't know.

And I do go to some dealers that are really good about retaining their used car customers because maybe they're selling a brand that's not doing as great in the last couple of years or whatever. So they can't afford to lose any opportunity. So every used car, regardless of what they sell, they need to get those people back in.

And a lot of the times, too, they're asking you what their next car should be.

Yeah, it could be from them just because I'm doing service, for sure.

100%.

Yeah, wouldn't it be fun if they brought in their used Subaru? You're not a Subaru store, but then you put them in your Mercedes loaner that you've got sitting there not doing anything. Man, maybe they fall in love with that car and they buy a car from your store.

Service sells the next vehicle.

I think the, you know, the name of the game or the word of the week is, uh, intentionality, right? Like, you just have to be intentional in You know, what the thing is. If retention is the thing, then how intentional are we being trying to get that retention, right?

Yeah, and it won't be just one thing. It's a bunch of things.

Nothing good happens by accident, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, well said.

I heard a GM say the other day at the store, he said, we just date the customers. The service department marries the customers.

Ooh, okay.

I know, I really like that.

Yeah, I like that one.

For sure.

Yeah, but it all boils down to like kind of what you said, right, Vicki? Like, it's what we're doing when we're interacting with these people.

Wow, so Vicki believes in having more than one spouse.

Do I what?

Do you believe in having more than one spouse?

More than one staff?

Spouse.

Oh, spouse. I don't know.

We do it.

I love my spouse.

We do in Utah.

Yeah, Dylan lives in Utah. It might be a good place for you.

I live in New Orleans. I don't live in Utah. We just put hexes on them.

We actually don't do that anymore. We don't do that anymore.

It's not what Netflix says.

I saw that.

What would you guys say are the biggest reasons why service departments lose customers?

They just, they just, they don't, they, yeah.

They don't connect on a deeper level.

Right?

Like, they treat them like a number.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Very transactional. You know?

Sure.

If we're trying to make a friend, right? It's, you know, most people go to the same barber every time that they get their haircut. They don't care what the price is, but they have some sort of banter. They have some sort of relationship with that barber.

There's no way you go to a barber.

They charge me the same amount for a haircut that they would charge Chris, I think.

Really?

I would if I was a barber.

But you can feel that in the store. I have a store that I've worked with since day one when I first started with you. And you go in the store and you can feel it.

Yeah.

You can feel it.

Yeah.

And I don't have a whole lot of stores like that where you walk in, you're like, wow, this is home. I would never go anywhere else. It's in Utah.

You know, and you walk into, you know, some service drive sometimes, you can feel it, the tension.

Oh, sure.

Well, you can feel the tension before you get there. Like, just calling and nobody picks up, or when they pick up, they put you on hold. Like, you just can't really ever connect with anybody.

Right.

Right. And people drive and go past dealerships just to get to that dealership. That's when you know you won. When somebody says that, I go past 3 dealerships to come to you.

Wow.

Yeah.

Strong connection.

Yeah.

I used to have a customer that drove all the way from St. George.

Wow.

All the way up to the Salt Lake Valley.

Nice.

Just to come to our store.

I think it's more about the relationship too than even the product. So even if you got a customer that maybe they had a bad experience with whatever they, and they had it bought back or, how many times have we seen it? If they like the dealer, they'll go do the return. Like the, the manufacturer's buying it back, and they walk right over to sales and buy another one because they love the dealer, love the service.

Being taken care of though, right? Like, back to what Brian said about the intentionality, it's just really like sad that industry-wide that we've basically just kind of forgotten what it means to, to make friends and treat people like humans. Yeah, we just lose that. It's transactional. We get wrapped up in our own personal things. We go to work, kind of like I always look at it as where some folks are doing the punch card, do the punch card, get on, sit on the desk waiting for things to happen. I hate my life. Then I go back, punch, punch it again, and I walk out. You see it time and time again. But there is a way to flip that.

And I think, you know, to the point, you know, a Mercedes customer is different than a Toyota customer. In a way that's true. But at the end of the day, they're just a human, right? They just— they don't know what they don't know. They're uncomfortable in situations, um, and it's up to us at the store to, to make them comfortable and make them like us, make them feel special.

Even I would even say, like, whether it's the brand Toyota or Mercedes, it still takes money, still takes effort, right? From even a customer standpoint, you can make stores that do it well.

Like, you'll see You'll be at a Toyota store and see a Mercedes pull in.

Yeah, right.

But they just, they have a relationship with that person.

One way to find out is when you go to do active delivery and before you bring them to their car, you schedule the next appointment and they don't stop you. Yeah, say, oh, I'll call you. Be like, no, no, if you go ahead and schedule that appointment and they don't stop you, you know you've made a good connection. You did something right in this whole scenario because if they stop you and say, no, I'll call you, you've messed up. They should allow you and they should want to come back and come back and see you.

I like that. That's a good point, Amber, because it's like if you truly made a connection and made a difference, yeah, you've made a friend. A friend wouldn't stop you, right?

Yep. Friend is going to say, I want to see you.

You remember Amy at my store?

Mm-hmm.

The technician made a mistake and racked the car wrong and it was a 750 and it fell off. Mm.

Fell off the rack.

The rack.

Amy still got 100 on her CSI.

Yeah.

Because it was a relationship with her.

We've seen that a handful of times.

And it's, it's awesome.

Yeah.

There's another commonality I think with stores that do great with retention, and the service manager's out on the drive a lot. And the customers all seem to know who he is, and he just shakes their hand. And yeah, and, uh, they come in and, uh, maybe they're multi-generational customers, or they had many, many cars, and They know the managers out there all the time.

Yeah.

I love that part of it.

Yeah.

'Cause advisors can come and go sometimes, but the managers will be there for decades and they seem to know, the good ones seem to know everybody.

I have a Chevy store up in Pennsylvania and they made the service manager, he came from sales and he was a sales manager there. And I thought, oh man, this is not gonna be good. But gosh, is he so good. And he's so good with the customers. And to your point, he's always in the driveway and he's seeing the customers he sold cars to or that he did deals with. With, but he's got such a great personality that they just come to him instead of sometimes the service advisor. But he's amazing when he's out there because it's like the welcome wagon. Hey, how you doing? He knows everybody. It's very impressive.

Well, and even when they come to you too, right? When they go straight to the manager, it's easy for the manager to hand it off to an advisor and they're comfortable with it.

Yeah.

Right?

Because it's a relationship, relationship building. And that's what it's all about.

Absolutely.

Final word, James.

Live long and prosper.

We'll see you next time on Service Drive Revolu—

Revolution! I've always wanted to do that. Did I do it right? Yeah, it's great.

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 833-ASK-SDR and we'll answer your question on the show. That's 833-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.