Chris Collins and Christian answer a caller (Josh, a 23-year-old Toyota dealership employee in Canada) about transitioning from express service/advisor roles into the main shop. The hosts advise that customer relationships and consistent service approach matter more than job title: slow down, 'pet the dog,' build rapport, and treat express and main shop customers similarly. Christian adds that difficult customers can be transformed into loyal ones by resolving their issues and recommends retaining the regular express customers you already know rather than handing them off. The episode opens with show intro, caller question, hosts' guidance, and ends with CTA and swag/promo mentions.
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To your Friday drive by. This is where Christian and I answer your questions. The questions that are burning in your mind. You're just like, hey, if I had an answer to this, I could solve the world's problems.
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Just the one with your name and my name on it. Give those away. Okay, let's go to this week's question.
Hi, Chris, this is Josh here from Canada. I work for a Toyota dealership and I've been working there for about a year and three months or so. I'm newer to the car industry. This is my first job there. I'm about 23 years old right now and I've moved up through the dealership quite fast. I was a lot attendant for six or so months. I worked in the BDC for a little bit, helped with the shuttle coordinating too. Then I moved up to there to into the bdc. After that I went up to express position and now I'm going to be moving to the main shop soon here. And I started training recently and so I was just looking for some tips from someone who's kind of been progressing really quick and just going from writing service, express service stuff there and going into the main shop now dealing with a lot more of the diags from customers and just how you would approach a lot of the tougher situations with customers that you don't have to deal with express. Your opinion would be much appreciated. Cool.
Josh, thanks for the. For the question. There's a couple things that I would point out there. One is as you kind of move up and you know, someday maybe you're going to be a manager. I. I'm not a fan of the system where you have quick lube advisors and then main shop advisors for a bunch of different reasons.
But.
But one main one is that there's really no difference. You want to connect with customers coming in, whether it's foreign oil change or for something else. And the idea that they're two separate experiences because we can't logistically figure it out in the back is a huge detriment to your ability to build a clientele. And most of the time, what happens is like in your case, we have the newest people or the people that are the greenest with the least experience writing the most ro. So you're gonna go from writing 25 ros a day down to writing 10 or something. And it would have been better for you to write 12 or 13 every day and spend time with every customer whether it was an oil change or not, than just running them in and running them out. And I would say my advice, and Christian's probably got some good stuff to say here, but my advice is that it's all about petting the dog and slowing down and making friends in your relationship with the customers. That matters way more than the vehicle or whether it's an oil change or not. So it doesn't really change to me. I'm walking up to the car. I'm curious about what the customer does, what their, you know, likes and dislikes are, you know, the human element in it, not just the. The oil and rubber.
Yeah, you'll. The more he does this, the more he'll find that that doesn't matter at all. So I've got two things I was gonna say. The first is he had. He had said something in his message about when you take over the main shop appointments, you have more bad eggs. And I always say that the worse the egg at the start, the more golden it is at the end. So the first thing I would do is kind of accept that really the key to your success as an advisor is how you can flip those bad eggs into the golden eggs. And the truth, the only way to do that is to fix whatever the problem is that are coming in. And then another thing I might do, it's kind of unique, but if I was transitioning into the main shop from the express side of the business, this is going to be completely crazy and a little bit off the wall. But what I would do is I would make sure that you get an okay from this first. I would absolutely still write up all of my regular customers that came and saw me for the last six months or eight months or whatever. On the express side, I would still write them up no matter what. Like, grab your customers that you collected and keep writing them up every time. Never turn them over to someone else. So I would try to work that into because like Chris said, at the end of the day, the split floor is not the most ideal thing. But since you've done it already, you've probably touched more customers than almost anyone else in the dealership. So don't give those back to somebody else. It's a terrible idea. But at the end of the day, you might find that it's easier to manage 10 customers than 20.
Great stuff. Great advice. Well, thanks, Josh. And we'll see everybody next time on Service Driver 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.
