The Most Important Thing For A Service Manager To Understand (Service Drive Revolution Drive By)

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Welcome everybody to service Drive Revolution and your Friday drive by. A little something to think about going into the weekend. Today we're going to talk about psychology and perception. And this was all spirited from a question on a Facebook group. And Abby posed the question. Abby, I want to be completely honest with you. I went in there and I went to make a video replying to this and two things happen. One is that I don't know, for some reason Facebook hates me and my phone camera was sideways. No matter what I did, I was upside down. Then my answer to this is a little longer than I think is appropriate in there. So we're going to get a little deep. Maybe this is a little heavier than most are used to. But I really think your question is on point and a great one. So let me read Abby's question in the Facebook group. What is the opinion on the three Cs to the customer? We receive surveys and get hit on price and communication. I see value in breaking down a complaint cause and correction to a customer. I feel it helps explain the concerns and can help them understand the effort into the dollar amount behind the repair. Am I the only one that thinks this question mark? So kind of the first part of this is she's asking what is the value of advisors putting complaint cause correction on the repair order. My answer to that is that we have to separate the two. So the complaint cause correction are to the benefit of the customer. But more than anything else, in my opinion, those are kind of to cover us that we're actually doing them. And it also shows us as leadership how our system's working. Like, you know, a lot of times in that scenario, the technicians can mess it up just as much as the advisors. Right? And so it covers us. And it's good to have complaint cause correction. But the truth of the matter is, is what's happening here has very little to do with the explanation on the repair door. And it has everything to do with how the customer is feeling. So whenever you're getting customers that are complaining about price, you have to understand that that complaint comes from somewhere else, that usually we aren't looking. So we understand intuitively that business is about exchanging value for money. We're solving somebody's problem and they are giving us money. And the more value that we give somebody, the more we can charge. Right? And so that's kind of the exchange. It's an exchange of value. Now most of us start to think about the value being the commodity that we're selling. So we think that let's Say that we're in the business of selling toothpaste. We think that what people are buying is toothpaste and we're competing on toothpaste, right? But if we're just competing on that commodity, the toothpaste, most of the time we're going to be competing on price.

And if a customer doesn't perceive any value different than our competition, besides it just being toothpaste, then the customer is going to gravitate towards the lowest price because there's no loyalty involved, there's no emotion involved. Now, if we have toothpaste and that toothpaste is recommended by dentists, and science says that, you know, you don't have to, you know, ever have cavities filled if you use this toothpaste or whatever, the hype is on that.

It, you know, that's what is going to drive the value. And that's perception. And what that comes down to is it's the story that's being told. So the story being told about that toothpaste more than anything else determines the value. Now, oftentimes toothpaste and I'm, I'm randomly pulling toothpaste out of the air, but I know that there's companies out there that make toothpaste that's like free of phosphate and all these other things that, you know, are made out of really organic stuff that basically, you know, no seals or anybody is harmed in them. There's no byproduct from it. It's really, you know, I don't think organic's the word, but it's good for nature and it's safe. There are tons of people out there that will drive a Tesla or a Prius or whatever because they perce that they're doing something for the environment. The same would apply to toothpaste. And once again, that comes back to. That's the story being told about that product. Okay, now I know I kind of went on a little bit on a tangent, but come back with me. So what is the greatest story ever told?

What is the greatest story ever told in, in really, honestly, history?

Money. Money is the greatest story ever told. Think about the dollar in America for a second. It's not really backed by anything except for the perception that the world has of the dollar. And oftentimes you could make the case that the perception of the dollar in the world is held up more by or our military and our pop culture and who we are as a country and how, you know, aggressive we are in the American way and the American dream and all that. But at the end of the day, the dollar is only valuable if we perceive it to be valuable. So every one of us is walking around understanding that the dollar's value.

Is something that we perceive, but it's not like it was in the old days that it's backed by gold or you know, some people say it's backed by oil. It's really, at the end of the day, we print money. I mean you can see what we're going through right now with COVID We just print money. It isn't like we go out and acquire more gold to back up the money where it's, we're just printing that stuff. And you know, I've, I've read a lot of books by economists that would say that the way we're going to get out of this is we're just going to forgive ourselves the debt. And you know, we think like, oh, we're borrowing the money from China and all that. It's not that simple. But money is the greatest story ever told. So now how does this apply to customers complaining about price? Most of the time when customers complain about price, it's because we have let them think of us as a commodity or we have lost trust with them and they're disappointed. So then they navigate to price, they default to price. So what it means at the end of the day is our service advisors aren't connecting with our customers on a deeper level. They're not becoming friends, they're not over delivering. So like one thing we teach in our service advisor training is a two hour call. And the two hour call just stands for call customers when they don't need a call, call customers when they don't expect it, be a pattern interrupt, be different than anybody else, and over communicate. Most customers go into a service department, they drop off their car or truck, they don't hear anything, they call us or they show up and it's not done, or we somebody told them it was done, they show up, it's not done. Most of the time that experience is a huge pain in the butt for customers. And every time they worry, every time we disappoint them, every time we look disorganized, every time we're not friendly, every time we pretend like we're on the phone when we should be talking to them.

We'Re losing value in their mind. So price is perception. In the perception that your customers have is that the value doesn't outweigh the cost. And so the simple solution there is to build more value and build value by having a Relationship with your customers. Build value by over communicating. Build value by petting the dog and talking about everything else but the vehicle. The vehicle is a commodity and if it comes down to price, then somebody else can always do it cheaper. Right? So say, you know, a perfect example of this is like oftentimes somebody will be selling alignments for 89.95 and when we go in, we'll raise the alignment price to 139.95 and we'll sell 2, 3, 4 times more alignments than they were ever selling by raising the price. Now on paper that seems like, oh well, you just raised the price. Maybe you gamified the advisors and they sold it. Well, yeah, we, maybe we did gamify the advisors and that helped in it. But what we really do is we change the process in the drive so the customer's greeted within three seconds. We take away all, we take away all decision making. We say, you know, pull into lane one, pull into lane two. They have no chance to worry. We tell them, stay with your car, Tom is going to be out to help you. Then Tom comes out and meets him at the car and then Tom talks to him about where they're headed, what they do for work, what they did on the weekends, you know, whatever it is. But it's not about the car or the truck. It's about them as people and building trust and then over communicating, making them feel good about the process and at the end of the day trying to make them feel like they're family, friends, that that's really what it's about. But that's not the experience in the average service department. In the average service department, somebody pulls in, they wonder who's going to help them. It feels like chaos. It's a little bit intimidating. It looks disorganized. Sometimes it's a mess. Physically, things aren't laid out right. Then when somebody, they, you know, finally go and get somebody to help them or somebody comes up, they seem to rush. They're like, what brings you in today? Okay? And it's all about the car. They type up a repair order, sign here and then it's cause, you know, complaint, cause correction. And maybe the car was done when we thought it was and that's it. There's no connection. We, we're not different than the competition, et cetera. And so my, my first counter question to you, Abby, was how many ros are your advisors writing? And I think you, you said seven to eight. They have more than enough time to over communicate with customers, more than enough Time to source parts, to do all kinds of things and over communicate with customers. They have more than enough time to talk to customers for a couple minutes about their grandkids, their hobbies, you know, their sports team and really become friends. That's what it's, what it's all about at the end of the day. Remember if the experience would be better by the customer pulling right in the shop and dealing directly with the tech, there's no reason to have service advisors. If the service advisors can't make the customers feel good, they can't add value, they can't over communicate, then that layer of expense is of no use to us. It just isn't. And so I know that's a long winded answer to your question, but I think it's a great question. It's an important one. And so understand that the greatest story ever told is money. And the perception of money is the most important thing to understand. And value is only questioned when they're disappointed or they don't feel an emotional connection to us. If it's just about the oil change, if it's just about tires, if it's just about a water pump, then they would probably rather go to Costco and save $10 on the tires. So it has to be about a relationship. It has to be about us over communicating, about us delivering experience that they want to or they would endure again and not rated up there with going to the dentist. And that's on the service advisors. That's the role of the service advisors in this equation. So thank you so much for the question and I hope everybody has a great weekend and we will see you next time on Service Drive Revolution.

Next week on Service Drive Revolution. You know what we're going to talk about today? Let me tell you what we're going to talk about today. Why you can't hire techs, that's going to be the subject today. We also are going to play my new favorite bit. Would you rather and we're going to take a question from the audience.

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.