A short YouTube Q&A where listener Brandon asks who should dispatch repair orders. Hosts Chris Collins and Christian Lafferty argue against hiring a separate dispatcher, favoring advisors (or a team leader) dispatching to their technician groups (often with a ~3:1 tech-to-advisor ratio). They acknowledge electronic dispatch systems can help but should allow advisor overrides and still usually require human 'massaging.' Humor (Chuck Norris jokes) punctuates the discussion.
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To your Friday drive by where we answer your questions. The questions that are on your mind, they keep you up at night, are keeping you from performing at your highest level. Whatever it is, service drive questions, politics, relationship, anything, whatever, we are here for you. I'm Chris Collins and this is Chris Joan. Hello everyone. If you have a question, the number is 8333 ask. Strike that down. 8333 ask SDR. If we play your question on the big show, it is the only way to get a swag bag. With service drive revolution T shirts, hats, that sort of thing.
You'Ll look good, get ready for summer your SDR swag. Okay, let's go to this week's question.
Hey Chris, this is Brandon. I called and left a message already.
About the dispatchment of work. I know I didn't say my question clearly, so here's another shot. My question is who should dispatch work or who should dispatch the repair orders? Ifixops director has taken away the ability for the service advisors to dispatch work and is solely relying on the system.
Clearly Brandon hasn't listened to that many shows because regular topic, we do not condone the hiring of a dispatcher. That would be adding another step in a fairly easy process and a whole.
Other human to payroll.
Yeah, but another step in the process which makes it more or less efficient.
Less efficient.
The more steps in any system, the less efficient.
That's right.
And so my feelings, Brandon, are that the system dictates it more than anything else. My preference if I'm setting up a shop is I do lateral support and I have either a team leader dispatch or the advisors. Most of the time I think it's the advisors that are dispatching. When I set it up, I like to have it the team of techs, kind of a three to one ratio. So three techs to each advisor. So we'd have two advisors to six technicians including quick lube techs and those advisors would dispatch to their group of technicians. I find that having the advisors dispatch does a couple things. One is it helps the advisors serve their customers better because they know what's going on and they are only hurting themselves if everything's a waiter. Right. Like if you're in an environment where you have five advisors and a dispatcher. If I write waiter an early time on all mine and get them in, the advisor that isn't doing that is going to be left holding the bag.
That's right. Which happens for sure.
Lateral support in smaller groups, the advisors in control of their own destiny. But they are only mousing themselves if they're mousing something. It also improves the advisor's ability to communicate with the customer because they know exactly what they have. They know exactly what is going, not going, coming, what they're capable of. So it ends up providing a better experience for the customers too, because there aren't those layers of communication where you think you can get something done and then the dispatcher moves things around or whatever it is.
So advisor dispatch also leads to the. When stuff does go wrong, they're way more proactive, calling the customer because they know they're the first to find out when the dispatching thing, when they're starting to get behind. Whereas in a lot of cases, if it's, let's say it's central dispatch, the text telling the central dispatch that something's behind, and then maybe there's that lag between central dispatch telling the advisor and. And the customer.
Yeah, the advisor's going and looking for it. But it's been sitting there for two hours. But it's rare that the dispatcher's calling saying, hey, this isn't gonna make it, or whatever it is.
There's only one person on the planet that I would trust to dispatch. You know who that is?
Mm.
Mm. Chuck Norris.
What's that?
Well, I mean, there's a lot of reasons, but I'm just gonna go over a couple. You know that Chuck Norris died 20 years ago, but death is still afraid to tell him?
Yeah, I've heard that.
Have you?
Yeah.
What about, you know Chuck Norris, huge about exercise, right? You know that he doesn't really do push ups. He pushes the world down.
And then finally. This is a little bit of a quiz. Okay. What do they call fear? Spiders?
Arachnophobia.
Yeah. What do they call fear of tight spaces?
Claustrophobia.
What do they call fear of Chuck Norris?
Chuck? Norphoria.
Logic.
Well, Brandon, thanks for the question. And you got a free joke out of that too. We could call that three, but no extra steps. Not a believer in dispatch in any scenario whatsoever.
And I would default to advisors dispatching, or a team leader, but probably advisors more than anything.
I do wonder if eventually electronic dispatch will get good enough. But I've never seen it where it doesn't need to be massaged. But I'm excited for what it could be.
Well, I think sometimes electronic dispatch works good as a basis, but the advisors need the ability to override it.
Yeah.
That's all.
But I do think it's headed somewhere, you know, and as these dmss get Better. Maybe. Maybe that'll help.
I don't know. At a high level, this is a different conversation, but in a high level, like, I invested in this company that is redoing the AI for, like, Netflix, and they're outperforming their AI. And so the whole thing with Netflix is they want to keep you on there, right?
Yeah.
And so they have. They. They believe their AI is worth, I don't know, a billion dollars. Because it's serving up.
Yeah. What. When you log in, what they're telling you, you should watch.
Yeah.
Is a big key.
So the thing that they found is that those AIs that are left just to the AI without any human intervention don't perform as well as if there's human intervention.
That's an interesting lesson.
And even, like, you know, Elon trying to manufacture cars without humans, he ended up having to hire a lot of humans. And that was a very costly mistake. So I think sometimes technology can be an asset, but I don't think it's going to take over to that degree.
Okay.
Because it would. There was no way it could anticipate the customers, the timeframes, the parts arrival. Like, it's a ways off. There's a lot of variables in getting your work done.
Yeah, that's true.
And which one to start, that sort of thing. Right. Yeah. And most of the time, the. The thing with the electronic dispatch is you want to keep a technician from being able to assign himself a bunch of jobs without finishing them. So they can only have so many open. Sometimes that needs to be rethought because, like, let's say a guy touches a bunch of, I don't know, Hyundai's that have engine recalls. And so he's got a bunch open.
And they never get done.
But there's people waiting to be diagnosed and, you know, so you have to have human intervention to some degree to be successful still.
Yeah. And to your point, I've never seen it where it didn't need that, but.
Could it assign an oil change or. Yeah, it could assign those. Just regular work, for sure. Thanks, Brandon. We'll get that swag bag out to you right away and we'll see everybody 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 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 8-333-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 that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins and I'll see you in the next video.
