Stop Blaming Communication: The System Is What’s Broken

Welcome, everybody, to the big show. Today we're going to talk about effective communication and a lot of other stuff. It's going to be really, really fun. We'll have a good time together. Adam is here. Hoagie's here. I'm here. And that and much, much more. Coming up on this edition of Service Drive Revolution. I'm going to AP in advance if these two seemed goofy and delusional today, but you guys have been from one side of the country to the other in four days.

Yeah, it is. It has been a week. It's funny that I've done weeks like this before, but very, very rarely. And it happened again, though. Like when you book airline tickets to go too many places at once, it'll, like, send you a warning message like, hey, did you do this on purpose? Type of thing. And when I booked my flights this week, I, I, it was like, are you okay?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So from car Carolina to here.

Yeah. Oklahoma City to Carolina to here. And then back. I'll be back to OKC and then like, pingpong.

Yeah, we had, we had a great. So we're doing this after a new client boot camp. That's like two. It's a day and a half and, and super fun. Good group. Nice group from all over. And yeah, it's funny. Like, I start off in the little intro kind of making a joke because people come here. We're in Los Angeles. People come here and they kind of are wondering why it's in Los Angeles. I think, like, you just get that vibe. They're like, why are we in Los Angeles? And so I always make the joke that I like high taxes and nothing working crime and all that. And yesterday after I made that joke, like two hours later, two cops show up.

Making friends.

Yeah.

And they, they wanted our camera footage from an incident that had happened a month ago. And it's so funny. So I was, I was bitching at the cops about the fact that they never come when I call. And who knows? Do you think they were really cops? Because Adam said they were taking pictures of stuff, which made me really nervous.

Yeah, they were taking pictures of the display cases and everything.

One time at one point, the guy goes, what's the most expensive book in here?

Yeah. So odd.

That's not a question a cop asks.

No.

Is it?

I don't think so.

So I don't think we asked them for their badge.

We should have.

They had a card, but I mean, you could make that card anyway.

Yeah. Yeah.

We were talking to Jasmine, though, earlier. They just Kind of, like, said, hi, we're here to do this, and they just busted right in. Yeah.

Yeah. Did you see Jazz out there arguing with the meter cop guy?

No.

So they gave me a parking ticket. One of the things that we do to new employees is we make them watch my car to not get parking tickets. And so Jazz is the newest one, and she does a good job. Like, I'm don't get that. I mean, for a guy that used to park on the sidewalk, I'm doing pretty good with parking tickets. I mean, I get them, but not. Not that much. But he was riding a parking ticket, and this has happened before. The. There's an app that you can pay for on the. On the app, right? Or you stick the card in the parking thing. So the thing was flashing red even though she'd paid on the app. And so she's showing him on the app that she had paid, and he goes, oh, yeah, those don't sync up.

You.

You can take a screenshot of that and contest the ticket like that. He has no connection whatsoever with the monetary system that they're charging us like that. That's somebody else's problem. The. The parking app. It's nuts.

The disconnect. Thank you, California.

Please raise our taxes. Yeah, we want to pay more for less.

Let's. So he was just looking at the flashing red light. That's it. So if there was no flashing red light on there that. Well.

And I've asked her before. I'm like, hey, you know, when I left yesterday, the light was flashing. She goes, no, I. It's on the app. And I'm like, are you sure that works? Ends up. It doesn't work. That's the first time I've got a ticket. What. What else is funny is, like, there was a bystander that jumped in and started arguing with the cop on her behalf.

Oh, wow.

And I wanted. I kind of wanted to just go out there and be like, jazz, it's okay. Like, we'll pay the ticket. Like, we don't. And the guy's a supervisor, too. Oh, gee, it's so funny. Nothing works. Nothing works anymore. I had a great birthday. Everybody got me some pretty cool gifts. But this crazy bottle of tequila, that was pretty good. But, you know, I. Adam's smirking, right? Everybody pitched in but him.

I did not know.

I did not know you weren't even here.

That's the. That's the excuse I'm going to roll with.

So Hoagie had. Your birthday was Sunday?

Yeah, Sunday.

Sunday.

Sunday. The 11th.

And mine was Tuesday.

Yep.

Mine is a few months.

That's good. Yeah. When, when you're this close to Christmas, you don't really.

Yeah.

Just all blends together.

No. I've been sending everybody this video on YouTube about people that don't care about their birthday, which I fall into. And one of the very first things it says in there is like, you know, that it's just you. That the thing for me when I was a kid was I would get a real gift for Christmas and then I would get a practical thing for my birthday because my parents were out of, like we were poor. Right. So I'd get like a pair of pants or something. And so, you know, your expectations were kind of lowered for your birthday and then you just kind of carry that into adulthood. I don't really care.

Yeah.

But it was a cool bottle of tequila. We shared it with the boot camp.

Yeah.

Last night at dinner.

Yeah, it was good.

They did some damage. Fun.

Yeah.

So we asked them for subjects that they would like to see on SDR and they came up with some, some good ones. And the one we're going to talk about today is communication, which is a funny one because often what happens invariably is we will, we will have somebody call and say, I need advisor training. And then it will be followed with we need to teach them communication with customers sort of thing. And it's, you know, treating the symptom, not the cause. The problem is not communication. Most of the time that's the, that's the outcome is that we're not communicating, but kind of like time management or a lot of these like kind of self help topics. What people actually teach or how people address this is to address the, the symptom, not actually fix the cause. And so we're going to talk a little bit about what the cause is and really go into how you can, you know, how you can have an environment where communication is effective and consistent. But the truth of the matter is, is once you understand this, communication won't be the subject anymore.

Yeah, yeah. It's just a byproduct, like you said, like. Yeah, it is, it is interesting. If, if they're talking about communication, they're almost always talking about csi. And if you ask people like, what's the, what's your main problem with csi? People a lot of times will say communication and you can kind of, you can kind of walk through it and set a, set it up a little bit. Like they, you know, I don't, I don't know. Like if an advisor is not calling, not calling people back. There's tools you can use to help set them up for success that are just a standard of your process, of your system for them to call them back. Sometimes I'll still get, and we've talked about this in the past, but sometimes we'll still get people that look at us like we have two heads when we suggest using just a good old fashioned logbook to write down the time that you're promising to call a customer. Right. Like just having that as a basic part of your system. It's amazing. One little thing like that. We talk about wanting advisors to be more proactive and not as reactive and things like that. Um, but then we're not, we're not implementing anything as part of our systems that, that set them up for success in that area.

Yeah, like most of the time when, when somebody says they, they want help with communication and they want to teach their people communication, when you, when you dig in, you, you have advisors writing 25 to 30 tickets a day, everything is very chaotic. They're the, you know, the percentage of waiters that they're writing, how many they're writing, the intervals between appointments with the customers, how the appointments are made. None of it is to set the advisors up for success. It is all kind of just an afterthought. It's all left to chance. And then the outcome is that we perceive that we have poor communication, but we're not intentionally setting them up for, for success in a way. Right. So like if you have advisors writing customers every 10 minutes, like if you're making appointments every 10 minutes, it's virtually impossible for a customer to pet the dog or for an advisor to pet the dog. Make friends with the customer, really address their, you know, their concerns and make the customer feel comfortable and welcome and then call and follow up on the other customers in between. So the first thing would be in the system is to have at least a 20 minute interval in between. The, the other part of that is if like you can, if you can do four appointments in an hour, if three of those are waiters, you're diminishing the advisor's chances of communication. Also because waiters take more time. They're there, you know, and also you don't have time to follow up on the waiters and go talk to the customer. Like think about how much quicker it is if you call a customer to, to recommend something in versus going and getting the customer from the waiting room, pulling them out somewhere private, then going through it with them in person. It Takes twice as long. And so how many waiters they're riding an hour needs to be controlled and intentional and thought out and then giving them breaks in between. Like you got to think like every couple hours you gotta black out an appointment so they have time to call. The other part of that too is that improves the communication with the technicians because they have time to go check with the techs. The technicians actually can go up and we can call the customer right now instead of pulling the vehicle out and then parking it, that sort of thing. So all of your efficiencies improve too. But intentionally setting up a system for how their day is structured is, is the first part. So that system starts with how we make, how we make appointments and how we schedule their day.

Right.

If, if we talk about advisors in a quick lube good luck communication, it's just one after another after another after another. And if you have, you know, the, the highest volume going through your least talented, lowest amount of advisors and techs in the quick lube, it's. It's a first come, first serve cattle call. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

So what's interesting as you were talking through that I look at at least in. In truck. Right. Not a lot of the clients or customers are sitting there as waiters. So it's very interesting. And controlling and having these systems and I call it, or we call it controlling the narrative. So really intentionally having a system in place that you can control the narrative by contacting or calling up the clients, whether it's a logbook or whatever, it's not going to always be fixed with software. Right. As we call it. But having those systems and practicing those in place that are the key to the communication, rather calling the customer, advising them of the next steps and kind of what's going to be the next step to intentionally know, know where, like where they sit.

Yeah.

You know, whether it's. If it's a pre approval type situation or whatever it is. So it's not all of a sudden, hey, we're going to drop this huge bill or just we're looking for an invoice number and just. Well, I'm stuck with this $15,000 bill that I didn't really approve or have a pre approval for. But having intentionally then those systems in place because we don't have a lot of waiters in truck. There are some, but the everything.

One of the things that blew Hogan I away the most in truck dealerships was how the drivers would come in and wait. Yeah, some of those waiting rooms were disgusting too. By the way.

Yes, that is true. And they have hours that may or may not work.

Yeah. Which if you can imagine on the car side having showers in the waiting room. How fun that would be. Would it be fun like maybe in a Volkswagen dealership?

So what Chris was what fascinated Chris and I when there was waiters in a truck dealership was that there is so much demand. Like we talk about needing technicians and how there's eight techs leaving the field for what people a lot of times don't know is there's with drivers in truck. That was the same thing. Like I think right now it's. There's seven loads sitting for every one truck on the road or something like that.

Probably somewhere around there. Yeah.

And I think what you were going to say because it did fascinate us both was if a driver is stuck down waiting for their truck to be fixed, they went and got another job. Yeah.

They would go and look for the driver in the waiting room and they'd be gone. They took another job.

Nuts.

Yeah. So there was, I mean, can you.

Imagine if a customer in a car, in a car dealership just like I.

Went and signed another car.

Yeah. I bought another car because I didn't want to wait.

Well, they just slip seated, they just go somewhere else. They weren't going to deal with it.

And they, the, the stories that the advisers have on the truck side are way better than the, the stuff that they find in trucks.

Yeah.

Oh, that's a, that's another future.

Hard, hard to believe for how many good stories I have from oh man. Car dealerships.

The amount of what's in vehicles like.

Trucks, it is nuts.

But yeah, again, controlling that narrative, having those plans and systems in place to communicate with customers so that there's no surprises, I think that's the biggest thing is to avoid the surprises.

So in truck, the thing that we, we taught and the systems we. We put in place are, are kind of the next point we have on the list is having some sort of logging system and then intentionally kind of planning the expectation for the customer of when they can expect some sort of an answer. Right. So in, in truck, it was to diagnose whatever the issue was with the truck within. Within an hour, triage it, but let the driver know what to expect. Because our, you know, our customer at the end of the day in truck is the fleets and we want them to keep their drivers. Right. And so if the driver knows within an hour, they'll wait an hour, but they won't wait four hours. So if they know within an hour what's going on, and then they can make other plans. It's a manageable thing in, on the car side. And when I was an advisor, I would, I would tell the customer, like, you know, hey, this is when I'm going to call you by. Are you going to have your phone all day? Where are you going to be? Like, I would qualify all that, but I would create a plan with the customer and set an expectation, even to the point. And it was painful, but even to the point where if I knew the car wasn't going to see the shop, I would tell them then, hey, we had a lot of cars left over from yesterday. We didn't get to. And then they would go, I made an appointment two weeks ago. And I would be like, I understand. I'm, I'm just really trying to help you plan your day and be, be upfront. There's a chance it'll get in, but if it doesn't, you know, what, what alternatives do we have? And that then it was way better to tell them that in the morning than to call them at 3 o' clock after they've waited all day and they're, they're an hour from getting off work. And then you tell them their car never made it in and it sat.

There all day and everything afterwards, like on, on car. Right. Trying to figure out, with all the kids, dinner, doing all the things, and you thought you were going to be able to get your vehicle. It's the same thing on the, on the truck side. All right. They're trying to schedule loads and they're. Do I have to put this driver in a hotel or put them in another vehicle? Just knowing, like, it's not the best of news, but just knowing is more than half the battle.

Yeah.

So they can plan. It's all about turning those, like, on kind of planned scenarios into more of a planned, predictable outcome that you can assist with them. It's way farther.

You know, one of the things we talk about in bootcamp with new clients, too, is when we start to go through this information. It's very important to, to us as a company that when we're, when we're working with somebody, we're not training just to train. Like, we expect outcomes in partnering with our dealers, we expect the outcome to change. And when you're doing that and you're going through a lot of information, a lot of that is concepts like what we're talking about right now. And I've sat through a lot of training over the years all of us have. And it's really easy to, to take information like this or to listen to somebody speaking about information like this. And it sounds like we're kind of preaching in a, an idealized version of things. Right.

So how I'll give you, I'll give you an example of that is like when we talk about teaching advisors how to overcome objections.

Yeah.

When I was an advisor, if I got an objection, I had lost the battle. The customer never liked or trust me early on. There was no, there was no overcoming an objection that I was going to do that was going to get the customer to then do the. They need breaks and they're saying they don't want to do breaks. Right. So they either don't have the money or they don't like me. One of the two. But at the point where they say, no, I've already lost, like, I, I remember watching, you know, the big advisor trainer that's famous in our industry and in his training, he was like, ask five times. And I was like, I knew right away this guy's never written service that you're going to meet somebody at the cashier and ask them again to do an alignment. Like five times. You're going to ask somebody. You've never written service a day in your life. If you think that you're going to ask, you offer an alignment up front and they say no.

Yeah.

No.

Maybe you could, maybe you could softly, when you call them with the inspection, you could softly mention and hey, just remind you you're due for an alignment and leave it at that.

Yeah.

But beyond that, like, you're, they're never coming back. If you're playing the long game, they're never coming back. So to your point is, we're, we're, we're trying to help you figure out getting the outcome you want. Not the, the, the idealized version of, oh, well, any sales, you ask five times and you're no. They're never coming back.

No.

And in service, it's a different kind of sale. You're not selling a car or a suit where you can ask five times. They need breaks and they're saying no.

Yeah.

It isn't like you don't need a new suit. You don't need a new cowboy hat.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Well, no, that one's pretty good.

Okay.

If you're listening to this and not watching, Hoagie's got the most beautiful cowboy hat on. It took him an hour to find before the show.

Well, Chris, you just made me kind of think about when you're just saying there is that it's. It's very intimidating. I feel like really for any part, whether it's truck or car, going into a service department as a. As a customer, you're like thinking, all right, I've got to go to this dealer. There's a certain brand. How can they shake my hand and steal my wallet, you know, with the other hand.

Right.

Kind of thing. And it's like, well, no, like how do we pat the dog? How do we get in there to where we build that trust? Right. Like with the full intention of. There's certain things that we should take care of right now and there's certain things we can schedule later on. And like especially within the truck side of things, with all of the fault codes and telematics, we really can have these unplanned repair events into a planned repair event. And I think that's an ultimate. When we talk maybe not like software, but just leveraging technology to further communicate with our clients a little bit better and having those systems in place, it's the same thing on the auto side that if we intentionally only have a system in there, we can educate them at the same time of what we can do now and what we might be able to plan a little bit later on. But having that effectively communicating truly shares that outcome. Because I know that going through that firsthand when I'm able to help educate. Not the. What is our. The whether it's a certain viscosity or talking too high level. Right. Brake fluid hydroscopic. If we're just kind of leveling and that's.

Oh, their eyes roll in the back of the. Dude, come on.

That like, that is like the epitome of training. I feel like it's. It's nice.

Yeah.

The bracelet technician to know that. But we don't need to geek out on those kind of things. And just like the best is like.

The advisor when we used to pop the hoods and they'd be like, they'd.

Taste it like, oh, that's a Washington state thing.

That's not.

That's not making fun of my Seahawk.

Yeah, that's. That's not a. But it like there's a. There's a row of dealerships I drive past on a. On a somewhat regular basis. And if you go.

Go buy in Oklahoma.

Yes. And OKC. And if you go buy them at 7 o' clock in the morning, like the cars are out the door and. And or out to the street, you know, just lined up and I just feel the tension. Yeah. Like, and I know people describing it.

I feel the tension.

Yeah. Like the local thing is, is if you're going to that store, you, you go in super early and you might have a chance of your car getting done today. And they, it's just the tactic they, they use. And I know if I go talk to that service manager and I say, hey, like, we can set up a schedule and like we can get rid of this, this chaos. And, and I already.

Service manager would never have time to see you.

Yeah, well, yeah, and they'll, you'd be.

Waiting in line like everybody.

You don't understand, you know, all this.

Different here in Oklahoma situation. You're like, well yeah, it is different here in Oklahoma for sure, but not that different.

Yeah, yeah, we don't taste brake fluid. Like, we just, you know, but there's, there's, as we're saying this stuff, if you're a truck store and you're talking, you know, you're hearing us talk about a triage service lane and, and things like that, you can list a bunch of reasons why it's not going to work. If you're, if you're thinking about a car dealership and, and, and I'm talking about you and the cars are out to the street at 7 o' clock in the morning and you just throw open the doors and see what happens and chaos ensues. Like, I know it may sound like we're preaching the idealized version of things when we say, hey, you can set an appointment. But like that store, I've been to that store many times and talking to them about setting up our process for some of this scheduling, we call it service drive judo. And when we're setting up that process, like, you know, they'll be like, you don't understand, like we're going to have a bunch of waiters because our customers don't go by appointments. And so I can't set it up. Appointment by advisor and I can't do it on 20 minute intervals or you know, this, that and other. So there's a lot of great things Chris talked about and I know there's some of you listening that are being like, oh, that sounds great, but you know, I wouldn't be able to do that at my store. And it's always funny to me, like I'll be in that store with the line out to the road and they'll say, hey, our, our customers won't set appointments. And I'll be like, okay, can we go in and listen to the BDC for a little bit.

No, you just call. Yeah, like, that's what I like to do. Is I just right there when they say that, I call and nobody answers, and you're like, yeah, they don't make appointments because we don't make it easy to make an appointment.

Or if they do, you get an appointment time. And I've literally had this happen multiple times where they're like, okay, we got you scheduled for 10:40am and the customer's like, okay, is it okay if I drop it off at 7? Yeah, no problem. I'm like, no, that's why.

That's the appointment. Seven is the appointment.

So, you know, just. Just when you're thinking of some of this, have some way of go listen to some phone calls, go out front of your store at 7 o' clock in the morning. Like, just get a little bit different perspective, because I promise it's possible. But if you. If you're convinced that your situation's different, you'll. You'll be right. But if you're having communication issues, like, it's a symptom, it's not the problem.

Yeah. Okay, so back to kind of our. Our. Our steps here that we came up with for this is what we want to do, is we want to put the customers on a track. They're a train on a track. And we set the expectations, but we're also doing that to ourselves. So when we log in and we write, write it down. And like, I would on my log sheet, I would put, like, they're in a meeting from two to three, so I got to call them before two, you know, but we're putting them on a track. We're clearly setting what the expectations are and, and asking them for feedback because, you know, our. Our expectations are only as good as their ability to function inside of them, Right? Yep. And then the next one, the next one that we have on the list, that is always, always kind of funny to me. And I always think about Dave Anderson and his leadership training, and when he used to say this thing about people would say, my people suck, and he'd be like, then you suck your.

You.

Right? Like, don't get Adam started on pronouns, but you, right? Like you, my. I suck. My people suck.

Yeah.

Like, it's the same thing when we'll. We'll get somebody. And I'm not being mean when I say this.

It's just.

You got to, you know, our job is to coach you and try to help you be better. Is when you say, how do I Get my advisors to do walk arounds. It's like, when did that become negotiable? And there's this thing that happens when, when we've done our job of setting up a system where people can, can function inside of, and they have enough time to call customers. They, they have all the ability to do everything we need them to do. But then we allow people to freelance and do whatever they want. And it's like, well, how do I get my advisors to call customers? It's like, whoa, when did that become negotiable? You will, you're allowing that to happen. It isn't happening in a vacuum. Like you are allowing that to happen. And I find there's this like, kind of like funny connection between identity and goals. Right. If you think about it, your goals are your identity and your identity are your goals. Like whatever you're striving for, whatever you're trying to achieve is who you are. And so if you want to be the best, you want to create an incredible customer experience, you, you know, you want to do something that matters, you want to mentor people and create future leaders in our, then we're going to have a higher standard, we're going to have a higher bar of what is acceptable and what we allow to happen. Now, yeah, it's more work. You can't just sit in your office and ignore everything. You have to get, you know, involved. You have to be proactive, you have to be out there, you have to be listening and paying attention. But in the, in the clients that we have that perform at a high level, they expect themselves to perform at a high level and that becomes their goal. And they don't tolerate underperformance in any way. If you don't care about customers, if you don't call customers, if you don't, you know, have a passion for taking care of customers, then you can't be here. And it, it doesn't mean that you're a bad person. It just means you don't, you don't fit. You know, it's like, oh, you know, I got this one advisor and he just doesn't like people. Like, yeah, he should be working in somewhere else warranty or something like put him in the warranty department. I don't know, internal advisor, something. But not you. You just said he doesn't like customers and his job is customers. It's like you're, you're training to win an Olympic gold in swimming, but you can't swim. It just doesn't make any sense. Right?

Yeah.

And so we're allowed, like, a lot of the, the symptoms that, that come up like this. Like, oh, how do, how do. How do we get our people to communicate really, is you're confessing that you're not holding people to a standard and your identity is just to get through the day, not to be something great. You're not striving for anything bigger than what you have now. You're. You're not thinking about getting better every year or every day. You wake up trying to do a little bit better than you did the day before. You're just maintaining something. You're trying to stay out of trouble and you're trying to maintain. And I, I'll tell you that the advice, the managers that get in the most trouble are the ones that are just trying to survive and maintain. And you can, you can see it from a mile away, too, because they're closed off. They're not. They're not asking questions, they're not looking for ideas. They're just, they're just telling you that they're different. They're things different, and they just want to get back to being left alone as quick as they can. Right. And so that, I mean, just, I would love everybody to just kind of think about that in every aspect of your life is like, your identity is your goal and your goal is your identity. Like, whatever you're striving to do is who you are. That's who you are. At the end of the day, you're either somebody who performs. You're somebody who, when you're given a responsibility and you accept that responsibility, you're going to be a steward of that. You're going to do the best job with that that you can. And it ends up like, you know, with, with a lot of our team and our coaches. Like, you know, we have coaches that have done some incredible things way before they came to work for us. And they have a track record of being given responsibility and making more of that responsibility than would. Would be on, you know, done on average. Right. And so then they move up and they become teachers and mentors, and now they're, they're helping tons of people get better. But it was because that was their identity. They, they saw the opportunity and they, they had a general view of the future, that, that there were things that were possible. There's possibility, there's excitement in the future of, hey, how good could we make this? How good could we be if we really tried versus just, you know, maintaining the thing?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

100 agree.

Yeah, there's A. There's an old quote I was thinking about, and I haven't. I haven't talked about it in a long time, but. But I loved it, and you kind of reminded me of it when you said that. But it. The quote says that you'll never meet a happy, irresponsible person. And. And it's true. Just like as a human being, you're. When you're given responsibility of something and you do a good job with that thing, like, it's super fulfilling. And so you're just caught in kind of, you know, this weird spot if that's. If that's not the case. And a lot of people are just hiding instead of, like, stepping into, you know, the responsibility or the challenge or whatever. And. And it's a tough place to be, right?

Yeah. I mean, it's just so easier. It's so much easier just to go crawl back in your office and just hide rather than kind of facing the. The possibility. It's hard, right? We talk a lot about it. Well, it's just. It's harder than what you expect. But taking those additional steps, looking at yourself in the mirror. What are the goals? Write them down. Like, we talked about logs. Just write down those goals and then strategize with the team and take it. Try it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And.

And decide to be the person that is the solution. Decide to be the person that makes things better. Be that person. Like, I don't know. I made a decision to think that way, and nobody taught me that. It was just like, you know, instead of looking for opportunities in other places and the, you know, the grass is always greener, whatever. Like, I just tried to do the best I could with what was in front of me. And then my opportunities got bigger.

Yeah. Because then, like you said, you're asking questions like. And you'll figure out things like. Like the little thing I know about the bdc, if the line's out the door, we can say that all their customers want to show up at 7, and their customers want to be waiters and they don't want to set appointments and whatever. But if you just go ask one question, Just. Just that one question. Hey, can we go in the BDC and listen? Like, you won't have to be in there for five minutes. And, you know, you figure, yeah, it.

Ends up where the BDC is. Like, there's one person in there and the phone's ringing off the hook. And then when that person gets anybody on, they're like, when do you want to bring it in? They're not loading the shop. There's no intention to it.

And they have eight messages for one of your advisors. And like, I can go on and on and on.

And then like, secret.

Yeah. And one trip to the bdc. I know who's not calling their customers back. I know what's wrong with the schedule.

I'm the guy that sets the appointment and comes at 7am I'm that guy. I'm sorry.

I'm the guy that has somebody else dropping off.

I'm a tech.

I don't go to the service hoagie. Just fix. Even if it's warranty, he just fixes it himself. That's funny. Okay, so you know how to have effective communication in. In your department starts with having a system. And, you know, systems constantly improve. They get better. And then having. Putting customers on a track. So having a plan and communicating that plan. And then the. The last part is what you allow. It's your identity. If you allow people not to communicate, if you allow things to be left to chance, then that's what it will be at the end of the day. And you know, this, this is if. If you take this to heart, this is, you know, incredible content. If you're really looking to get better, think about the system first, not the symptoms. You will get lost in the symptoms. Like, I don't know, Are you at the point where when people tell you what the problem is, you don't even hear what they say because you. I already know. I know by looking at the financial statement that nobody's answering the phone. Yeah, but I will. I will call in front of them to prove the point. And then even then, a lot of times people will be like, oh, well, that's. That's rare. It's because it's Monday. We're like, well, yeah, well, Mondays ends up being the day where most people call.

Yeah.

From the weekend.

Right.

Like, why wouldn't we be staffed up on Monday?

Yeah.

Like, yeah, we control this. Like, it's up to us to build a system that. That serves the customers, not the other way around. Great stuff. Well, thanks, everybody. We'll see you next time on Service Drive Revolution. Thanks so much for watching this episode of Service Job Revolution. We're uploading new stuff every, 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.chris collinsinc.com now that's offers. Chris Collins, Inc. I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.