How To Get Your Advisors To Call Customers Daily

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Welcome everybody to your Friday drive by on Service Drive Revolution. I'm Chris Collins. This is Chris Stone.

Hello everyone.

We are here to answer your questions. The phone number, if you have a question, is 8333, ask SDR. That's 8333, ask STR. And let's jump right into it.

Hey, Chris and Christian. My name is Stetson. I work at a Chrysler dealer in Scottsdale, Arizona. I moved down here from Seattle, Washington. I was an advisor there for five years. I actually probably worked at a few dealers that Chris probably knows. I was a technician for three years before that at my current dealer. Management's great. Technicians are great. We can use some more techs. Obviously that's kind of standard, but one thing we're having an issue with is getting advisors to contact their customers daily. I know that's kind of an industry wide issue, but we have veteran advisors that are having an issue along with some newbies that we're trying to train up. And so it's been a lot of chaos trying to get that to happen because I feel like half the phone calls coming in are customers looking for updates and then that clogs up customers looking to get in. I'm not quite at the management level. I can kind of already tell that's where the management is wanting me to go eventually is to management. But I'm just trying to figure out ways as a fellow advisor, not necessarily from a management standpoint, that I can try and urge those advisors or point them in the right direction to help them out. So one, I'm not fielding phone calls for those advisors trying to help out because obviously I want to take care of the customer regardless of if they are my customer or not. But I also need to make money.

Thanks so much for the question. I would be curious if you're a Seahawks fan or not coming from Seattle.

I'd also like to compliment his name. I think the name Stetson's awesome.

Oh yeah.

And he sounds like he's a great dude. Thanks for listening.

First thing I would do in this situation is I would just want to know the exact numbers with no emotions or no feelings whatsoever. So whoever's answering the phone, like the service receptionist, bdc, I would have a ticker sheet every day. You're going to have to remind them to do it constantly in the beginning. But I would have it just broken up by customers. So how many customers did each advisor have call?

And I wouldn't even say status, I would just say how many called for them. Right. Because you'll Be, you know, if they have a ton of calls, it's going to be status. What, what I usually find when I do this is that it's, you know, let's say you have eight advisors. There's two of them that get most of the calls.

Always. Yeah, the offenders.

So you're, you don't, you don't want to find yourself in a situation putting systems in place or training or talking about something that is only 20% of your advisors. And so I would spend a couple of weeks just getting the ticker of how many calls and I also would, would break it up into sections of three hour blocks. So I would say like if we open at 7, between 7 and 10 by advisor, you know, between 10 and 1. So I want to see the peak times for the calls also because you know there's other things that you'll learn by doing this exercise.

So that's where I would start and then I would work on, you know, in our system we, we teach the advisors and our advisor training the circle of trust. And one of them is calling with an update before the customer expects it, the two hour call. And so I would put, you know, I'd put your advisors through our training and then use that as a, as a map to coach and kind of hold them accountable. I also would be very aware of how many the advisors are writing. Cause sometimes if we have advisors writing 20 customers a day, they don't have time to call and update. So the amount of time between appointments and how many appointments they have will determine their ability to follow up and touch customers also.

Yeah, I think that's really, really good. I would say that from Stetson's point of view, since he's an advisor trying to figure out what's going on with his co workers and at the end of the day what he's trying to do is help himself out as well. Because when he's helping out his partner's customers that are just not getting status calls and it's affecting him like he'd kind of said. So the thing that I would say is maybe there's a little bit of a sale to all this is thinking about the inbound status call versus the outbound status call. Right. So, so let's.

Every time you get a status call for another advisor, you tell the customer, hey, looks like Christian didn't call you back. Next time why don't you come in and ask for me.

Oh, I kind of like that too.

That isn't where you were going.

No, not at all. But what I was saying is that.

I do like it. I mean, it's great. But at the same time, I think that we should probably tell people a little bit about what is the advantage. Right? So think about when someone calls us. When a customer calls into us and they want a status update. And let's say that they magically get to. To an advisor. Right. Or even the other advisor. So the RO that the advisor is looking at, is it the one that the customer's on the phone? Do those two things match ever?

No.

Never. The answer is no.

Good. Never ever, ever, ever, never.

There is a 1.4% chance that it's the same.

I felt like in that scenario, it's like when you're. When your girl says you never say I love you.

Never. Never. Such a definitive word.

Never. Never.

Rarely.

What about yesterday when I said I did not. Never. I never get a call from the one with the RO in my hand is what you're saying.

So it doesn't happen very often. It's an unlikely event. So then you got to put the customer on hold. Right. Which how is that for the customer experience? It's not only to wait for five minutes to talk to your advisor, but then after that you're talking to the wrong person. Then that other person puts you on hold and they go into, like, this purgatory.

You're doing everything twice.

Exactly. So then you have to run into the shop because you got to ask somebody completely out the window. It's a mess. Total control.

It's chasing your tail, literally.

You are running around in circles.

You're playing whack a mole.

Yes. So you come back and then you tell the customer you'll call them back later. Right. As opposed to.

And then if you're not good at calling people, you're probably not good at calling people back for sure.

Then you forget to call them back. Then they call back and wake up.

Like, oh, I forgot to call Christian back.

Or you could try this just to see if it's a little bit less confusing. You could regularly contact your customers on an outbound thing. It is the RO you're looking at it. You call them, you give them an update.

That makes too much sense. Don't tell them that.

Yeah, it's almost like swearing. I just swore suggesting that that's the case. But the truth is, you can handle a lot more when you're in control of the communication. So that's what I would be talking to my co workers is about.

Control. When you call an update, you're in control. You're controlling the narrative and why wouldn't.

You want to be? The customer shouldn't be in control. They don't know our system.

Yeah, I agree. No, that's a good point. It took you a long time to get there, but it was a good point.

Yeah, I'm not sure why it took me so long. Because I interrupted you. Oh, that's right. Is that you interrupted me.

Do we have another one? Yeah, let's go to the next one.

I was an auto ASE Master tech. Still have the ASC master tech certification. Never let that go.

But went heavy duty a while ago as a service manager.

And had two shifts, day and night. I had Foreman's on each shift. It was beautiful because those guys let me know exactly what was going on in the shop day and night as well as have the ability to speak to customers, speak, explain things and put a personal face as hey, maybe Bobby or Dave is working on your truck in the shop. But maybe John and Rob is. But I know those guys, those guys are good for your job, are going to be able to do it and you have somebody in the shop who can tell them that. In auto I've noticed that every shop I've ever been at there is no foreman, there is no eyes in the shop. Your service manager is the eyes in the shop, which is fine, but no one's willing to embrace my idea of having somebody who is a tech that's not going to.

Be completely vulgar and horrible and is willing to speak with customers as well as be my eyes and ears out in the shop if I'm not out there every minute of the day.

Do you think it's a good idea to have a foreman or not?

So he works, he's a truck and a truck. He has shop foreman's.

No he doesn't. He had it in the past. Now he wants to bring Foreman into the current environment he's in but doesn't have it and he's having a tough time selling.

Does the car have to do with it?

That that's where he cut his teeth before he hopped over to truck.

But a lot of car dealerships have Foreman.

Yes, that's what he said.

Some manufacturers require it.

I also like the fact that it's impossible to find someone that's not vulgar or horrible to talk to customers. I don't think vulgar and horrible is a bad thing. I think customers like that stuff. Like there's restaurants that make a living off of treating customers horribly. Like people come and seek that stuff out. Why not have this Shop.

Am I going to like a dominatrix without the rubber? Like you pay somebody to abuse you?

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. Customer service is at an all time low. For sure. I thought from the very beginning, Brad, that the spirit of the question is, hey, I want to run my department a specific way and I have a way I like to do it, but I can't do that.

That's, that's exactly what it was most of the time. What happens is the reason why you can't do that is because you're not putting enough profit to the bottom line or you're not performing to the level that gives you that sort of control. So especially in truck, you rarely ever hear managers talking about net to gross or profitability. But if you were a manager that was focused on profitability, the narrative was profitability and you were pointing out to whoever you work for profitability, you would have a lot of leeway in making decisions. But if the thing isn't making money.

Then most of the time leadership's first thing to do is to cut heads. Like, I don't know how many times we see them cut technicians, which are the only thing that makes us money as technicians and, and bean counters will come in or owners will be like, well, you got too many people, you gotta cut, you gotta cut people. So.

I would just keep that in mind that there, there's a gap here between you're running your business and you're expected to get a result.

But the result is probably vague. What, what's winning and losing. It isn't just hours through the shop. How much money do we make at the end of the month? And understanding that probably is the bigger answer here. I am a fan of foreman's in a lot of situations and foremans become great service managers. They're a bench. They also. A foreman can cover you.

They, you know, a shop foreman can be a partner in crime for, for a manager in the sense and he'd.

Alluded to that, that that's what he's looking for. He's looking for someone to be his.

Eyes and ears vital. They're, you know, vital. So I would think of the question in a different way, like why don't you have the authority and what's, you know, how do we get very clear on what the expectation is of your role and then how do we adapt that so you can have some control to run it the way you want?

Great.

Did you have that sense?

Yeah, very much so. I thought that the thing was about getting to the structure that he wants and it made sense to me, too.

Now, our experience with Truck is most of the time, managers don't see a financial. They don't know that they're profitable or not. Most of the time. Most of the time they don't know what their effective laboring is. So you're selling hours and you don't know how much you're selling them for.

And when we close that gap, you end up having a lot of authority because once you understand those things and you know how to create profit, it's a win win for everybody, for the business and for you because you can run it the way you want. You're very clear in what's expected and ownership is happy because you're, you know, you're printing cash.

Literally. It's like a Xerox machine for cash.

That'll buy you a lot of authority.

Instead of a burn barrel. For cash.

Right.

Do you ever have a burn barrel?

Not for cash.

Grandpa said. Oh, take it out to the burn barrel.

Yeah, we had a whole burn pile.

You'd separate the burn barrel. Compost. Did you ever compost?

No. My grandpa burned everything.

You can't burn everything.

Really?

No weird things going on in Illinois?

Yeah, well, rural Illinois for sure. The people in rural Illinois know what I'm talking about.

Thanks, Brad. Thanks for the question. I apologize that Christian didn't sneak in a joke. He's a little light on the jokes today.

Sneaky. Super light.

Way to prepare.

Yeah. One day. One day I'll tell a joke.

Hopefully. Hopefully next time we'll see you. See you again real soon on the 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-TAK 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.chris collinsinc.com that's offers.chris collins inc.com I'm Chris Collins and I'll see you in the next video.