Tiered Subscription Services In The Drive

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Welcome to your Friday drive by where we answer your questions. I'm Chris Collins and this is Christian. Hello, everyone. The man with the jokes. Papi chulo, which is Spanish for handsome.

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I have a question for you. I was on a webinar yesterday and it talked about finding ways to own the retention experience instead of putting the responsibility on the customer. So I guess some dealers are offering tiered subscription services to loaners and valets and stuff like that to help cover costs. I'm just wondering if you guys have seen this or know how somebody would make that work. Okay, thanks. Bye.

So there's a couple different ways to do this. I have seen packages where you can buy certain benefits like that. They never seem to pan out or work that well. There are a lot of dealerships that do oil changes for life, which means you get free oil changes for as long as you own the car if you buy it from them. That seems to be a pretty good retention tool.

I've done that before. It works really well.

Yeah. But for the most part, my preference and what I've had success with is having a. Benefits of. And just charging a little bit more. Right. So if you're gonna have loaners, you just build it into your labor rate. To your effective labor rate.

Yeah, because really you don't need that much of a change in your effective labor to cover it.

So loaners, car washes, things like that, you just build them into the price. So, you know, if you're. Let's say you're riding a thousand ros a month and you're getting an extra 10 bucks an hour or something.

Yeah, it's 10 grand or.

Yeah, it's. Well, that's if you're an hour a ticket. But what if you're four hours of ticket. Oh, my gosh.

That's $40,000.

So it depends, Right.

Yeah.

On where you're at. But I always think that it's better to just charge a little bit more and give the customer more perks than to.

Nickel and dime them. Because every time you're asking them to buy something else, they kind of start to get decision fatigue. It's like, yeah, we're p. You know, we're pitching them on so many things, and at some point, it's like, well, what do they really need versus what we're trying to sell them? So I would just do the benefits of it. Also. The benefits of. I've taught this before in a marketing workshop that I developed a few times how to design it.

Because I was very successful with it on the new car side and used car side. But it's just like when they buy a vehicle from you, it's like, hey, you get free car washes, you get loaners, you get this, and you can build a nice little menu that is the difference between you and everybody else in your market.

Yeah, the why buy? Thing. Yeah.

And then sales. Everybody kind of participates in it. Usually kind of like the free oil changes. Everybody participates in that.

That's right.

Right. So. Great question. You want to add anything to.

Yeah. The thing that I really like that Lindsay said right at the top, was about retention. And for the longest time in the industry, we put the responsibility on the customer. Like, it's the customer's job to come back, regardless of how we treat them. That's how we got into this in the first place, is that the funny thing is, is that most customers, when they buy a vehicle from a certain dealership, they have an immediate kind of loyalty to come back. The reason they wouldn't come back is because of the service experience. Right. So the key is that, you know, when you think about it, the most important visit, I believe, is that first visit where it's a customer coming in there at 5,000 miles, and you want them to have a nice, flawless experience in service. But it's also that first time that says, hey, you know, I get it. They've had your car for six months. You might not even know how everything works on this thing. And they really start to see us as a resource for giving them information, that we're the experts on the car. But if you take really good care of them during that first visit where we're not really asking anything of them, there's nothing that's going to be due on that car. But if they perceive that as we're really going above and beyond for that particular service, they assume that the rest of the transactions are going to be identical to that. So the retention's on the it's a responsibility of the dealer. And I think that you should have just as much outbound effort as you have going towards retention as as you have inbound effort and just trying to receive the customers. So I think that should be curated.

Great stuff. Thanks so much for the question. We'll see you next time on Service Drive 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, 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 do Chris Collins inc.com Now that's offers Chris Collins inc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.