Most service advisor training fails because it ignores where the real work happens: phone calls, greetings, and follow-ups on the shop floor. Generic sales training doesn't fit the advisory mindset. Advisors also waste half their time on broken processes like washing cars and chasing parts instead of selling, which kills productivity and customer satisfaction.
The thing in the front, the front lines, like, and that's the thing that, um, I think a lot of people miss when you get promoted and you start to move up and you're in this glass box in management is you forget that the war is won or lost on the front lines. That interaction with customers, how you answer the phone, how you greet people, how you follow up with people isn't happening in the office. It's happening on the front lines. And I was on the front lines. So My advisor training was better, and I would contend that our advisor training is better than anything else out there because it comes from advisors. Most advisor training out there, I hate to say it, but the bigger ones, they're sales trainers that laid something over advisor training. But they— it's different. It's a different language. It's a different mindset. It's a different relationship with the customer than a sales environment. Yeah. The sales are the easiest part. Now, the flip side of that, that I would say is when eventually, and we'll talk about this in the next episode, when I started fixing service departments, the other passion that I had was how do I put systems in place that make the advisors be able to do the job they're supposed to do? Because so much of my time as an advisor was spent washing a car because it wasn't washed, running back to parts because the thing wasn't, you know, going and picking up a car myself because something didn't happen. Um, maybe sometimes 50% of your time as an advisor is fading heat for broken systems and things that don't work, calling customers to tell them that the car won't be done because there aren't enough technicians in the shop. Like, so the, the combination of really understanding that the war is won or lost on the front lines and that the systems around that. And that really the only thing that drives that is the capacity in the shop. If you don't have enough technicians, you don't have the ability to take care of your customers.
