Auto Dealer Monthly, February 2014

FEBRUARY 2014 AUTODEALERMONTHLY COM 27 tend to be more accountable for their own performance Recruit aggressively for women More on this in a moment Be willing to take on good people who are new to the position No experience means no bad habits to break Your ad doesnt have to say service advisor Use titles that will appeal to higher number of applicants such as customer service representative service secretary or administrative assistant Your goal is to interview as many applicants as possible I actually got the service secretary idea from a GM dealer He ran an ad with that title and more than 50 applicants showed up most of them women We interviewed and profi led each applicant then hired a young lady and put her on a performance based pay plan She had no technical skills and no bad habits to overcome Aft er fi ve days of training she went to work She fi nished her fi rst month at 18 HPRO By the end of her second month it was 21 She loves her new job her customers love doing business with her and as you can imagine the dealer is thrilled Next you must determine how many service secretaries you need on staff Twelve to 15 repair orders per day per person is a reasonable number Th ats customer pay and warranty ROs not including internal If your advisors are working with more than 15 customers a day and you want to grow your gross profi ts then you will need to start planning to hire more staff quickly If you are successful in growing your traffi c and fail to add staff your sales per RO will immediately begin to decline More customers should never result in less gross profi t Each advisor should be free to spend 15 minutes with each customer during the writeup and another fi ve to 10 minutes at delivery Hire that additional advisor the moment your traffi c begins to increase PRODUCTION CONCERNS Th e industry benchmark for shop productivity is 120 To meet that standard your technicians must produce 48 fl at rate hours for every 40 clock hours worked If your productivity is already at 100 or above then you need to start recruiting additional techs Your advisors will stop selling if they believe the techs are too overwhelmed to get the work done You will most likely need to recruit C level techs since that skill level represents the majority of your sales growth opportunities including vehicle maintenance and light mechanical repairs Th e aft ermarket segment thrives in that area as well about 80 market share so why not try to take some of that business back Every dealer has the opportunity to compete with the aft ermarket shops and win And remember You do yourself a disservice by failing to recruit from the aftermarket ranks Th ose techs are already accustomed to inspecting every vehicle for additional repairs and maintenance needs Now if your shop productivity is below 100 you have to determine the cause Ask your service director to prepare a 24 month trend analysis of your customer pay RO count tracked month by month Is your traffi c going up or down or fl atlining Th e only good answer is up If your traffi c is fl at or going down you can assume that your customers dont like doing business with your fi xed operations team and prefer to go elsewhere Study those CSI reports carefully and evaluate what your customers are telling you Plant your management team in the service drive during the morning rush hours to observe how your customers are being received Have them go back to observe the return process At both stages your customers should be given a clear and precise presentation on the repairs or services performed Low productivity is a direct result of a lack of selling and subpar advising by advisors as well as technicians Advisors who are not trained to eff ectively communicate with their customers will not sell enough hours to maximize technician productivity Technicians will not inspect 100 of vehicles serviced when they believe their advisors wont sell the work another reason why your advisors should not be servicing more than 15 customers per day Each of your technicians has the ability to produce more hours Its a team eff ort Focus on building gross profi t by utilizing customer driven processes that will exceed their expectations on each and every visit to your service department Make sure you have the right number of employees at the right time to support your plans for growing your operating income Make sure everyone is continually trained on doing the right things the right way If youre successful you will have given yourself the pay raise you deserve Don Reed is the CEO of DealerPro Training and one of the industrys leading experts in maximizing profits from fixed operations DReed@ AutoDealerMonthly com ISTOCKPHOTO COM JBRYSON Your next service advisor doesnt have to be an experienced technician and they certainly dont have to be male Your recruitment strategy should be focused on fi nding applicants with excellent customer service skills and no bad habits