How Service Advisors Can Increase ELR

Foreign.

Again I can't wait to get on the road again.

Oh, I forgot the words something.

Playing baseball with my friends oh, yeah.

Because I can't wait to get on the road again we are getting on.

The road again Ladies and gentlemen, today we are going to answer your questions on this edition of Service Drive Revolution. Drive by.

If you have a question that you need answered, 8, 3, 3, 3, ask SDR. That's the number. It's 8, 3, 3, 3,. Ask SDR. And if we answer your question on the big show, we'll send you swag. It's the only way to get Service Drive Revolution swag.

It's the only way. It's not available in stores or online.

Okay, let's go to our first question.

Hi, Chris. My name is Shelly. I work at a very busy downtown Toronto dealership. I've only been here for about four weeks. Prior to this, I was at a massive dealership, which was not as busy to say the least. And I made the switch over because I want to try a new brand and try something deathrint. And I sort of regret my decision at this point. The reason why I say that is because this dealership is way too busy. We are taking almost 60 appointments on a daily basis with only three advisors, sometimes only two advisors. And I'm writing 25 to 30 ROs on a daily basis. I feel drained. I'm unable to give my customers proper service and I feel like I'm missing a lot of steps and making more mistakes in this kind of environment. What is something that I could do to improve myself, to do better in this sort of environment? Or should I just leave and try to find something that would suit me better? I just feel very guilty, not able to give my customers a good experience.

And I have gotten absolutely no training for Honda as to how to be a excellent service advisor in this kind of environment. It's all very different for me. So I did get some guidance as to what to do. Yes. I'm very overworked, stressed and overwhelmed. So, yeah, I love listening to you guys show. Have a good one. Bye.

What a failure.

When I was a service advisor, I wasn't good writing 25 a day. I think one thing Shelley, you got to kind of keep in mind is like, we all are who we are and we all have our skill sets. I know for a fact I'm much better as an advisor, writing 10 or 12 a day, spending time following up, not forgetting things. If I write 20 a day, I'm waking up in the middle of the Night with something I forgot. Even if I'm keeping a log and everything, it's just still really hard. So I would, I would just resolve myself to that it's not the right situation for you and go do something that fits your skill set in your, you know, your desires more. But you know, sometimes we make a mistake and it is what it is. Just, you know, do your best to figure out another solution. You learned a lot, I would think, in that. Yeah.

But I think it's crazy. Four weeks in writing 25 to 30 tickets a day, if you take a little while to get used to the place you're in. Even if you've been an advisor before, it's a lot of customers. I'm super pumped at the way that she was really like, well, she wasn't necessarily blaming, writing all the tickets. She's like, I still want to take care of my customers. With an attitude like that, I would expect that she's probably a decent service advisor and there's places that she can work that they actually really encourage you to focus on the customers and not necessarily on the numbers of ros that you write in a day. So I'm with you. I hate the thought of job hopping's tough, but I think that we've all probably made that mistake where we've taken a job that we shouldn't have before and you didn't find out till it was too late. And the thing at the end of the day is that.

As I'm thinking about her before she took that job, what could she have done and know that that was the environment she was hopping into. That's probably more the lesson there is to figure that out before you go into it. Because like Chris said, there are people that are good writing 25 tickets a day. I'm not one of them, he's not one of them. But there are people that I've seen do it at a pretty decent level.

But they're rare though.

One in one in a thousand.

It's not a recipe for a scalable system. I would also say that if you want to send your resume to Christian, we have quite a few clients in the Toronto area.

Oh yes. And I have some that are looking for really high quality advisors.

We'll train you.

Thanks for the call.

That's a phenomenal question.

Hi, my name is Corey. I'm calling from Alberta, Canada. And my question to you, Chris, is based upon effective labor rate and how to manage it from an advisor perspective, outside of discounts and ensuring that each of our customers have A clear understanding of exactly what it is that we're trying to not only help prevent, but also how we're saving them in the long run. The difference between managing the ELR and managing not only our customer perspective, but our advisor perspective so that we can continue on the path of growing our ELR to an effective rate in which exceeds door rate on a consistent basis. So if you could answer that question for me, I'd really appreciate it.

We would have to understand the pricing.

Strategy has the most to do with effective labor.

But I would tell you in our pricing strategy being consistent, checking history and recommending maintenance and your technicians believing in you doing good inspections and then you calling the customers, using the table of contents technique and selling the work that the customers need, both of those two things would.

You know you would have a higher effective labor because it's the pricing strategy that we're using. Also, everything you do as an advisor comes down to connecting and making friends with your customers. If your customers like and trust you, it's not really about the price most of the time, unless they just lost their job or they're broke or whatever it is. But.

So having a connection with them. But the effective labor thing is different per store. Like I talked to a guy yesterday, his pricing strategy, I don't even think that I understand this. The guy was a little off.

So they may, they, they charge full bore. They have a high effective laborator, oil changes and tire rotations, but then he has a low effective labor rate on alignments and maintenance.

Yep, it's a little bit backwards, but.

It would just depend on what, what the pricing strategy is. Right. Like that one's a hard one because if you're overpriced, or.

I wouldn't say overpriced, but oil changes can drive traffic, but they also drive perception. So how you're priced on an oil change has a psychological effect also.

And that can go the other way. Like if you're too low, like that drives perception too.

You can coupon your way into being busy and not make any money.

Yeah. And that the product is perceived as cheap is definitely not where we want to be. So my advice was, from an advisor standpoint, if I was really trying to manage elr, the one thing that I do see that's consistent regardless of the pricing strategy is that if I'm an advisor and I've got a lot of one line ros, typically my effective labor rate is lower. So it would be.

Why is that?

Well, because typically the one line ro, the opcode would be an oil change which has a lower effective labor rate than a lot of other items. So it's just. I knew that.

I just wanted you to explain it.

Oh, okay. Thank you. Yeah. So it's. You know what the funny thing is, too?

So that I was walking to work the other day.

That fellow was. He was from Alberta. And did you know that Calgary actually has one of the biggest rodeos in North America?

Yeah, I did.

Yeah. So there's these two cows out in the field talking to each other. And the one cow goes, why are you laughing already?

Your segues are the best.

And the one cow goes to the other, he's like, hey, there's a. Do not spit out your coffee. There's a. There's a rash of this mad cow disease going around. We gotta be really, really careful. And then the other cow says, thank God I'm a coyote.

Get it?

Yeah, someone did. Someone got it.

Good. Cool. Remember, 833 3, ask SDR. If you have a question, we will do our best to answer it. We will see you next time on Service Drive Revolution. Thanks for watching this week's Drive By. I hope we gave you something to think about over the weekend. 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.