Chris Collins argues that digital vehicle inspections (DVIs), though widely adopted, can reduce service-department sales when poorly designed. Using MPI as an example, he explains DVIs often flag many ‘marginal’ items, auto-send itemized estimates and prices, and undermine advisor credibility—leading customers to shop and decline work. Collins emphasizes focusing on outcomes (do sales and customer experience improve?) rather than blindly adopting processes; he favors phone outreach and advisor conversation over impersonal emailed inspection reports. The clip closes with CTAs (8333 Ask SDR; offers.chriscollinsInc.com).
Chapters
I think in, in, in all of this, the, the most important thing. And this applies to everything. In fact, this, there's a section about this in the leadership book in the sense that I believe that one of the things that makes me better than most at business and fixing systems and understanding things is the fact that my, my.
My attention naturally gravitates towards the outcome of things where most people's attention gravitates towards the, the noise, the friction, the drama, the tension. And they get stuck there, right? And so they, they get stuck in the symptoms, not the cause. And so in a, in a situation. And I'll, I'll give you the, this analogy. We've talked about this before. I think recently.
Everybody'S going to digital.
Inspections. And there's this company called mpi and a lot of the manufacturers were trying, you know, because service departments historically are very inefficient. They don't do good inspections. They, they don't, you know, they're. Most of the time, they don't even have enough product capacity or production to do the work if they offered it right. And advisors are worried about csi. It's just all, all kinds of issues. And so the idea is, well, if we have a digital inspection and we track everything, that's better than nothing in a, in a sense, which is maybe true, really. But we weren't doing nothing. So it wasn't better than what we were doing. But I would get, I would get, you know, threats and the whole thing, like, you got to put this in. And I'd be like, well, it. Whenever I put it in, the sales go down. And if you guys want to pay me, I'll fix your, you know, I would tell MPI this. I'm like, I'll fix your guys thing if you want to pay me. But your thing is flawed. Like it doesn't. And oh, you're a n. You know, you're, you're old school, you don't understand. But the, you know, all the stuff that people do when you don't agree with them or whatever. But the truth of the matter is, is your sales would go down when you put that in. If you put that in and everybody followed it, your sales would go down. And the reason why you're so I'm focused on do my sales go up or do they go down. That's all I care about. Like, am I, is the customer experience better or worse? If it's worse, why am I going to do it? Because everybody else is doing it. Because we love technology. Why to me it just doesn't make any sense why I would do some, why I would spend all that money doing disrupt the system than to have my numbers go down. Like, it doesn't, it doesn't make any sense. Now the reason why the numbers were going down is because in npi the tech would fill it out, parts, would put the parts in there. It would email these customers anything that was yellow, that was marginal, which was half of the car. If the car's four years old, the belts are marginal, the hoses are marginal, they don't need to be replaced. But they're not perfect. They're not green. Yeah, but they're not red. But it would send an estimate for everything to a customer. So a customer would get this thing and it would, they instantly, they'd be like, there's no way, there's no way I need belts and hoses. And this. So in. You're instantly losing all credibility with them. You can't read them, you're not talking to them or whatever. And then it would put the price on there. And so you'd have all these broken out prices that your breaks are at 20. It would quote them even though they could go to 15 or what, you know, whatever it is. And so we would launch these things. The customers would look at it. This is what would happen a lot of times is they would call around and shop and so then they would find somebody who would do it cheaper. They'd pull their car out. What happens when they get to Joe Schmo service department with this laundry list of stuff and they look at it and what do they tell the customer? You didn't need any of that stuff. Yeah. And it.
So terrible design of the thing. Now then you get to the point, okay, you can turn off the yellow. It still is. You're giving somebody a shopping list and you have no way of selling value. They would have these videos like you thought customers were going to click on links and go watch videos on break fluid. Like customers don't want that. So now if I, if I tell a customer, hey, the technician has, has checked, checked it out and there's some things that need to be addressed. Call me when you get a chance and I get them on the phone. Do I have a better chance of selling the work they need by getting them on the phone or sending them a random email?
Thanks so much for watching this clip of Service Driving Revolution. 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.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see.
