Turning Your Service Department Into A Video Game

Foreign.

To service Drive revolution and your Friday drive by where we answer your questions on the big show. Remember, the phone number is 8333 Ask SDR if you have any question. We will try to answer it, although we don't answer every question.

No, definitely not. Some are just not appropriate for the show.

But 8333 ask SDR. I'm Chris Collins, this is Chrisean. Hello everyone. Let's go to the question.

Well, before that though, I have a question that I didn't call in, so I just figured I'd ask it. Do you ever wonder this, like, what if. What if soy milk is really just milk introducing itself in Spanish?

Continue on. Random thoughts.

I love it. That's funny. Soy milk, yo. Soy milk.

We keep running into problems with. We have older technicians and they don't want to do the mtf. It affects lots of things. Is three of the questions on the CSI survey are about the mpi.

How do we get them to do it?

And.

How much accountability should the management have? How much of my pay should be affected by an MPI or a CSI that I can't get a mechanic to fill out that's been there for 30 years and thinks he doesn't get paid to do an mpi, so why waste his time when he's a flat rate technician and is a dinosaur and doesn't want to change? And it's the whole group of technicians, it's not just one or two.

70% of the cars I put out the door, I do not have an MPI to give the customer.

This month it's going to cost me $1500 out of my pay. I'm gonna make about 5500 bucks. Would have made about 7000. Thanks. Have a great day.

That's a great question. So one thing that came to mind.

When I was, when I was listening to your question is how funny it is.

And by how funny it is, I mean how sad it is.

Yeah.

When I used to go into service departments to turn them around.

One of the things that I, or we, my team would do as part of the process is we would interview everybody in parts and service.

And when we interviewed the technicians, a couple of the questions that we'd ask is like speaking so do you inspect every car that you work on? And 90% of the technicians would say, yeah, oh yeah, of course. And then we'd ask, do you test drive the car? Oh yeah, I test drive every car I work on. And then you'd say, well, do you have a specific test drive route or whatever or how many miles. Now, the thing that I knew before the interview was I'd gone through 200 ROS and I had charted how many of them had inspections on them.

And the mileage. So when the, you know, the before and after mileage, if it was available, the before and after mileage. Right. And so what the technicians would say.

When they know it's the right thing to say versus what they were actually doing was completely different. Like they know that they're supposed to inspect, but they're actually not. And then if you then later on ask, well, why aren't you? They'd say, well, because the advisors don't sell the work. Or, you know, there would be a bunch of reasons that you know are legitimate. Just in the sense that if that's how they feel, then you have to try to understand why they feel that way. Even if it's wrong or even if in your head you're like, well, no, that's not right.

It's more important to understand why they feel that way than whether it's right or wrong.

And so.

I would not go at the technicians directly in the sense of, hey, you, you know, you have to inspect the car. You know, I need one. What I would do is I would gamify it in the beginning and see who I could get to do it. So just a simple game to do in the shop is go buy a big screen TV or a barbecue or something that, you know, probably is around 5 to $600 and get some raffle tickets and just say, hey, for the next couple weeks we're having a contest. Anytime you fill out an inspection sheet, doesn't matter if it sells or not, we're going to give you a raffle ticket. Now the reason why I'm doing that is I want to know how many will actually bite on that. Same time, I'm every day for lunch, I'm taking different technicians to lunch individually. So I kind of start with the most influential guys in the shop and I talk to them and I ask them what their challenges are. I try to find out about their home life, what's going on. And.

If they ask what are our challenges or what's going on, I would bring up like, oh.

We'Re falling short in these areas. And I would just tell them. I wouldn't preach at them, I would just tell them. But oftentimes those older veteran techs are smart. And.

I would sometimes just compare it to the terrible leadership in Covid where.

There'S this thing that happens where they Say you have to get the vaccine. Now, a lot of people might agree with the idea of a vaccine, but as soon as you tell them they have to, half of this country's like, no, I'm not doing it because you're telling me I have to. And it's terrible. Leadership in the sense that what we wanna do is sell people on the reason why.

And not try to make people feel isolated in the beginning because they don't agree or they have more questions, or they just wanna wait and see a little bit, but get a certain amount of people to buy in and then use those people as the model, then go after the ones that don't. But it's. I think it's. This question is a little more complicated than it appears on the surface, is you got to have equity with them. So you gotta make friends and you gotta take genuine interest in them on a personal level. And then you gotta test it and see, like, well, how many of them are open to some fun, how many of them can be motivated by gamification and some fun. And then from that there's gonna be peer pressure because if some of the more influential guys are doing it right, then also you can just grab a couple of the more influential guys and tell them you need their help and you expect them to be different than everybody else. And I need you guys to be the model and you're the future foreman or leaders or managers and get a couple of the more influential guys doing it or at least endorsing it, and, you know, the appearance of doing it. And then the other part is you got to question your leadership and your authority because.

You want to be at the point where you have enough equity with your team that if you ask them to do something, they're going to try it just because you're asking.

And so if we're going into this with the idea that, hey, it's just an even exchange of money, and if I just pay them and I take no interest in them whatsoever, but I pay them, they're going to do what it is I'm asking them to do. That's pretty old school and very ineffective in today's world. It's probably been ineffective for a long time, but it doesn't work as well today as it did in past years.

And then the other part probably is bringing in some new guys. And I always, when I bring in new employees and I'm trying to change a culture is I make it very clear before I offer them the job that they're part of the new regime. And even though they see everybody else not doing inspections, if I catch them not doing an inspection, once they're gone, I might overpay those guys too. Like, I might overpay those new techs coming in just to change the culture in the shop. So.

You know, I wouldn't overpay them tremendously, but it's valuable to have new blood in there that's doing it the way you want also, because that sends a message that, hey, we're, you know, we're trying to upgrade our thinking here in the performance.

Yeah, I think that that's all good stuff. And it's definitely the holistic thing. I feel like this guy might be an advisor, which I think is a different angle. So as I was listening to the question, what I was thinking is that as an advisor, and I like how he calculated, it's going to cost him 1500 bucks. So he must have done some sort of math. And the only thing that I would just say is that as an advisor, if I'm going out, let's say that I've just got a group of technicians that don't check out cars. I might go out. Let's say that they diag'd a car from me. Let's say it was a suspension issue. And I might go out to the car and say, hey, so can you show me the control arm or whatever it is? And they show you the control arm. I'm like, oh, great. Well, this customer's really interested in taking good care of their car. Is there anything else you see on here? And then stand back there while the. Maybe they look. Oh, yeah, let's take a look at this, this, this, and this. And you see the one that the inspection doesn't take very long. But then like, oh, yeah, I could sell that. And then you go and you get the parts quote, and then you sell the job and you go back and hey, thanks for taking that extra couple of seconds to look over the car is an extra three hours at work and you have to kind of make a big deal out of the sale. But what I would want to do is I just think that when it comes to an advisor versus technician relationship, if you convince the technician it's worth it to look over your cars, even if the group as a whole doesn't do a good job with inspection, like as an advisor, I at least want my cars looked at. So maybe some sort of a. Some sort of a make it worthwhile for them out of that. But I'd just be like, hey, that extra few seconds got you this and then maybe just you do that a little bit more. And then you get to a point where like, oh, I'll look over Christian's cars because he sells the work. The main reason I find that technicians do not do inspections, they think it's a waste of their time because they're convinced that advisors don't sell. That's not always true. Like, we have reports that can show that, but I don't think that we take the wins when we get them.

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.chrisconsinc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.