Strong Service Advisor Metrics

Foreign.

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Ask the SDR. I'm Chris Collins and this is Papichulo, which is Spanish for handsome spy.

Hola, mi gente.

Let's go to this week's question.

I have experience as a, as a service advisor in mostly aftermarket shops and a little bit in dealerships.

I know that your metrics for a service manager are.

Net to gross and elr, but as a service advisor, I don't have.

What are service advisors metrics to use?

Thanks for the question. Joshua in beautiful, Iowa. You ever been to Iowa?

Many times.

It's beautiful. ELR is one.

Agreed.

CSI customer satisfaction still.

Agreed.

Retention. How many customers come back to.

You got one more.

How much you discount as a percentage of what you write? I dig in. And then total dollars, parts and labor is one. How much customer pay? So one. One that's missed on advisors a lot is how much customer pay do you write compared to warranty?

And that changes what. What is acceptable? Changes based on brand. But it's a really, really important metric. Yeah.

And the. And let me. We should tell you why. So let's say you're working in a Honda dealership and they have a lot of recalls and you're writing a lot of warranty. Those opportunities should turn into alignments. You know, they should come back for other customer. And so if you're just processing warranty and not retaining customers for customer pay and their maintenance, you're not making friends.

That's exactly right. That's good. I would throw hours per hour on there too. Not necessarily that's the only metric. But I do think that when I think about being an advisor, a lot of times they think about how many tickets can I write? And they almost hang their hat and their identity on hey, I write 25 a day or whatever it is. And what I've learned is that the most successful advisors have a lower RO count, but a higher hours per RO and higher retention. And the more hours per ro, the happier the customer typically, the better the retention.

Better your relationships, all that. Yeah.

Because they don't.

You can make friends.

Yeah. People aren't buying from folks that they.

Don'T like very much over communicate all that. So good Question. Let's do another one.

What is up, guys? It's John Coleman from Miami. Just checking in with you fellas. Love your work. I got one question. What do you guys do with all the technician comebacks? Sometimes the technician isn't always available. The customer might be there waiting, peed off. We got to get this thing fixing out. So I got to give it to one of my best guys. How do you handle that?

Wonder where in Miami he is.

Good news is that's close to the water. So if the car is a real big problem, you just drive it into the Ocean, say, Sorry, Mr. Customer. I don't know what happened.

Well, custom technician comebacks.

Are, in a sense, a cost of doing business, in my opinion. So.

You know how we. I guess there's kind of two measurements of.

Customer service and just your basic culture and ethics is, let's say a customer just bought a car and something happened to it, does that go to the front of the line? And if a customer had a comeback, does that go to the front of the line? And I think in those two scenarios, they should always cut the line. If the technician that did it isn't available, you're going to have to eat it and address that. If a technician has a lot of comebacks, you need to fix that issue. But we should always side on getting the customer handled right away. I also often find that the.

Sometimes the technician that created the comeback created the comeback because they probably shouldn't be working on that car and they're in over their head. So that could be a dispatching issue. But I always side with. That's a cost of business. And if your policy or your comebacks is a big expense, you need to fix the quality with the technicians.

Not make the customer suffer.

That's right. So my thing was recognizing patterns. And even if it's a point that you gotta kind of double check your cars, like, I think that there's so many different types of comebacks. So there's there's the. There's the mechanical comeback, and then there's the. What I would call like a lazy or process comeback. Right. So the most common comebacks that I see are little things like maintenance reminders, tire lights, stuff like that, where we could have avoided it in the first place. So. So all that stuff that we should be catching in the first place, and then the last thing, drain plug. Well, yeah, those are all things that we could be catching before we give the car back. But those are serious issues. And I don't think that the customer cares whether the original tech is on it or not. What they want to know is that we're addressing it. So I think that you over communicate to the customer that they're a priority, remembering in the back of your head that your most loyal and your best customers, if you do this job long enough, your best customers will come from comebacks or situations where we let the customer down and you pick up the pieces and you have the opportunity to be the hero. So do not dismiss any opportunity for a comeback with anything other than just absolutely over deliver on what it is. They'll forgive you for the comeback if you make them feel important.

Yeah. Think long term.

Yes, always long term.

Great question. Thank you so much. Remember the numbers 8333 ask SDR. That's 8333 ask STR. We'll see you next week on Service Driver. 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 it's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins and I'll see you in the next video.