Service Advisor Training: Five Keys To Being A Best Of Breed Service Advisor

Hi, Chris Collins here and in this video I want to talk to you about how to be the best of breed service advisor that you can be. Now I was a service advisor and I know in a lot of service advisor training out there, you can kind of get the feel that the person teaching it was really never a service advisor. And I can tell you the heart of everything that I do is that I was a service advisor for a very long time and was very successful at it. So the keys I'm going to give you, you're going to relate with and you're going to get right away. But I might tell them to you in a little different of an angle to really make an impact and change the way that you think. So what is the role of a service advisor in a dealership? Some people are going to say it's to sell. Well if you're a really good service advisor, selling is the easiest part of what you do. Your role in the dealership is to collect customers. You are a customer collector. If you think about it, in 19, 1950s and 60s, there were a lot of shops where the customer pulled right into the shop and dealt with the technician while the technicians ratcheting on a car and going what? What? It doesn't start when it's cold, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah blah. That wasn't a recipe for good customer service and good communication. A service advisors role is to make the customer feel comfortable and to trust us as a dealership. And if we do that right, then it feeds the circle of life in our industry, which is the sales department sells a car and hands us the customer and then we take care of that customer for the trade cycle, maybe two years, three years depending on the car line that you're working for. And then we hand that customer back to the sales department and they sell them another car and then we get them back again. Which is the greatest retention tool that there is in any industry out there. But you have to understand it and really, really perform and understand that your job is to collect customers, not just to sell them work. Selling is the easiest part of what you do if you do the collecting part right. So how do you collect customers? The key is you gotta connect on a different level. Listen, the car is a commodity. Any dealership can sell them the car. What's different is how you connect with them and what you talk about. So when a customer pulls into the average service drive, when the advisor meets the customer, whether they go out to the car, which is the best way to do it, is meet the customer at their car. But let's say the customer comes in to the service advisor. Most of the time, what I hear service advisors say is, what brings you in today? Did you have an appointment? And then they talk about the car. The car is the least important part of this whole transaction. What is important is the connection that you make with the customer. What you want to talk about is where are they headed today, their kids, how fast they've driven their car, if it's a sports car, if they help coach the soccer team, if there's soccer balls in the car. You want to talk to the customer about personal things. And then the car is the easy part and secondary. And you don't have to spend a lot of time doing this. You can do this in two or three minutes. But if you start the relationship with talking about the personal things, the trust and the sales are going to be very, very easy to do. And when I was a service advisor, I remember at dealership that I worked at, they actually allowed me to sell cars in the sales department and paid me a commission to sell cars because I had so many customers that trusted me that wouldn't buy another car unless I endorsed it. They would say, I need to buy my daughter a car. What should I get? And I would tell them, like, hey, this new model, we haven't seen any issues with it. That's the car that I would get. And I can walk them to sales desk the deal and sell them a car, because they trusted me that much, and I could sell that many cars in a month. And that's really how you should think as a service advisor, is you need to have that connection with your customers. I'm sorry, there's a little barking going on because I have some puppies in here in my studio in downtown, and they want to be in the video. They're jealous. And I think she was saying that she wants to write service when she grows up.

So that's the key, is you want to talk about things that are personal. You can just simply ask a customer, hey, what are you doing this weekend? What are your plans for the holiday? What did you do over the weekend? If it's Monday or Tuesday, it's very easy to do. But that's what you want to talk to the customer about, and that's what you want to connect about. Remember, the car is a commodity. Now, I want to do some math with you. Now. If you connected on a deeper level with three customers a day, just three customers a day. Now, granted, you're going to get return customers every day. But if you found three new customers every day to connect with, let's do the math really quick. There's 52 weeks in a year. And if you went on vacation for two weeks, you would have 50 weeks in the year. There's five working days, right? And we have three customers. If you want to get out your calculator, you can. But 50 weeks times three customers a day, times five working days is 750 customers. So if you did that over five years, if you connected with three customers and took two weeks vacation over five years and weren't sick, maybe we should include sick days in here. But we didn't. You can adjust the math. If you're sick a lot, that would be 3750 customers over five years that you would connect with. So if you stay in one dealership and build your customer database and over five years you collect 3750 customers, times an average transaction in our country of about $208 parts and labor, you would have in five years without taking another appointment just with those customers coming in. In one year you would have $780,000 in parts and labor sales from January 1st to December 31st that year. So just three customers a day, connecting with them on a deeper level. And that is the key to, to being a successful service advisor. You know, in my book, the Millionaire Service Advisor, I started off with a story about my rich uncle. And I talk about my rich uncle that bought me a car and he bought me a house and he paid for clothes and he paid for vacations. And you know who that rich uncle really is? It was my customer database. It was like a retirement savings plan. Because I had such a big customer base when I was a service advisor that I didn't have to answer an incoming call. And I had customers waiting for me at my desk. And I know a lot of you advisors watching this right now probably have that. If you've been writing service for a long time, but really think about, could you build that? Could you collect more customers and connect on a deeper level? And I mean, I've heard in, we had our top dog service advisor event event not that long ago where the best advisors from all over the country are invited to a workshop. And we had an advisor, there was a speaker that had made over $420,000 in one year riding service. And he was a customer collector. And he did, he had a really, really good system for riding. But you can be very successful, make a lot of income as a service advisor. If you collect customers. Now, I want to give you a couple keys to the second part of being a successful service advisor is your role in your customer's life is to keep them in a safe, safe and dependable vehicle. That's your role, is to keep them in a safe and dependable vehicle. And to do that, you have to understand preventative maintenance. You know that the Car Care Council says that over $2 billion a year is lost in preventable repairs on cars and accidents they could have been prevented. Over $2 billion, and that's about $800 per consumer in repairs that they have to do to their have been prevented by preventative maintenance. So the second key is you want to keep your customers in a safe and dependable vehicle, and that's having the car inspected when it's in your shop and preventing the customer from leaving there with hoses that should be replaced, belts that should be replaced, fluids that should be replaced. You got to believe in preventative maintenance because it saves your customers in the long run. If they do it up front, it saves them time, heartache. Nobody wants to be driving somewhere for the weekend or going to work and running late and have their car break down. So over $2 billion could have been prevented if a service advisor and a technician would have taken the time to inspect the car and then recommend the work to the customer. And then if the customer would have trusted us enough to say yes to the work, it all could have been prevented. So that's the key to being a top breed service advisor, being the best of the best. Westminster Dog show best of breed winner is those things that I talked about. So I hope those tools work for you. And I'm Chris Collins and I'm here for you if you have any questions. My email is chrischriscollinsinc.com thank you.