A Subaru dealership switched service advisors from profit-based pay to customer satisfaction scores, cutting some advisors $1,500 a month. Chris Collins and hosts debate the fairness but argue advisors can recover earnings by building real relationships: answering phones well, following up, treating customers like family.
Next question is.
From wants to be kept anon okay. Which I'm guessing on them is anonymous. Hey Chris, I've been listening to your podcast for some time now and on my second time through all of them I came across the podcast talking about Advisor pay plans December 5, 2017. That was a long time ago. Yeah. Recently my store Subaru, one of the busiest in the group, has adjusted all the advisor pay plans. Originally we were getting paid off of parts and labor and were based off of gross profit tiers 7 to 8.5% as see already I'm lost. Are you paid off of sales or gross? How would you read that?
I'm going to assume he's getting paid off of gross, but it was a little confusing.
As a department we are making an average of 225 to 250k per month out of four advisors. Now is that parts and labor.
Four advisors and each individual was making 6 to 8k monthly. Everything was smooth and profits were growing. Now they have adjusted our pay plan to get paid strictly off of net promoter score. Which is CSI right?
Yep.
Basing a stranger's opinion on a survey as to what we get paid percentage wise the percentages are still the same but the question that is asked on the surveys are based off of our experience. Would you recommend blank 10 out of 10 to family and friends? A score from either 0 to 8 or 9 to 10 is a 10 seeing as we are still grossing the exact same but a lot. A lot of advisors have seen a $1,500 cut out of their pay due to this pay plan. Seeing as to what your thoughts are, I feel this is an option to where we still making a profit but they possibly don't have to pay us as much to help boost their profits. As a manager group, it makes us advisors not want to sell as much and focus more on customer retention and making sure they are completely satisfied. In the end we have to always take care of customers. For a question to a random stranger to based on pay to fill, it's not fair and that's what it says. So a little little trouble with the.
English language and I'm with that too. You read some of my writing and comes back to that.
So is this you? Are you anonym?
No, no. The one thing that stuck out so much to me, which is definitely if you look at it through a different lens, is they're assuming the customer is a complete stranger because they're leaving him as a complete stranger.
That's your fault. This is a customer as a Stranger.
It is a layup. You're gonna give me more money if I can connect with customers. And the amount of money is dictated by how much you can sell. Think about that. Make a friend out there. Get that customer to know you on a deeper emotional level and vice versa. Because. Because in return you get the better csi. The customer trusts you, you sell more and you have the highest tier out there. This is a layup, guys. We just have to slow down the process and make friends. That's simple. It's a layup.
Well said. Okay, and then now.
Let'S go outside of our little selfish shell. As an advisor. Like you know that saying, to the man with a hammer, the world is a nail.
Yeah.
So to an advisor, the world is just everything that we do. As an advisor. Let's step back for a second. And why is CSI so important to a Subaru dealer?
It dictates how we're taking care of our customers.
Yeah, but what else, what do the manufacturers do?
Pay a lot of good money for that.
So there's bonuses involved. What else do you do? Manufacturers want to give more points to dealers that can't get CSI or that can. So if a group wants to buy more Subaru dealerships or any other dealerships for that point, it's kind of like their credit score with the manufacturer. So there's tons of money involved. Right. And then you're not allowed to buy other dealerships if you don't have good csi. Right. And the.
You know, kind of the, the third one is that they sometimes don't give you cars. So you're a dealership. You want the good cars. Like I don't know what the good car is with Subaru right now, but you want a bunch of turbo Imprezas or what they're selling, that's the hot car. You're not going to get a bunch of those if you're, if you don't have that relationship with the manufacturer and you're not in good standing with the manufacturer. So we got to step way back from just being an advisor and being so selfish. And we gotta, we gotta understand that it's a big deal. It's a big deal to the dealership and that's what keeps us employed. That these strangers opinion is that they like us. And we, let's just talk about the things as an advisor we can control. So can we control how we answer the phone?
Yes.
Can we answer the phone with a good attitude or a bad attitude? Can we be in a hurry or take our time? Can we show empathy or not. Not care.
We can.
When a customer comes in, can we let the customer wander around and wonder where to go and who's going to help them? Or can we run out to a car and welcome, how are you doing today? And connect with them and ask them about their kids and their work or whatever it is that matters and really, genuinely make friends with the customer? Do we control that? As advisors? We do. Now, as advisors, can we follow up with customers beyond what they expect? Could we call them before they call us? Do we control that or somebody else?
Well, where I work at is what they're going to start with. But 100. You can control it.
Okay, so if we have a working phone, we can follow up. We could email, text, whatever. We could follow up with customers and exceed their expectations, right? Could we? Could we? Could we? Could we? Could we be better than any other advisor that's ever helped them? Could we greet them, follow up, check history, care about them? Could we treat them? Now, I know this is crazy. It's crazy. I've been accused of being crazy before. Could we treat them like family? Yes.
So we control that. We're not victims. And so if we did all that stuff and they showed up to pick up the car and we were there and we made them feel great and we said, hey, please come back and see me. Like, the thing I used to do is like, here's my card. And please, if anything happens or you need anything, I want to be your guy in the car business. Please call me for anything. And people would call me because I was sincere and I really did want to be their, you know, car guy. People would call me and say, hey, Kris, I'm thinking about buying a new car. What do you think about the new legacy or whatever it is? And I had a lot of influence on what cars they bought. And I would tell them the truth. I would say, like, hey, there's a lot of issues with that one. But the, you know, this one is the good one. And so it's all, we're not victims here. Our role as advisors is to do that. And so really the question here, Anonymous, is how much of a pro are you? How much do you care about being great at what you do? How much do you care about the dealership you work for? Or are you just selfish and it's all about you? Because it's really, really odd to me that you would describe a customer as a complete stranger. It's in your control that they would be a really close friend.
