The Best Way To Dispatch Work

Foreign.

Welcome everybody to your Friday drive by. This is where we answer the pressing questions that you have on your mind in an effort to help you perform at a higher level or give you some new insights, some ideas. If you have a question, the number is 8333-ask-SDR. And if we play your question on the big show here, we send you a swag bag. I'm Chris Collins and this is Chris Chahol.

Hello everyone.

Let's go to the first question.

My question is concerning dispatching and what you think is who is best and how is best with respect to that. I've seen it done by a shop foreman. I've seen it done by kind of a lead tech that isn't the foreman. I've seen it done by the service manager, service drive manager. And currently we have service advisors that are writing service dispatching. What is the. It seems like they all have their downsides and upsides. What do you think? Who do you think is the person that could be most likely to be fair and neutral and disperse the work evenly and in a cost effective way? And have you ever.

I don't know if anybody uses like a completely just neutral party that just dispatches for service and you know, maybe does some cashiering or something like that.

We're going to call you veto because that's anonymous.

Wow. I like that. Multilingual.

The question is about dispatch. I like how she said every one, every option has its downside.

Yeah.

So I know Christian is a big fan of having a dispatcher. What maybe paying the dispatcher like I don't know, what, 110 a year?

Oh yeah. Probably closer to 150. It's a lot for inflation.

Yeah.

And so. And it's, it's better if the dispatcher has like 25 years. Like if he's a failed service manager that then you put into dispatch.

Yeah.

Usually better.

Yeah. Where service managers go to die.

The more bitter, I think, the better the dispatcher.

Yeah. I actually just recommended the guy that used to throw your ros in the street and drank on the job. I just recommended him to a client the other day. He was a winner.

It never made sense why he was always making coffee. But he had a coffee thermos until we figured out that the thermos was full of whiskey.

Maybe I'm naive to that. Like that. I think that people do that more than I think. Think.

Yeah. You know what I mean?

For sure. Yeah.

But my grandma, God bless her Irish soul, would, when I, even when I was a kid, she would pour Whiskey in her coffee and then do the sh. Like don't tell grandpa. Yeah, but I'm sure grandpa was putting gin in his coffee, right?

They were doing the same thing. Yeah. My grandfather always called it a nip.

Can you imagine if you had a little nip in your coffee? The rest of the day would be downhill. Like sleeping in my office.

11 o', clock, nap time.

So, Beto, the thing about dispatch is it is a function inside of a bigger system. And I don't want to discount how important the bigger system is. So how we bring in the cars, how we're set up, advisors to technician ratio, how the shop is set up, and the, the way. Are we running lateral support or would you just have an open shop? Are we running a quick lube? Not running a quick lube. All of those things play into the variability in the answer to this question. So I would say that the way that we run things is traditionally, for the most part, we would run a lateral support group that would have quick lube techs on it. It would be its own little business inside of a business.

And there would be two advisors to this group. And so in our experience.

There'S three ways to do this. The first way is you could have a team leader dispatch. The second way is you can have the service advisors dispatch. And the third way is you can have your DMS dispatch. I'm not really married to any of those. Most of the time having the advisors dispatch, probably my favorite, I would say the computer's probably second team leader is third. But I've seen all them work very, very well. The thing that happens is most of the time in a shop, let's say we have five lateral support groups of two advisors. So 10 advisors total. Half of the groups might be doing the advisors and a couple of them might be doing a team leader dispatching. Because team leaders sometimes struggle with the idea of handing out the work and they will either to a detriment, punish themselves with good work and not balance it out, or they will do the opposite and they'll take all the good work. So sometimes that's not the best. Depending on the personality and who the person is. The probably the most fair is the computer or the DMS and then locking down how many open tickets they can.

Have, how many jobs tech can pull at a time. Yeah, there's no emotion from the DMS.

Yeah. So my, my thing is one of those three Christian would pay a dispatcher. You said 150.

Yeah, buck 50.

And the more bitter, the more demotions they've had like a past service and manager.

The drunker.

The drunker the better.

Yeah.

So you can see we, we have a very different outlook on this. Did you want to add anything?

Yeah, I was gonna say that I've so I've personally tried and coached all three and the one thing I would say that I really like about the advisor dispatching is that it seems like that's where the customer gets the best help because the advisors are very aware of not only the promise times but the conversations that happen. And then you know, the theory would be that advisors work together but there's some where the advisors just don't work together. Like you said, I've seen it go really well and I've seen it go really poorly. But at the end of the day it's got to be consistent and the facts need to judge it. Right. So I think that it's what's the efficiency of the shop and how happy are the customers. So whatever gets the most work through keeps the customers happy and getting their cars back in the time is the way that you go. But I would never marry myself to any one of those three ways.

Yeah. Keep in mind that the least amount of steps or the least amount of hands that an RO has to touch, the better the customer experience. So with the advisor doing it, that's probably the most efficient way.

Yeah. And a dispatcher at best is a bottleneck and at worst a ten foot wall.

Yeah. Well said. Thanks Beto for the question. Next one.

I am a top level advisor. I always have been. I was a technician for 10 years. I've been a service consultant. Now I've been sent on trips to Puerto Rico, Cancun, won many competitions, just came off another winning month for tires, alignments, anything else they throw at me. Spiff wise. I take all the money every time. I am stuck at being a top performer service consultant and I'd like to get to being a service management position but it's been very difficult to get off the desk because everywhere I've worked, every group I've worked, being that I'm a top performer, usually top in the group, they stick me and keep me at the desk and I can't get off. I keep applying for management positions but without prior service management experience, it's been extremely difficult to get my foot in the door in a management position somewhere at the dealership level.

That reminds me of the whole like when you ask somebody what their biggest weakness is on an interview question. I care too much because I just care too much.

Explain that, though, why would do you ask that question anymore? What did we used to ask? What are your weaknesses or something?

Well, so I've switched that over. But, yeah, like, what is your biggest weakness? Is the thing that I used to ask that I don't anymore. What. I've changed that over.

My biggest weakness is that I care too much.

Yeah. And it's. I'm too reliable or whatever it is. Like. Like those. Those are their weaknesses.

So come to think of it, I think that's what you said when. The first time I talked to you, you're like, yeah, my problem is.

No, if you think back, we just talked about this not too long ago. So. So when Chris and I did our interview, which we probably could do a show on because it's. There's some really funny stuff that happened on there. Like, literally, I was. If you guys have ever seen the movie Goonies, and when. When the character Chunk gets put into, like, interrogation, he spills the beans on everything that he did wrong. And that's exactly what I did. You'd be like, well, what were some of the failures you had? And I went all the way back to my first day in the car business.

Was that, like, too much?

Too much, yeah. So I just kept going and going and going.

But I've switched that up. I warm everybody up with, what is your biggest professional success? And then they talk about all the great things, and then I go, oh, what was your biggest professional failure? And then I follow that up with, what did you learn from that? Because I'm always interested because I think failures are such a great teacher at the end of the day. So I'm always curious to see how people learn from that. But.

So Nick, I like Nick. I suffered from this early on that I cared too much.

Yes.

Nobody. Nobody's looking to take their top racehorse out of the race.

That's true. Right.

And so I remember what I did is I took my vacation and I went to F and I school. I got my license for F and I, which in the state I was in, you had to have some sort of certificate. And then I started applying for F and I jobs. I got an F and I job, and then I gave notice. And then all of a sudden, the world opened up to me. I'm not suggesting that, but I would suggest that you sit down with the owner or leadership general manager of your dealership and say, hey, I'm making my goals for next year. And one of my goals is I want to get into management. What advice would you give me? And Maybe just kind of plant the seed. Like if I was applying for a job as a service manager out there, like that you're going to apply other places. What advice would you give me? Just leave that hang, but ask them for their advice and then start applying. If you're a top performer, there's a lot of places that will hire you. Your performance.

Is the best indicator of what your future, you know, capabilities are, possibilities. So that's what I would do. But you're gonna have to be willing to leave the place you're at probably to get a promotion.

Yeah. I also think that for him, too. Just because I know what happens with advisors that are like that. Really, really high top performer. Just remember that that promotion isn't always about money because there's so many. Oh, yeah, you might make less, you might make less. But I promise, at the end of the day, if this is really what you want, just look at that as an investment in your education when you sacrifice some of that pay. But I think that if you really want it, at the end of the day, I think that he's got a really legitimate point that there's a lot of people out there, that it's, you know, when you find somebody that's really good at taking care of customers, like, the thought of pulling them off the desk is frightening. So I can see where that would happen to him.

And also Nick's going to realize really soon when he does get that promotion. But getting other people to perform like he did is, you know, an act of Congress.

Yeah.

Pretty hard.

Good stuff, though. That was funny.

Great job. So thank you. Remember the numbers 8333 ask SDR if you have a question. We would love to help you out, and we'll see you 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. Sam.