The Role Of An Effective Service Advisor | SDR #189

Welcome, everybody, to the big show. Today we're going to talk about something that I get asked all the time. What is it that service advisors do? Do I need service advisors? Can I replace my service advisors with a kiosk? We're going to go in depth on what the role of the service advisor is and what winning and losing is for that position. Also, we're going to talk about the news and why I don't want you to call us about service advisor training. I'm Chris Collins. This is Chris Jones.

Hey. I was gonna tell you something I forgot before we started rolling, but I was out and about yesterday, you know, just meandering about the city, walking around the city, walking around. And I met a microbiologist.

Much taller than I thought.

That took me a second. That and much more. Coming up on service Drive Revol.

Before we get to the news, let's, let's, let's inform our audience of something strategic that could save you time and frankly, save us a lot of time.

I like it.

Don't call us for advisor training.

We have advisor training. We sell advisor training. But don't call us for advisor training. Have yet to have anybody call us for advisor training that needed advisor training.

That's really true. That's a good point.

It's happened to me so many times over the last couple of weeks that I get on a strategy session and they're like, they just want advisor training. And I'm looking at their thing and so here's what, here's what it says and I'm going to tell you what you need. And it's not advisor training. But let me go through the pain of this story really quick. Booked out 10 days. Next appointment is 10 days out. Now, I am seeing recently customers are next day now because traffic is starting to drop. Remember I told, I told everybody, traffic's gonna drop. It's starting to happen already. I'm seeing it already. But booked out 10 days. In the last month, they've sold six alignments. So let's say they're writing 1200 customer pay ROs. They've sold six alignments and five of.

Those people hit curbs and asked for.

The alignments or they're internal.

Oh, yeah, they sold one to sales. That's pretty good, right?

So they're booked out and they're not selling anything.

And the thought is if our advisors were just better for advisors knew how to sell.

That's not why your advisors aren't selling.

Now if you're 10 days out, your.

Advisors aren't Selling because you can't get the work done and you need to hire 10 technicians. I mean I don't think we've gone into a store or had a store come into the coaching group that doesn't need to hire three at a minimum. But what was in the Monday meeting, the BMW store, How many Techs We've.

Added 15 and counting.

15 texts in 45 days or how about 60? But 60 days. So in two months. And frankly we can do it faster than that.

Well, we've done some stuff in that store that allows us to go even faster.

Yeah, but you need technicians, you need the production. So then the other thing that. Then they'll say, well, we just. Our techs could be more efficient for sure.

No, I think that, I think that we can get everyone that's at 100% to 300%.

I wouldn't spend time on that. I'd spend time on hiring technicians. You need tech. So now if you, if you're landlocked, you don't have enough stalls, we can help you with that. We can figure that out.

If you need help hiring technicians, which you do, everybody needs technicians and we can help you. We're really good at hiring technicians. We can help you with that. But if we train the advisors, they're just going to be suicidal because they can't get the work done that they're going to sell. The advisor training is last. The first thing is you got to hire techs. The second thing is you got to fix the system because the systems are antiquated. Then we'll train the advisors.

Yeah, that's just a little piece of it. The whole thing sounds like a nightmare. Like last night I had a dream that I was a muffler. I woke up exhausted.

This is a great segue.

Why don't we just go to the news now?

8.6 miles per gallon. Is it a semi truck? Is it a Boeing 747? Is it a tank? No, it's the next generation of USPS mail trucks. That's right. The next gen USPS mail trucks are only capable of 8.6 miles per gallon.

EPA says, which is up from the previous generation. That was 8.2 miles per gallon.

Miles ahead, no pun intended, of where it was.

So it's funny, they pushed this thing through our beautiful. Was it Congress that, that signed off on the post office getting between 50,000 and 16000 new vehicles and only 10% of them are electric. The rest of them are basically the most inefficient gas guzzling yeah, but the.

Propaganda was it was going to be an electric fleet. I totally remember that thing. And it was like, oh, we're going to have so many electric cars and then 10%, well, they could just raise our taxes. I can only hope. I can only hope. But yeah. So that's a big whoopsie. 8.6 miles per gallon. Like, that's nothing.

What does like a aircraft carrier get? I don't know.

It can't be good. I mean, those things are monstrosities.

But do you think it's more or less than that?

I feel like it's probably even less than that. I would say that it's probably gallons per mile on those kinds of things.

You know what's unique about those aircraft.

Carriers or USPS trucks.

USPS trucks. I know this because my mom worked for the usps, that they have the.

Steering wheel on the other side.

Oh, good, Chuck. Yeah. See? Do I do it when you tell a joke? Do I try? Do I guess at the punchline?

Yeah, sometimes.

No, I don't. I just take it.

I disagree with that. But it's okay. I like it. Ready for another story?

Not gonna ask any questions anymore. What's the next story?

Are we having a tiff? This is kind of fun.

All right, I'm having a moment.

So obviously, you know this podcast is wide reaching, right?

Yeah, we get big numbers.

Huge numbers. But also you say that we have.

The biggest numbers in the industry. We have no way of knowing, really.

It's definitely on the rumor mill that we're.

We have some. We have a lot of downloads. We have a lot of very nice people that support us.

It's. It's a lot of fun. It's pretty cool. But I did not expect this. You know who's been listening to our podcast? Little company in Seattle, Starbucks.

What?

Yeah. So Volvo to charge up EV drivers at 15 Starbucks shops. Remember that little conversation we had not too long ago?

Making service departments a destination make it easy for people to charge? Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, it just shows you we're onto something. Right. Because Starbucks gets it.

Yeah, Starbucks gets it. Volvo gets it. They know that they got to have experiences and destinations, but I feel like this is really kind of a. That's progressive and scattered across a 1350 mile route from Denver to Seattle. So essentially you could. It would. It's encouraging the road trip. That makes a lot of sense.

Wow.

Yeah, I think that's really cool and.

Progressive, but it's also just creating a narrative for customers. Like they, they think about that as, oh, I Should take a road trip. It's an experience. You know, they're making it fun because, like I've told you before, like, I would love to take the Tesla in the summer and go to Vegas together and experience little restaurant or whatever that halfway there, you recharge. And a fast charger.

Yep. And Barstow.

Yeah. But you think about it as, oh, this is something I want to do because you have to stop versus something that you're scared to do.

Yeah, that's so great. I just think it's progressive and it's definitely thinking about what to do with that. You know, 45 minutes to hour time when you're charging. And it's funny how fast it goes. Sometimes when you're out in the road and you're charging, like, you look down and there's a lot of times where the charging stations for Tesla are in malls. And it's like you go down, you go to one store, and you look at your watch, it's already time to go back. It's faster than you might think.

So let's talk about the big topic. And I'm excited to talk about this because I feel like it's something that is widely misunderstood. And I think a lot of band aids have been put on this, but nobody really talks about, like, what does a service advisor do? What is the purpose? And we, we do have, like, a narrative in our industry where people will say, service advisors are salespeople. And I'm always like, service advisors are not salespeople. They're customer collectors. They're not salespeople. Sell. If you've ever written service selling is the easiest part.

I mean, you talk about your customers are given to. You don't have to prospect.

Yeah.

They're showing up. Right.

Like, for the most, in some cases, more than you can handle.

Yeah. So you got customers. Like, a real true salesperson would have to prospect customers. But you're. They're opening the doors and you're, you know, you're writing them up. Maybe you make an appointment, but you're not. You're certainly not going out and selling the. The car or truck and then servicing it. So you're not really selling. Second of all, that what they need, they need.

Yeah.

It's not like they're coming in and saying, I need an oil change or I need whatever. Now, we might recommend additional things, but once again, it's easy. They need it. Like, I always find it fascinating when you call on declines. You call a customer and you're like, hey, I see that you were in here last week and we recommended breaks. And I'm just curious, did you take it somewhere else? And true to Nada's research, every time the reason why people don't do it is they were not told or they did not understand. But most of the time the customer is like, oh, I didn't know that. So we put it on the ro, but we didn't actually tell the customer number two. They showed up and we told them so they were already planning on picking it up. Right.

But it isn't because they don't want the brakes. It isn't because of the price. But perception is that.

And so what does a service advisor do? And the outcome of a good service advisor is that they're a customer collector and that customers are coming back to them, coming back to where they work in the process. But let's just talk about the role of a service advisor. How did it come about and you know, what is important about it in the overall scheme of things? So if we talk about just the origin story of how service advisors came about and what the thought process was behind it is early on you had customers pulling right in and dealing directly with the technician. Now the customers dealing directly with the technician.

Was good in the sense that the communication of what was needed was clear because you didn't have somebody in the middle. Right?

Yeah. That you weren't losing communication even a little bit.

But everything else about it was inefficient because the technician now is not working on a vehicle. They're dealing with the customer. Right. If they're, you know, you. If you're a good technician and you want to flag time, you. Any rapport building any, you know, longer conversations than 30 seconds is costing you money. Right. So it's very inefficient in the fact that what we're selling in a service department is time. That's our product. And just like flowers or eggs or milk, that thing can go bad and you're never getting it back. Once it's spoiled, it's spoiled. So time is irreplenishable resource. Once it's gone, it's gone. Same thing with rotten milk.

Yuck.

It's trying to give me that mental.

Oh, no, it was a smell.

So to increase the efficiency of the technicians and keep them working on the vehicles, we added this layer of expense called the service advisor. Now it is an additional layer of expense. But the thought at the time I can only assume was it will more than pay for itself.

Because the technicians will be more productive and the customers will Have a better experience. It's worth the expense. So most service advisors and most service departments are paid a commission on the work that they, they create. Right. However you want to look at it. But they're paid a percentage of either the sales or, or the gross. Sometimes they might have some sort of salary, but it's very rare that a service advisor is not compensated on their individual performance. Now that part is closer to a salesperson in a sense.

Yeah.

Right. But they.

They'Re performance based in that. But the idea is that the advisor is going to make that whole process better. Right. So the first part of this just kind of touched on that an advisor does is it's about communication and it's communication both ways. It's communicating to the customer and it's communicating what the customer needs to the technician. So they are a communicator. You came up with the word that I, that I thought was really cool. You said they're scribes.

Yeah.

Explain what you meant by their scribes.

So essentially their job is just to kind of take information, write it down, and then hand it off to, to the technician. So they're just kind of taking the story from the customer, writing it, and then giving that story to the technician. I used to say translator, but what I. Well, to a point though what happened and what I found was, is when I was training advisors and saying you have to translate, what they would do is they would take the information from the customer, then kind of like self diagnose and put that on the paper as opposed to actually just taking what the customer said and letting the technician do that work. And it would sometimes send the text down the wrong path because the advisor was putting their two cents onto the transcription.

Yeah. So customer is coming into the service department, advisor is meeting them and getting what needs to be done. And then the next one is they're recommending things that the customer might not be thinking about that they need as far as needed maintenance. Most of the time you're just recommending maintenance because an advisor wouldn't know much more than that at the time. But they're, they're documenting the customer's needs. So if the customer says I have a rattle or my car cuts out at this certain time, they need to get as much information as they can to make it easy for the technician to figure that out and diagnose it. Yeah. So they might need to go for a ride with the customer. But whatever it is, they need to understand what it is so they can communicate it to the technician in a very Effective way. Now, a lot of technicians will tell.

You that doesn't happen not near as effectively as it should. You think about that. Like, the retelling of the story can take diagnosis from minutes to hours.

Yeah. And I have seen on ros. And not that long ago, rattles.

Rattle from rear.

Yeah, like that's the description. Rattle from the rear suspension, the rear interior, like, you know, the rear trunk.

What?

Where?

Like, throw me a bone.

Yeah. So that can be. That can be a real inefficiency for the technicians if they're not provided with the right information. And so that's something that advisors should, you know, try really, really hard to be good at. And second of all, put your hands on the problem. Like, if it's rattling, go for a ride. Make. Make it. Duplicate the problem. The. The thing I used to tell customers when I was an advisor when they would have rattle or whatever it is, I would say.

Understand there's this weird psychic phenomenon that happens that there's a. This, like one Mile Dome that comes over your vehicle whenever you're within a mile of us. The problem doesn't happen anymore. Just to kind of plant the seed that, hey, it's, you know, a lot of times you hear the thing once and you think, oh, that's happening. But it isn't happening all the time. But your perception as a customer is that it's happening all the time, but it's hard to replicate. And so if we can't replicate it together, they're going to cut the technician a little more leeway because they understand they couldn't produce it on demand. Right.

Otherwise they just think we didn't try hard enough. You know what I used to do that's kind of. I like how you said that. The One Mile Dome. I always used to say, so you know, when your kid has a toothache and they're like, oh, dad, my.

My tooth.

It hurts so bad. You finally go to the dentist and the toothache goes away. It's the same exact thing.

Oh, yeah. Because customers would get frustrated. They'd be like, oh, it does this thing. And then you go for a ride with them and it doesn't do it. And then they'd be like, you know, and I would be okay. Like, that happens.

Yeah.

But what I was really trying to say there is, listen, our techs can't. They don't, like, they don't have crystal balls.

That's right.

So I have to be able to replicate it for them. So that's the communication part from the customer also communicating the expectations to the customer. So the service advisor's job is to also frame the customer. What's going to happen, what can be expected, how the process is going to work right up front. And then communicate. So you got to communicate. We teach in our advisor training, you know, touch the customer when they don't need touch, when they don't expect it. Because then it builds trust.

Yep. Outbound, not inbound.

If they got to call you, you lost.

Absolutely.

And it's funny, like if you know, in a service department, you can sit by the phones at lunch and tell how well managed it is and how good the advisors are by how many calls are coming in to check status.

So.

Great. Cause if we're not getting to them before they call us, we lost. So the communication follow up. Right. Then the advisor is managing the process.

Yeah.

And in some service departments, they're actually.

Sourcing the parts.

Certainly in your independent shop.

So you're managing the process. You might be dealing with an extended warranty. You might be deciding whether the work that's needed is covered under warranty or if the customer needs to pay for it. Right. There's a lot of different things in the process that you're in control of and, you know, also offering the customer different options for things, for parts. The extended warranties might want to go one way. Like this would happen to me a lot where they wanted to send a used part. The extended warranty would. And I would tell the customer like, hey, they want to send a used part, but I wouldn't recommend that. And so, you know, you're, you're managing that, that process. You're also managing the technician's process in the sense that if a technician pulls a car and they have the diagnosis and they say, hey, this customer needs this and this and this, and you can't get a hold of the customer right away, then the tech's pulling that out and the next job that they have are pushing your job to the back of the line. Because the technicians are only effective if they're working and they can't sit around and wait for you to figure out how to get ahold of the customer. So how good are you at managing the process? You gotta, you know, right up front. Where are you gonna be today? What's the number I can reach you on? How do you want me to communicate?

Time sensitive.

You got to be, you got to be ready to communicate with the customer if that is needed, if communication is needed in that sense. But you're managing the process. The other thing you're doing as a service advisor is you're advising them. So you're advising them up front to the maintenance they might need, but you're also advising them to repairs that somebody might need on a car. And this will happen very frequently when you're a service advisor is somebody will have an older car with a lot of miles on it that needs a lot of work and they can't afford that work. And you need to prioritize that work. So you might need to go back to the technician and say, hey, you know, they don't have 2500 right now, but what's important? And then discuss that with the technician and then tell the customer, like, you know, this is what's important today, but over time we should take care of these things. But I, you know, when I was a service advisor, I would have customers coming back, you know, every payday to get a certain thing done, to check off their list. But you, you have to prioritize in, in prioritizing, you got to see it from the customer's point of view and get the technician who's the expert's point of view. So you're in the middle of that, of that process. And so the word that you came up kind of for that was liaison. Right? They're a liaison in that sense. Do you want to add anything to that?

Yeah, I was also like, with the rest of the thing, I think I'd put down that like the advisors, the master of time and space and so much of that stuff, like things can't happen without them actually kind of pulling different strings. And it's so vital the way that behind the scenes they keep everything going.

And then the last one on the list, and this is not last because it's not the most important, because it is the most important is you're a friend. A service advisor needs to be a friend to the customer. They need to feel like we care, like we're intentive to them and that we want them back. Like we care about how they feel about the process. Like, you know, I say this all the time, but I wouldn't recommend something to a customer that I wouldn't recommend to my mom. And so making them feel like a friend, making them feel like family is why you are there as a service advisor. And just think about this for a second is if I could cut out that added expense in the financial statement, which usually ends up being 8 to 10% of the gross, right? If I could cut that out and save it, which in some dealers, dealerships or service departments can be hundreds of thousands of dollars if I could cut that out and the customer would have a better experience. We don't need service advisors. And if you start from that perspective, that a service advisor's role is to make.