Lately, I seem to be having the same conversation over and over with clients. The story or complaint from the dealer usually sounds something like this … “My customer pay work is dropping”, “My service department keeps my customers waiting too long”, “My service department isn’t taking care of my customers well”, or “I don’t know why we can’t get any customer pay work.”Customer Pay Work
The question I usually start with is “Who is more important, you or the customer?” The first reaction is usually the look that screams, what are you talking about? Mr. Dealer does you, your general manager, or your used car manager complain regularly to the service department that your vehicles aren’t ready fast enough? Have you ever said, “I’m your best and biggest customer” to your service department? Have you ever said, “I don’t care about your customer pay work, I want my internals completed?”
If you say those things long enough and loud enough to your service department, they hear you. Not only do they hear you, but they also hear “internal work matters more than customer pay”. At that point, their priorities of the work shift and the customer drop to the bottom of the list. The customer who comes in off the street needing an oil change now gets to sit and wait for hours because your lifts are full of internal vehicles being reconditioned.
Require a Service Walk with Every Vehicle.
Let’s back up a bit and look at a few issues from the beginning. Is your sales team doing a service walk with your customers 80 percent of the time? That’s about the percentage you should be at if they are doing a service-walk with every customer sold during the hours your service department is open. Most stores close their service department before the sales department, which is why most stores can’t hit 100 percent of the time. This is the first step in making your customers a priority.
It doesn’t matter if the service-walk is 10 feet from the sales desk to the service counter; the distance is not the point, the opportunity is. If your sales team takes every customer to meet the service manager or a qualified service writer, you set the stage for returning service work. The service manager will have an opportunity to set up the first oil change appointment. Many stores offer this for free or at a discounted price just to get the customer back that first time. The wrong thing to do is to have your sales team say “when you have trouble with your vehicle Mr. Customer, you can bring it back here and they will take care of you”. Because what the customer hears is “I will have trouble with my vehicle and the dealership will pay for it.
Have a Process In Place to Address Both Customers & Internals.
Now if you have a service-walk in place in the sales process, you need to reemphasize the importance of your customer to the service team. The customer in front of the counter or in the waiting area is the most important customer they have. It is no different than the sales floor. If you have a customer on the lot and a customer on the phone, who is the most important? The one on the lot is the most important. It doesn’t mean you should ignore the one on the phone, it simply means you have a process in place to address both of them. The same thing has to happen in your service department. The customer vehicle that needs repairs is the highest priority, but you still have to have processes in place to get the internals completed.
If your team begins prioritizing the customer and internals are suffering, then you need to review your processes. Is dispatching being done properly? The level of skill required to do the job needs to be assigned appropriately for timely completion. Do you have a parts bottleneck? Or is it that you simply don’t have enough technicians or service writers to handle the workload? It might be that your buying cycles are too inconsistent and its feast or famine in the department. There can be a number of issues preventing your team from being able to juggle both well. Identify the issue and address the root cause.
Provide Customers for Your Service Department.
Now if you have a service walk in the place, and your service department is now prioritizing your customers but you simply don’t have enough customers coming to the service department, that’s an entirely different issue. What are YOU doing to help that? Dealers will spend thousands of dollars a month to drive traffic to the salesman and expect him to sell cars, but when they want more customer pay work in the service department, they often expect the service manager and service writers to miraculously find the new customers on their own. I have yet to meet a service manager or service writer who has a marketing degree, and even if they did, wouldn’t it be unrealistic to expect them to market without a budget?
Decide Who Is More Important.
To conclude let’s circle back to the original question, “Who is more important, you or the customer?” If you answer “you” (internals) then your customer pay work isn’t likely to grow. However, if your customer is more important, put them first, and most importantly, communicate that in words and action to the service department, and your customer pay work will likely grow again.