Effective Communication With Your Technician As A Service Advisor | SDR #246

Welcome everybody to the big show. Today we are going to talk about communication between text and service advice is going to surprise you what we have to say, but I believe it will inspire you. But even better than that, funny how it. It overshadowed better than that. And it's not the news. There's the news. We're going to talk about our top shift meeting songs, how to get your team pumped up. The release of the latest Metallica album made me think of this because I was telling you how good it is. Yeah, right. So Metallica 72 Seasons would be my number seven song. And the eight literally is like from beginning to end. It's just incredible.

Well, I hate to knock your list, but I would really worry. You know, we've got advisors in here. A lot of stress. Don't you think that that kind of stuff could make people's blood pressure rise?

That's the idea, is to get their blood pressure up to get them excited for the day. Like they, they, they've been out drinking all night or they've been arguing with their wife and then now they come to work and we got a couple minutes. We have a very small window of opportunity to change the trajectory of their day. And we're going to use music as a weapon to do that. And so we can't. You can't, you can't come in slow. You got to, you got to raise their blood pressure. You want to get them, you want to raise the adrenaline in a sense.

I may have missed the exercise, but we'll see what happens.

I want everyone calm and happy. My number seven is the song Caribbean Blue by Enya.

Come on.

You'Re gonna play Enya. Have you played Enya in a shift meeting? You want.

You have to attend one to find out.

Could you imagine the look on everyone's face? What's going on there?

Your style is a little different. So what is theory behind putting everybody to sleep? You want them calm?

Yeah. So I know that this is a.

That you're doing this for service tribe where there's just customers lined up out the street. Yeah, it's on. It's like a Toyota and the advisors have an appointment every five minutes.

I don't care that there's 700 appointments today. What I want you to do is just sit and enjoy. I've got a lot of songs like that.

Oh, my goodness.

It's going to be really fun to go.

We should post, we should post our playlist for people.

Also, like, if you're, if you're watching this on YouTube, put in the comments, what your. Your top. I don't know, five or seven shift meaning songs. I'd be curious what everybody else is. Okay, so this one, for me, this is hard.

Let's go with. And you and I have debated this many times. Let's go with Alice in Chains, man in the Box, from what I believe is the best Alice in Chains album. So I. I think that Facelift is. Is by far in the best Alice in Chains album. And what do you think is the dirt guy. However you enjoy your. You enjoy your heroin like no other. Because half the album, he's about heroin. You know that, right?

But man of the Box is one of my favorite Alice in Chain songs. I fully support. There's nothing I have bad to say about that commercial.

Okay. What's your. What's your number six?

The song. A classic song. All out of Love by Air Supply.

I'm all out of love I'm so lost. So you're. What you're trying to do is you're trying to let everybody feel like you missed them.

I'm trying to create an environment between.

One shift meeting to the other. I was out of. I missed you. I'm happy you're here. Yeah.

There's nothing like having a good cry in a shift meeting.

Oh, my goodness. Okay, I'm gonna say number five for me. This is hard, but I'm gonna go Pantera walk. Just that intro.

So good.

Oh, yeah. I don't even know if I know the rest of the song. I just know the intro. Yeah.

So really, really good Pantera walk.

I dig that.

What's your. What's your number five? To really pump up the advisors. Get him set for the day.

Yeah. Super popular song. I feel like everybody knows it from the movie Frozen. Let it go.

Oh, no.

It is.

We're gonna confuse the advisors.

It is so great that I didn't go over this list with.

Can you sing a little bit of that for me? Because I don't know that I'm familiar. Let it go. Let it go. Is it like that?

No, it's slower.

That was too fast. Okay. What are we on number four?

Yeah.

Why don't we go. Ace of Spades by Motorhead.

Wow, that's a really, really cool song. There's a group that I'm really surprised you haven't released yet, so I wonder if it's in your. Who's that? Acdc.

Yeah, I almost went there.

Yeah, that's a really good song, too. This is what I like to call the Saturday morning shift meeting. Song mine is the song Rehab by Amy Winehouse. Because advisors come in, they're hungover, they have decisions to make.

That's pretty good. And I think that that's the first one of your songs. I think that I'm behind. Yeah, that's. I. That I agree. I agree with.

So this is my number three. I'm gonna go with 30 seconds to Mars. This is War. It's kind of an epic song. It kind of builds. You're sending the right message. This is war.

So it starts off quiet and then gets really loud at the end.

Gets really loud. Like, sooner than the end, I'm sure.

I know. I've heard it. I'm not.

The drums are great. He's a great drummer.

Yeah. This song. I don't know if a lot of people know this song, but, like, when I think about the mindset that I want an advisor to be in when they walk out of the shift meeting, this is absolutely where it's at. The song Teardrop by Massive Attack.

Come on. It's my number two. Now, most of you don't know this song by the. By the name and who the group is, but if I tell you the theme song to House, like the opening credits, that come on, that's Teardrop by Massive Attack. Where that really slow. Don't they call it trip hop?

Yeah. So it's meant to kind of be a little bit slower than your heartbeat to calm you down.

Yeah, I'm trying.

There's a theme here is you're trying to bring people. You're trying to lower blood pressure. So are you under the thought process that most advisors are on blood pressure meds?

Yes. Yes, I am.

And I'm just trying to put him.

Right into the east, send him to the earth with grave. Like, mine's all about survival.

What brought you here to the emergency room? Like Chris Collins Shift, meaning AC DC and Pantera. Okay, what are we at? Number two. I'm going to go. Teenage Wristband by the Twilight Singers.

Oh, that's a good song, too.

Starts off with a little piano.

This one is if we're really having a. Going to have an amazing day, and we're really trying to build up the energy and excitement. This one is actually my personal favorite. And it's welcome to the Jungle by Ginar. Oh, well, yeah, that's a classic meeting song.

That song's gonna not only get you fired up, but it's gonna take you back.

Yes.

There's memories attached to that song.

So that's probably the one I would say that over my years that I get the best response from people.

I think my number one, there's gonna be two chains, money in the way.

I don't know if I know that song.

There's a lot of songs in my list here.

Well, I hope you guys wrote some of those down because I do agree, like shift meeting, music can be a game changer.

What's in the news, Chris? John?

A couple of really interesting things. So down in Florida, Governor DeSantis signed a car dealership protection bill banning most direct to consumer auto sales. So trying to protect the dealerships. But he signed a measure, HB 637 Tuesday, banning most direct to consumer vehicle sales, solidifying the future viability of car selling operations across Florida. It was considered a direct threat, you know, the Tesla thing, direct threat to business. But there was a lot of lobbying that went on. Shocker. But Tesla, Rivian and Lucid are authorized to hold a franchise dealer license for the direct sales of EVs. So. But it looks like your, your basics, GM, Ford, Honda, Toyota cannot do direct consumer in Florida as of that bill.

So it protects Tesla and everybody else.

Oh, it almost could make it worse, right?

Yeah.

Then kind of segueing to Tesla, they had another crazy month. Their registrations or their sold cars grew by 52% in the first quarter of 2023. Everywhere on the road, I see those things.

You know what was crazy is when I was up at my mom's in Washington and so you're talking about the town in Washington where I grew up. I think the population is 2500. I saw nothing but Teslas up there.

It's crazy. Right?

Okay, so now let's, let's talk about.

Subject that is close to your heart for sure. Communication between texts and service advisors.

Well, I definitely think it's something that's, that's a common thing that I'm hearing out on the streets these days is that, that people believe the reason we're not as efficient is because there's no or bad communication between technicians and advisors. And I think that for a long time I would say that that's probably, that's kind of been the model when you think about it. So when, when I was writing service.

The, the face to face had to happen for the most part early on in my advisor career. As we got older, we got into a couple of things that I've got on my list. I've got a funny story to tell but.

But, but, but it was, I just remember face to face time and the thing that came out of the face to face time was, is that we built relationships with each other. So I feel like now go out.

Of your way to.

Build relationships. Like, did you ever take your texts out?

Yeah. So I hung out when I was an advisor. I hung out with the text outside of work. So there was a. There was a core of us that.

Buy them like a 12 pack.

Probably more than a 12 pack would. Would be my guess.

But alcoholic technicians.

Yeah. That nothing makes text happier than alcohol. In most cases. It's a fix for everything.

Easy.

Yeah.

So at the top of my list on this, I think feeds into that in the sense of.

When you kind of care about each other, you don't do the weird thing, which is whose responsibility is the communication. Because whenever there's a communication breakdown, the first thing that happens is somebody says, well, it was. They didn't. And we start throwing the blame around. But I think when you have those relationships, you want to own the responsibility because you want to take care of the text and the texts want to take care of you. And so there's a little empathy and a little care that gets rid of that. Whose fault is it? And communication starts with everybody owning the responsibility, right? Yeah. So I think communication starts with you not expecting others to be community, be good communicators and you owning the outcome of that. Now, if both sides own the outcome, there's never a discussion about communication. It's when one side starts blaming the other side that it breaks apart. Right?

Yep.

So to, to your first point is the relationships and then the ownership.

Yeah. And I think that one of the best ways to force that relationship is lateral support.

Oh, so the system.

Yeah, yeah, the system using. Using the teams to further the relationship form dictates function. Yeah.

But in lateral support, you're dealing with the same small group every day and it forces that relationship because right behind, you know, you're probably going to have two tickets for that advisor every day at a minimum. Right?

Yeah.

So you're just going to get in, you're going to get into a system.

Yeah, I just, I got to observe that firsthand. Not as an advisor, because I never worked under lateral support as an advisor, but I loved it as a manager and watching their relationships and like they were totally vested in each other. It was really cool when, when I.

First became a service advisor, I didn't know anything about cars and I worked alongside a bunch of advisors that had been doing it a long time that not only knew a lot about cars, but maybe were fixing cars on the weekend and like they had the, you know, they were technicians in some way, shape or form. And so I'm, you know, I'm 19 or 20, and these guys are in their 50s. They've been doing it a long time.

And.

I just had this weird curiosity about people. And so I was really good at building rapport with my customers and I sold a lot of work. And so the numbers that I was putting up created some jealousy.

And that jealousy then would feed to the shop because the tech, the other advisors would talk to the texts about how I didn't know what I was doing. And they, they were almost presenting it like I was cheating in a way, like I was lucky somehow or something.

Yeah, because it couldn't be skill or.

It couldn't be that I was building relationships with customers and they trusted me. Right. And so I remember at one point the Volkswagen techs, there was this, this tech and I think his name was Shane.

Shane.

I think he was like a young, younger guy. He was maybe a little older than me. And.

It'S so funny because he got paid back so good for this. But I remember he had, he calls me into the Volkswagen shop, which was across the alley, and he had a disc sitting there and all the Volkswagen techs, which, I don't know, maybe was like 12 of them or maybe more than that, they all come around in a circle and he calls me in, so they're all looking at me, and he says to me, what is that? And he points at this round metal disc. And I think I said, brake rotor. And everybody starts laughing and I don't know why they're laughing, you know. And it was a flywheel.

Yeah. For a clutch.

Yeah. So everybody's laughing at me. And then I remember that he went to my boss and said, how can this guy be riding service? He doesn't know the difference between a brake rotor and a flywheel. And it made me feel really bad at the time because I, you know. No, here's the thing that happens in our industry is nobody was teaching. It wasn't that I didn't want to know.

Yeah, you would have gladly listened.

They gave me an advisor number and said, here's your desk. And they opened the door and customers started flooding in. It wasn't like there was a six month training program. I was learning as I went and heaven forbid that I was actually performing and, you know, putting up some numbers and I had good CSI without knowing.

Anything about the cars, but nobody was teaching me.

It was all on me to learn. You know, whenever I would get an Inspection sheet with a lot of stuff. I would go back to the tech, and I would say, hey, can you explain this to me? So when I called the customer, I would know. A lot of times, you know, some of those texts were really nice. They would take me to the car and, you know, show me. And so I learned over time. Right. No, but nobody was teaching me that. And the idea that I was to.

Feel bad because I was performing, but I didn't have the product knowledge, that the only way I would get it was through, you know, learning myself. You feel like the world's against you? Like, yeah, the. Our management was terrible. All the advisors were, you know, miserable. And then the text, you know, you throw a guy like that Shane guy in the mix, and it just. It's just.

I don't know.

It's just hard to come to work every day.

Yeah, for sure. For both sides. Right. Okay. And I think that that's probably the. A really good reason to have this conversation is because right now, how it is is that I would say, you know, more often than not, it's adversarial. And the techs don't really think much of the advisors, and the advisors don't think much of the text. And at the end of the day, they're only. They're only hurting themselves.

Yeah, but think about. If both of them decided to make it better for the other. Everything would get better.

It's easier than they think, is what I would tell.

It starts with you.

It's easier than they think. And someone's got to be the. Whatever, the bigger person, and they have to make that first step. But I just think it gets easy after that. Is. Is now you get to a point where what if. What if you guys were invested in each other's success?

Pointing out the other person's flaws doesn't fix anything. And usually that. You know, what's that saying when you're pointing the finger at somebody else's three pointing back at you?

Yeah, that's a good. That's a good saying.

There's enough stuff you can work on.

If you're listening to this. Christian's trying to figure that out. He just pointed four fingers at himself.

I got my thumb backwards.

So the. The beginning of the end, I think, with technology was. And every dealership had this. And I don't think it's gotten better since was the next L. And just watching a bunch of morons hit the button at the same time. And I remember so many times I would tell people, just call them, like, the Next dose is a cell phone, Just call them. But you're doing this weird walkie talkie thing that doesn't, you know, doesn't make any sense. And so I think.

Making sure that you're connecting and walking out there, there's still a value to that human connection. And I don't think you have to do everything through text and I don't think you have to email or automate it. It takes not very long to walk out there and do a face to face and really understand what's going on. Even, you know, to the point, like if I had.

Kind of a runability issue or some sort of intermittent issue with a customer. One is I was either riding with that customer or I was having the tech ride with the customer or the foreman, if it was available, whatever it is. But I would ride on the arrow, come see me, and then I would go show them and talk to them about it. Because even though I would do my best to put the story that's one form of communication, but there's other forms of communication that maybe work better. And so, you know, what I wanted to do by that was say, hey, don't spend a half an hour trying to figure this out until we talk about it, because maybe you can figure it out in 15 with three minutes of conversation.

Right. Yeah, I think that that's, that's one of the things that I had down as well was that when you're writing an ro, write it like the time of the person working on it matters. Yeah. And I think you taking a road test with somebody and taking a bunch of notes and saying, come see me if I'm the technician, I'm like, okay, so this person actually really values my time and cares about it. That goes a heck of a long ways.

I did not want it to go to a tech unless it had been duplicated. And I think what a lot of advisors do is think that the tech is the one that should duplicate it. But I, I just never saw that work because half the time it would just come back cnd, which could not duplicate, you know, and so I wanted to duplicate it. So I didn't get the. Could not duplicate.

Yeah, because there's nothing worse than calling customer and telling them, I know you had five things that you brought it in. We couldn't, we couldn't figure out any of them.

And if the customer can't duplicate it for you, they understand that then the tech couldn't.

I've always said that's plausible deniability. Yeah. So anytime I had A situation like that. I was going to road test. I was going to have somebody point something out. I don't know if you did this, but I traveled with postie notes when I did road tests. So if there was a noise concern and they're like, well, I think it's coming from the passenger side, but it's when we're over bumps. I had. I'd have posting notes and I'd post on the dash where the noise was or on the roof or whatever so that they knew that I was trying to isolate the noise.

So I'm a little older than you. The post it notes weren't. Weren't invented. I don't think it was just paper.

No.

What we used to do is grease pencil.

I. I've done some grease pencil marker on the headliner. Right. It's so funny. Your noise is fixed. Shut up about the. Shut up about the marker. Yeah.

That'S a.

That's fancy that you had post it notes. Yeah. Also, I don't think our. The dealership I worked at wouldn't buy. We couldn't get pens. I think I had to buy our own pens.

I bought my own posting notes.

That's funny.

That's great. But. So I think just to kind of wrap that up, that the, the thing, if, if communication is an issue, it starts with you. And you, you know, you got to. You got to give to get and.

You give as much to get whatever it is that you want. Like, there's no limit. I don't think. You just keep going until it works.

And don't make it personal. Like, if there's an issue, like, say, hey, I really want to take care of this customer. And so you tell me how you want this to function. And most of the time they don't have a clue. And so then you can say, well, here's how it's going to go, you know, but making it about the work and doing a good job, not a personal attack on each other.

Great. I love it.

Awesome. Well, thanks, everybody. I hope the. The shift meeting songs are.

That was so fun.

I apologize for. I'm surprised that the Careless Whisper by Wham didn't make it on your list. I'm never gonna dance again.

We'll see you next time on Service Drive Revolution. Thanks so much for watching this episode of Service Job 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 8333 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.