This Secret Weapon Will Change Your Service Drive Forever! (Service Drive Revolution)

The secret advantage, your nuclear weapon. And it's free.

I'm glad I took notes on this one. Yeah.

Communication, such an important. It's 90 of everything. And it's not just for advisors to customers. It's for leaders to their employees. Goes both ways. Right.

The leadership one is probably harder.

So that's interesting because I think that a lot of leaders, especially when they're new, and I'll get this from female managers a lot where they'll say, well, you know, I just got to be mean or I just got to be a. That sort of thing. And it's. I'm always like, no, that's not the answer. The answer is to address it right away before it gets pent up. You're letting people walk on you and you're not telling them the truth. You got to give instant feedback. You got to push in, not step back and let them. You know, people usually are trainable and will take direction, but if you just leave them to do their thing and you just internalize it, you become passive aggressive.

Yeah. With that, I think when something happens, we. We have a story that loops in our brain and we actually create a more dramatic situation than the truth actually is.

Yeah. And then you overreact because you feel like you've been taken advantage of. But really what's happened is you haven't had boundaries and you haven't stood up for yourself.

Yes.

So it's, it's about over communicating you. The other thing too is we think, like we say something to employees once and they remember it. You got to say it every day, all the time. I always say the analogy of the same sales meeting we had on Friday, 20 years ago, is the one they're going to have this Friday. Right. It's about demos. It's the same stuff. You got to say the things, the same thing over and over again. If you were coaching a basketball team, it's the same thing. Football, it's, you know, you got to block and tackle and it's all about the fundamentals. We, like, assume that people know the fundamentals, but you got to over communicate and remind them of the fundamentals and do it in different ways, gamify it, tell stories, share successes, profile people that are doing it. Right. So if you have some employees that are doing it, you know, make them into a big deal and praise them for it. You can't just come at it one way every time it gets boring. You have to really make an effort to over communicate what our expectations are, what the customer experience needs to be what the basics are over and over again. It never stops. You're a broken record.

It really comes down to the point where there's almost no such thing as over communicating. Yeah, I've never heard anybody say, let's say technician to advisor. I've never heard a technician say that person gives me way too much information. Or that leader going down to an advisor or employee like that person over communicated what their expectations were. The over is the minimum.

And then I think you always have to end that with okay, tell me what you're taking away from confirmation for sure. So they understand because even sometimes they think that what you're trying to say is different than what you're trying to say. And that can be a lesson to you and how you're communicating or how the person learns or thinks about things. But you have to understand also they're looking through, through a lens or a context that can affect how they understand what you're saying. So you think that what you're explaining to them is obvious and common sense and to them nobody's ever told them that before.

Right.

So over communicate.

Yeah. And I think one of the things I try to do is eliminate verbal communication and I know it's impossible in our day and age.

Just sign language.

No, we have smoke signal.

So what is that? Telegraph, Morse code? Is that what it is?

Do you know dots and dashes?

No, we haven't.

Get your up and stop asking people if they have an appointment.

Answer the.

How do you not communicate verbally, digitally?

You write everything down. We have a digital communication system that we can put notes and everything in. What I meant by verbal communication is we're running at 300 miles an hour. Especially as high performing service advisors or shop owners we could go through like I do this with my assistant all the time. I'll tell her five things in one sentence. I said number one, number two, number three, number four, number five and she heard five, but she thought it was on car number one. I was talking about five different cars.

Got it so.

Well no, you said John Smith is it? Oh no, I said that like 30 seconds ago. Now we're on to Mr.

Yeah. So the verbal gets jumbled. Yes.

Where this becomes a nuclear weapon with customers is I think the thing that advisors miss is that if you call customers when they don't expect it and you call them before they're even thinking about you, you are making deposits in the future and building trust that no other service advisor is doing. Most service advisors aren't calling at all or are calling you Know, kind of at the end of the timeline of when a customer is expecting the call. If you call when, when you don't have any information and just say, hey, it's next to going to the shop. Or it's, you know, we're on track. How's work? You know, and, and just kind of communicate with them. That's different than any other advisor out there.

Yep.

And it is a nuclear weapon. Like if you called somebody, we call it the two hour call in our advisor training. But if you called somebody and just like, hey, did you make it to work okay? They're like, oh yeah. Is it going good? Okay, well, you know, the car's in line. We should have somebody looking at it here in the next hour or so. I just wanted to give you a little update. That's like priceless.

They handle. It's so easy. Yeah. They have to hang with the phone and look in and be like, was that really my service person that just called me and gave me an update call before I had to call them? The beauty of our industry is the bar. So low on communications.

So low.

It's ridiculously low. And our opportunity has never been better because we have a phone, we have texting abilities. Right. Where we can actually just snap a little bit of information to somebody. They look it on their phone and then they're good and they've been communicated. We've got email smoke signals as we referred to earlier, or telegraph. Or telegraph. But we've got so many ways to communicate with the customers.

I was going to say though.

If it's a millennial, they look at the phone like, why in the hell did you call.

Call me like, no, you got to send them emojis.

Yeah, right, Absolutely. Yeah.

So I it's send them like a car with a poop thing and then a dollar sign afterwards and there's a couple stars.

Right.

You gotta learn that language.

Poop sign, dollar sign. Thumbs up, high five.

Right. That means you need front brakes.

Yes. Perfect. That's good.

Wow.

It's all about, I need to learn that Proactive communication. It's about being proactive. We've been doing something in the last couple weeks that in the morning when we get in, before we start getting the inflow of intake is the cars that are held overnight. We, we make a communication with that customer whether it's a text or a phone call. So before 8:30am we're giving you the plan for the day.

Nobody stole your car overnight. It's still here. Next in line.

It's amazing. The amount of incoming calls in the afternoon for statuses are gone. We love it. So it's great.

Yeah, that's the goal.

Okay, let's. Should we answer some questions?

I want to talk about guns more.

That could be a seven part episode.

You know, so it's, it's interesting, but you are sharing the idea that. Was it a friend or. Who was it that was talking about the independence versus dealership?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And what, what did they say?

Good, Good client of ours, he's a university professor, teaches marketing. He's. Hey, I watched the, the podcast last week. He said, great topics, but you guys missed one, right? And I said, what do we miss? Trust. So it was all about trust. So that's coming up.

So why do, why would you trust an independent more than a dealer?

Well, there's a number of reasons why we would do that. That's for next episode, right?

It is, yeah.

Probably.

Okay. Thank you so much for watching this clip of Service Drive Revolution. Now you can catch the full episode on YouTube, iTunes, or Spotify or wherever you consume your podcast. If you have any questions, go ahead and post them in the comments below. Make sure you subscribe and hit the bell icon so you're notified when we post new episodes. I'm Chris Collins and you can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Chris Bulldog Collins. And I'll see you again on the next episode.