Chris Collins (Service Drive Revolution) argues that new problems require new solutions rather than defaulting to old playbooks. He uses analogies (water vs. electrical fires) and a dealership anecdote about resisting a 'say no to customers' reaction, advocating instead for documenting issues and leveraging positive customer perceptions. He applies this to COVID-era changes—shifting focus to selling safety, using service departments to sell cars, higher standards for cleaning, and community-focused marketing. The clip ends with a preview of a guest segment with Andrew Tarvin on using humor to connect with customers.
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Welcome to Service Drive Revolution and your Friday drive by. A little something to think about. A little food for thought going into the weekend. Hopefully it inspires a new way of thinking and some solutions. So what I want to talk about today is novice problems need new solutions. Now, what do I mean by that? What I mean is new problems come up all the time. But what we tend to do is we tend to go to our old playbook and try to apply solutions for that, right? Like take for example, at one time, if there was a fire, you'd put it out with water. But then as we progressed as a society, we had electrical fires. And what happens if you pour water on an electrical fire? You get shocked and it can make the whole situation a lot worse. So we developed fire extinguishers. So they put out electric fires. And this makes me think of a situation when I was. When I was running a dealership, I was a general manager of a big dealership. And I would have weekly manager meetings. And I usually had about 12 managers in there. You know, you had a BDC manager, service.
Director, manager, parts, you know, whatever. There's about 12 of them. They'd sit around this conference table and I'd sit at the head of the conference table. And I remember I walked in for one meeting and I could kind of tell that the room was a little different, something was off. And the old gsm, who was kind of like the union leader, had these printouts. And, you know, when the meeting started, he said, well, we want to talk about something. And he started presenting these printouts from the Internet that were blogs talking about how to get over on us for lot damage. And the solution that they had come up with was that we needed to start saying no to customers and we needed to put our foot down and not let customers walk all over us.
To me, it seemed like this was a new problem, that that old solution wasn't going to work. It actually appeared to me that if people are talking about how great our customer service is and that they can even get over on us, that's an asset to us. That's. That's a plus in the, in the mark against our competition. The last thing we want to do is start being Dr. No and turning people away and saying no. Now we could get better at documenting lot damage when, when cars came in, we could change our processes, but the customer experience, we wanted to ride that momentum. We didn't want to shut it down. Right? When I think about how that applies to today when Covid happens.
A lot of Us are trying to apply the old solutions that we had to the new problems, right? So our sales departments are closed down and we think, oh, hey, maybe, maybe we just sell everything online like the Internet. Well, you already had an Internet department and of course your Internet department's going to get busy. But the service department is a place to sell cars. Salespeople can be assisting in the service department and selling cars, right? Same thing with our service customers. One thing that changed is we now were selling safety to the customers instead of just service, right? So the old way of selling was completely different. What we were selling before had to change and we had to apply new things. So now all of a sudden details and cleaning cars to a certain standard ended up being a bigger asset. Same thing with our marketing. Now our marketing needed to be about community and bringing people in and helping those that needed help and having more empathy than just buy three tires, get one free. And so just think about in your business over the weekend, I want you to think about what are the new problems, the novice problems that I'm trying to apply old solutions to. And maybe I should step back and come up with a new playbook or maybe I should borrow a playbook from other industries. But what could I change in my thought process to embrace those things as opportunity to embrace those problems as something that I can take and parlay into huge opportunity profits and a solution for our customers? At the end of the day, that's what it's all about. So that's your food for thought going into the weekend. Stay tuned here for a little preview of what's coming up on the big show on Monday on Service Drive Revolution.
Next week on Service Drive Revolution, how you connect with customers using humor. Welcome Andrew Tarvin to the show, a friend of the show.
That's where humor starts. Is what you find interesting or what you find not even necessarily funny, but what you're just curious about. What makes you go, huh, it's alright.
That I've got six people dangling from the ceiling in the minivan.
Like it's kind of a little bit weird that it's up over his head female top. Like what's. I don't know if there's a word phallic that's also, anytime you have like that funny idea or that crazy thing that you see, it goes in the notebook. So like Christian probably wrote down saw someone doing heroin, right?
Somebody shooting up heroin is funny. You don't get to see that kind of stuff every day. If you have a zoom wedding, how does the honeymoon work?
Out like, yeah, that's a good we just went on to Google Maps.
Thanks for watching this episode of Service Drive Revolutions Drive By. I hope it gives you something to think about over the weekend and inspires some new ideas and hopefully some new results. If you have any questions for the big show, go ahead and post them below in the comments. We'll be looking out for them and we'll answer them on the show. Make sure you subscribe and hit the bell icon so you're notified when you when we post new episodes. I'm Chris Collins and you can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Chris Bulldog Collins and I'll see you again on the next episode.
