Chris Collins (speaker) questions whether car dealerships should install an Apple-style 'Genius Bar' to help customers with in-car technology. Using Apple's retail strategy as an analogy, he argues the dealership's service advisors already function as the true 'genius bar' and that dealerships should instead staff and train advisors on technology and customer connection rather than add a separate support desk.
Hi, Chris Collins here. And I want to ask you the question today. Do you need a genius bar in your dealership? You know, it's in my first book, the Irreplaceable Service Manager, I talk about when I used to buy a laptop and you would go buy a printer and then you would try to hook your printer up to your Windows based laptop and you would call the printer company because it wouldn't, you know, nothing would work, nothing talked to each other and you would call the printer company and you'd get some guy in India that didn't speak English and then he would blame it on Microsoft and you'd call Microsoft, you'd get another guy in India, probably in the building right next door in India, and you would get him and he wouldn't know and he would blame it on the printer. And at the end of the day you'd spend, literally I remember spending almost all day trying to hook up a printer once to via a laptop. And then along comes Apple and Apple says, you know, the, the thing that we're going to face is customers aren't going to switch from Windows to Apple because they're scared of Apple. What we need to do is we need to put in Apple stores with genius bars so customers can come right in, we can take all their files, move them over and make it really easy for them. And they don't have to call India. They can have a real person really help them. Which to Microsoft was a whole, you know, a whole nother thing. Now we all know that Apple put a huge dent in Microsoft profits and completely had Microsoft for probably 10 years dumbfounded at what to do. And they were just lucky that they had such a widespread software need that they survived because Apple was killing them in sales. And the genius bar was a big part of it. So now we have the same thing in the dealerships that the manufacturers are coming and saying, hey, you need to put a genius bar in your dealership to help customers pair cell phones and help them with technology and add another level of support, another cost to your dealership, which I don't know if you guys are paying attention, but from the very beginning, the service department was the genius bar. How are we adding another level? Listen, I live in Los Angeles, California and everybody talks about their brand, everybody thinks they're a celebrity. In the building I live in, there's a ton of celebrities here. In fact, it's funny, there's a quarterback that used to play for the Oakland Raiders and he just got traded to my beloved Seattle Seahawks and We were doing a coaching group here. I didn't even know who he was, but Ed from Star Chevrolet, who's right outside of Pittsburgh.
Knew this quarterback because he actually went to high school there. And he pointed him out and they talked and he was very nice to everybody. And I told my mom the other day, I said, hey, that Raider that just got traded to the Seahawks, who's going to be our third string quarterback, lives in my building. And I'm telling you, mom, he does not have the eye of the tiger. And she said, did you talk to him? And I said, no, because at the time he was a raider. But.
In our dealership, adding more stuff and other layers for the customer completely does away with our brand. What is our brand? In a dealership, our brand is our service advisors. They touch customers more than anybody else. If a customer buys a car, most of the time they'll see a salesperson once every two and a half, three years. But they'll see an advisor two or three times a year, depending on your brand, our brand. And the person that touches the customer the most is the service advisor. And that's our genius bar. But we want the customer to go somewhere else in the showroom and not to our service advisors. I've seen so many times dealers put in place some sort of system where the sales department introduces the customer to the service department and it never works, it never sticks. But now we're trying to keep those customers out of the service department. So customer buys a brand new car and they want to pair their phone. We don't want them to go to the service department, we want them to go to a genius bar. It makes absolutely no sense to me. When we want retention and we want to make friends with customers. The problem that we have and the reason why the manufacturers want this is one is your service advisors aren't trained on technology and the service advisors don't connect with customers a lot of times and they're not building their customer base and collecting customers. A service advisor's job is to collect customers. That is their role and their job in the dealership and in the service department. And then the second thing is us as leaders, we have the service advisors riding too many customers. I don't know how many times I've gone into a dealership and they need help and they want me to help them fix it. And they have three service advisors. And they had three service advisors for the last seven years, but they've been selling hundreds of cars every month. And the service Advisors are riding 25 ROs a day. No wonder the manufacturer wants us to put in a genius bar. The service advisors don't have time to help customers that want to spend money, let alone customers with a simple question about pairing their phone or technology in the car. So the key is you got to get the right advisor to customers need count so you need enough advisors that you can easily help the customers that need help. And you need to train those advisors on technology, on what the customers need with the car, and you need to train them on how to connect with customers, how to pet the dog, and really make friends with customers so they come back and ask for them. A genius bar is not the answer.
