What To Do if Your Tech Asks for a Raise & Why CSI Surveys are Dangerous

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Welcome everybody to Service Drive Revolution and your Friday drive by. We got a couple questions today from the audience that, that I'm going to answer. Just a little side note. The phone number is 8333-Ask SDR. That's 8333-Ask SDR if you have a question that you would like, myself or When Christian's here for us to answer on the show. Go ahead. Let's go to the first question.

Hey, my name is Eris.

I'm a service manager with Motor City Lexus of Bakersfield. I've been a service manager for three years, service advisor for 13, and I have a sales background in the automotive industry for four years. Last night, I had a technician come in my office, show me his calculated worksheet from his pay stub for this pay period, and he requested a raise. He pointed out that he was making X amount of dollars when he should be making the double minimum wage. My question to you is what metrics that you can think of, any reporting that you can think of, what should I use to justify giving him a raise or scaling his pay back and providing him tools?

I appreciate the support.

Thanks a lot.

Thanks, Harris, for the question. That's a good one. So the first thing that I would think about in this scenario is, and probably the reason why you're asking the question is, you understand this is once they're asking for a raise, it's too late. Now you're in an awkward situation because they've initiated the conversation. So what I would like to do or would try to do in your scenario is I would set a plan for technicians, a career path. And that career path would involve a couple of things, right? So the first part would be school, because technicians need certain amounts of school. And they, you know, to become a master with that, whatever manufacturer, whoever they work for, they, they have to go to school, right, and pass those tests and do that whole thing and be committed to it. So school is a part of that escalation path. And then the other one is performance. And so performance is dictated by how many hours they're flagging a week. And the third category would just be their overall citizenship. You know, how, how well they fit into the culture, how many comebacks they have, that, that sort of thing. Like, just, are they a good employee overall? And usually in the beginning, if we're, you mentioned tools there. At the end, usually I will loan tools to.

Technician or give them a tool allowance to buy tools and prorate it over a couple years. So have them sign a contract that you Know, if they stay for a couple of years, those tools are forgiven. But if they leave the it's prorated and they owe me the balance because I'm just trying to hook them in and get, and get them to stay. Also you need to check with a lawyer because in every state those laws are a little bit different. But I haven't found a state yet where you can't figure out a way to do that. But, but I would literally lay out like here's what an A tech master tech is, here's the pay scale and here's a B, here's a C, here's a, you know, entry level tech or a quick lube tech, and here's the career path. And in all the studies that I've seen in the technicians that, that I interact with most turnover is created because they don't see a career path. They don't understand what the path is for them to move up and increase their income. And because we don't talk about that, we also leave out the fact that most technicians and in most shops are flat rate and they create their own paycheck. Right. So I'm imagining in this scenario that this technician's an hourly employee and he's not flat rate. And what I would be doing is trying to get them to understand that, you know, being flat rate puts them in charge of how much they make. If you want to raise just flag more hours and you know, improve your performance. So without us being able to have a conversation and just taking the question as it stands, I'm assuming that the technician is in flat rate and it's very easy to flip that around and say, well, hey, if you're making, you know, let's say they're making $16 an hour or whatever it is, I'll pay you $22 an hour. But you're going to be flat rate. So you're giving them a raise. But it's built into your cost of labor and into your performance because now it's in line with what you're selling. Just like, you know, same thing if you're selling cars and the salespeople are commission, your commissions are in line with the sales of your car. So if you're having a bad month, everybody else is having a bad month also. It's the same sort of thing with technicians and, and then being flat rate. So I would create something that's written out that is a career path and a, you know, a hierarchy of accomplishment and performance that goes along with a change in pay. So we know Entry level techs are going to make this, and in the top end, you can make this, but your flat rate. And so it, you know, it's all dependent on your performance. Hope that helps, but good question. Thanks. Let's go to the next one.

Hey, Chris, great show. I got a question for you. My dealership CSE is in the tanks. It's not because of me. It happened before I got here. My scores are actually in the 80s, 90s and hundreds. But I came up with an idea and it was just like at Home Depot. All they do every time I go into Home Depot is, please take a survey. You could win a chance at a $5,000 survey. I said to my service manager, why can't we tell customers when we're talking about the survey that we will pick one person who responded to the survey at the end of the month out of a raffle and offered them a free oil change to encourage customers to answer the survey. They said, oh, no, no, that will affect the outcome of the survey. That's buying the survey. The customers. I'm not asking them to give us, you know, if you give me a good survey, I'll give you a free oil change. I'm saying all the respondents for the month names will get picked out of a raffle and somebody will win a free oil change. Is there anything wrong with that? And do dealerships do that or what's the deal? What's a way to increase customers response to cse, you know, or Ace or whatever name your brand calls it, Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I really would like to find a way to help us get more responses every month, and I thought that might be a way. Hey, man, great show. My name's Pete and I'm from Connecticut. Really enjoy your show. I like, you know, all your team members, everybody. I learned so much from it. I really appreciate it.

Thanks.

Great question, Pete or Peter, if I'm mad at you. So what happens with manufacturers is in most dealer agreements with the dealer or in the detail of how they're running their customer satisfaction indexes and surveys is that you're not allowed to coach the client or incentivize the client in any way, or you violate the terms of your dealer agreement and you can get in a lot of trouble. And some manufacturers even ask the question on the survey if you have been coached or asked to answer this survey in. In a certain way. So you can't do it. You got to be really, really careful because it'll. It'll cause much bigger problems. And the Fines and what the manufacturer could hold over the dealership for doing that could be catastrophic and not fun. I've actually been through it a couple times. So the thing that we teach in our, in our service advisor training is not to ask for it, to commit to it. So there's a big difference. If I'm asking you to answer the survey at the end of the whole transaction, what's more effective is at the time of write up, Pete, what I would say is like, hey, Pete, when we're all done here, Honda's gonna reach out to you and ask you about your experience. I'm committing to you that not only are you gonna wanna answer the survey, but you're gonna give me a perfect score. Because you've had such a great experience. Now for any reason you don't feel comfortable with that, please tell me. Because I want to be your service advisor for a long time and I want to take care of you. I want a relationship. I want to understand how I fell short or what I could have done better. Sound fair? And then you people go, yeah, sounds fair. Now what I've done is I've put you as the client in control, but I've committed to you that I want to over deliver. So I'm not asking you just to answer the survey. I'm saying I'm going to earn the survey from you. I'm going to earn a great experience. Now if you, if you've read my book, the Millionaire Service Advisor, I talk about how when I was an advisor, what I figured out, committing to that in that way is that it changed how I behaved as an advisor. I actually upped my game. I, I called and updated the customers more. Just me committing to it up front made me a better service advisor. It made me have a greater attention to detail and over deliver to the, to the customers because I said I was going to. And there's just something to that. So you can't, you can't gamify it. It's a genius idea. You know, I, I would do that in other industries for sure that don't have the same rules as our industry does. But we would get in a lot of trouble if the manufacturer found out about that. So can't do it that way. But you know, think about the idea of committing up front. Like what if we committed to it up front? Now I understand you're trying to help your peers in the service drive and so it would require them caring and, you know, wanting, wanting to get better. And that might be beyond the scope of your influence. But it's awesome that you care and, and a great point. And your insight that, you know, your approach to it is right on. It's just there's some, you know, fine print that we would be violating with the manufacturer and with Honda if we did it that way. But thanks for the question. Both questions were great. I hope you guys have a great weekend and I'll see you next time on Service Drive Revolution.

Next week on Service Drive Revolution, we revisit a caller from the past. Chris Ford, who was a service manager, now is something else. We answer his riddle. Also, we create a ringtone that you can download and we cover all the important measurables that you should know in your department. That and more coming up 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 day, so 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.chriscollinsInc.com hi, I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.