We continue with the second instalment of our much requested series on the 5 key touch points in your service department. Darren Bedford joins us again, to provide expert guidance for your team with the vehicle drop off.
What does a good vehicle drop off look like these days? We have self-service options with 100% of upsells offered to 100% customers, 100% of the time. Is the human interaction still needed?
Although we are not talking about the vehicle health check in this episode, it’s important that the VHC is explained and it’s the last thing the customer is left with at the drop off.
Some simple actions explained in this episode that can made a big impact in your productivity and upsell success. The next instalment of this series will be the VHC.
Here are the highlights:
{00:55} 5 Touch points refresh
{08:28} What is a good number of people for service advisor to see in a day
{14:08} Look at the previous VHC
{17:05} Explain the VHC, build trust in amber work
{22:52} Air Conditioning Service
{33:02} Desk Aids
About Symco Training:
Symco Training was founded in 2000 by Simon Bowkett and it was his belief that the business had to offer its clients something different. That difference was clear to Simon from his days in the dealership when he experienced many sales trainers who had all the answers, but were unable, unwilling or both to actually show the delegate how they could be implemented. It remains the ethos of the business today. You see, Symco only employ trainers that are committed to delivering not only in spiring and insightful training, but are equally as happy to demonstrate these skills and techniques with real customers in your own showroom. We believe in order for sales training to be effective and in Simon’s words ‘real world’, it needs to be tried and tested in the only place it matters the showroom floor. There is no room for theory when your goals are for your team to sell more cars, hours or parts and retain more profit. In dealerships around the world the focus applied by many of the sales executives is to try and sell a deal. Symco specialise in getting your teams to focus on selling themselves, the product and then supporting this with the deal.
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Welcome to the Selling and the Motor Trade Podcast, an association with Symco Training. This is the weekly podcast where we share best practice tips and ideas on how to sell more cars, improve your service department and generally put more profit into your dealership or dealer group. I'm your host, Simon Bowkett. As some of you probably already know me as Skippy, I will start by saying thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. Hi, welcome to another episode of Selling and the Motor Trade. They continue our educational theories and we're going to continue the part of the service advisor. I'm joined with Darren Bedford again. Darren, how are you today? Yeah, really good, Simon. Thank you. Really good. But Darren, this is number two in this series. It might help if you just go through the five different steps that we're talking about on this series. Some people may have missed the first one. Can you run through the five steps? Yeah, sure. We're scratching the surface on these, but we're covering various little parts of what we call the five key touch points. So we look at last time pre-calls and that's centered around booking calls and pre-calls and those two in that collection. This one today, we're going to do the morning drop off, which is fairly logical. That's the next thing that happens after we've taken booking from a customer. The third one that we'll do will be the vehicle health check call. So that's where we catch up with the customer. And fourth one is we're going to end up looking at the hand back to the customer, the hand over so we call it. And then the final one is the follow up. So there we will call the five key touch points. And just as a refresher, they're the things that would influence a customer's view of whether the service they received was good. And whether they're happy, whether they've seen value for money in their purchases. Yeah. So again, if you're just coming to this episode here, number two, go back and have a look at number one, the pre-call. Don't talk slots about how when things go wrong, it's often because the pre-call hasn't been done right. Now, again, it's not just a pre-call. Some businesses out there, you have a call center that takes all the bookings. Some service advisors have to do it themselves though. And these are just snippets from outselling today's service advisor program that down runs for some co-training. So let's get into the meat of this one. We're dropping the car off in the morning. And I want to start off with a question actually. The service and the customer, did they get involved with the customer morning? Or these days, we've got more and more of these automated drop-off systems where you just put your big tail down, you drop the jeans in, you get the feet of the loan car, it's out there. It's out there. It must make a lot quicker for dealing with customers. This drop-off, if it's still relevant? Yeah, I think very much so Simon. I think like most of what we work on, it's the people to people side of our business that always comes true in the end. I think what I would paraphrase that with is if you have a kind of sterile system or a sterile way of creating your customers and there's no event to what they're doing, then of course it does screen line it. And you've only got to look at the supermarkets as a comparator there. We've all now ended up in the supermarket where we're scanning our own goods and our own bits and pieces going through that. I've seen a big rise in the amount of places where they get back people on the tilt. I've also seen them doing a lot more to engage with the customers when they're on the tilt. But actually only the other week, there was a really good example that underpins exactly what I'm saying. It might work for me to go in, drop the keys off, get out of there, perceiving that I get out of there quite quickly and I've speeded up the whole process as a customer. But even as I said to you last week, there was a situation in the Sainsbury's where there was a problem and it was that time of night when all the yellow stickers come out, you know, there's all the people sort of picking up bargains as they've gone around the shop. But the computer system wasn't recognizing anything that was reduced. So what you then ended up having was this huge chaotic situation at those self-service tilts where people couldn't scan their own shopping. They're all waiting on the one person who was whizzing up and down having to override it. There were 10 or 15 items in some instances, so they actually needed somebody working with them on all of those items to get them through. And you have people, I won't repeat some of the colourful language that was being used. I can imagine people walking out and just leaving their basket of three or four items that are shopping just because the chaos that ensued around it. So I know you always talk about this in your courses, but is that effect in terms of what that human creates within that environment is part of it? But what we really want is somebody there with something going on to be able to deal with it. So I think the destinies in our own hands, you know, if we just make it a sterile experience, then the computer might work, you know, it might give them that benefit. It might even give them that perceived speed of operation, but actually a really good service advisor can make that experience, fun, can make it interesting for the customer when they come in, can be equally as quick, can be a lot more informative. And at the end of the day, you turn people into customers for life if you do it properly. Yeah, it's quite interesting because they are popping up everywhere now and I get why they're popping up. And I suppose from my experience, it's like, you and I, we travel a lot on airplanes and you used to go and check in and go and speak to someone. Now there's a self check in, you drop your bag in and it comes out there. Now that I know how it works, I'll work through that because I'm on an airplane once every two weeks minimum. And I just want to go straight there. However, there's always Mr and Mrs. Customer that are going on there once a year journey to see their kids, they're flying to Dublin to see their kids or something like that. And they just can't get to work. And it causes that frustration. And you get the good airlines, the, the, you know, I sat at the airlingus of the world. They always have people floating around there to pick them up and take them through the straight away. You have, how I say it from the airlines that might be a bit low cost. It's like tough. Can't work it out. That sounds like a personal problem almost. So I think these systems, if, if you're a service advisor listening to this and you've got one of these systems, okay, please keep an eye on them. Okay. And the other thing I would say is something I learned from them, these systems where they are. They're like the car wash. We did one and one liter chop off of a boil. We want the air conditioning service. It's amazing how much just a customer reading it says, go on then. I'll do that. So one thing I've learned from those things is you service as actually offer everything every single time. Yeah. That's what you get with the computer, isn't it? You get 100% of the products offered to 100% of the people 100% of the time. And you know, it's a numbers game there afterwards because there will be people that go, you actually put that in. That's a good idea. Do you know what last time I was driving down the road? I'd find somebody to buy that one of these at the top of a boil. If you don't ask that question, you'll convert 100% of nothing, won't you? So yeah, no, it's very important. So we're going to focus on the service advisor where they're dropping off. And I'm sure you're going to talk about setting the agenda and talking about the vehicle health check and what's going to happen. But and I will come back to this. I also want to get your views on if someone has got these systems, how do they set this the agenda on the vehicle health check and when's the best time to do it? So maybe it's good if we go through exactly how they set the agenda and then I'll get your views on what they should do if they have one of these automated systems out there. But again, the questions I get all the time, speaking to a service advisor is what's a good number of people for a service advisor to see every day? Should they be seeing 20 people a day? Hopefully that's a note. Okay, should they be seeing two people a day? What's the right number? And it's that easily because that's the question gets stronger at us all the time, normally by the overworked service advisor, I might say. Yeah, absolutely right. So I can kind of understand it and I certainly concur with it. He's a favorite question. Well, what's the number of people that I should be seeing because the other day I had 14 or whatever, ensure there's no simple answer because different people set up in different ways. Some people have booking centers. So that's clearly removed from the service advisors work. It depends on the number of service advisors that you have as well. I often think if it's one service advisor that's greeting people in the morning pretty much all the time, then it's probably easier to handle a larger volume. When there's two, you then want a lot of interaction and communication between them so that everybody's updated and there's a lot more systems and processes in place. It's going to involve a lot more teamwork for one of the better description. And then that goes up again and again, as you added more three, four, five service advisor, the level becomes more robust systems and more processes that make sure everybody's doing the same thing. So it's a little bit difficult to ask, but I suppose fundamentally, this is the point that I always come back to as far as what sets the busyness of that site. And if we just looked at say two service departments and let's say, for instance, they both have to achieve 40 hours a day. That's their plan. That's what they're hoping to achieve. This is really simple maths and I don't mean it to be that way. But if each of those vehicles was in your workshops for an hour, okay, so if you've got 40 hours to sell and you've got a vehicle that's in there on average for an hour, each of your vehicles, then you'd need to see 40 vehicles. Yeah, makes sense. 40 hours to be a voice out. Bear in mind that, you know, a lot of the cars now when they come through don't even get an hour for a service. You know, the first service on a car is less than an hour. Often small repairs, those sorts of things come into equations. So actually an hour is quite, you know, it might seem like it's a small amount, but it's quite difficult to achieve even to sometimes for some manufacturers to get to that time period. Look at it a slightly different way though. If you move that from one hour so that you saw those vehicles actually for two hours, each vehicle came in, it was on the ramps and you were able to invoice two hours off against that car. How many cars do you need to see now? Dead simple. It's been hard to be not bad. Half. And the one question I'd ask you then is who's got the busiest role at those dealerships? Who's the person that if you've got 40 cars coming in, okay, your daily function becomes managing what's going on on a day, you know, in the moment and in the moment only. If you slow that whole operation to the point that you're actually booking it sensibly, you're contacting people about items that need to be done and they're caught argue looking for things that may need to be done at that particular time. Things like air conditioning, brake fluid changes, depends on your manufacturer how they work. Other functions that you do, you're keeping that vehicle for longer. You're also building into your work schedule some time to do the upsell work that you actually get during the course of the day. If you get that work done, it just makes your whole efficiency go through the roof. So it's often the busier places are actually as a result of not spending the time of the preparation and the planning and the bits we were talking about last time that then create this wheel. And unfortunately, it's a bit like one of those hamster wheels. The faster you run on it, the faster it's going to go. You've got to actually step off that to stop the thing. Running faster and faster and faster won't help because I'll give you a prime example, Simon, how many times have we seen where we speak to a person and we get no vehicle health check back at four o'clock in the afternoon? Well, my argument there is you're going to then go out to the technician and go, great news. They want the brakes. That's no good. I've already put the car back outside. It's all boxed up. You'll have to re-book and we'll get back in. So we now compound the issue because we re-book that car back in for a small repair, again, down the road, down the track, three or four days later, or whatever it is to get that repair sorted out. In our efficiency comes through the speed of operations within that department. If we don't have that, we end up in a situation where the work that comes into us just ends up stacking up and it's, sorry, it's keeping using these analogies, but it's a bit like that production line that just keeps delivering pieces or whatever passed you and they just, the quality goes down and down and down because of the speed. Eventually, they all fall off the end. Well, we're talking about Red and Amber Upsilon. So often, service departments, they're too busy to do it because that's exactly what you're talking about. We've got the car in there in an hour. It's got to get in. It's got to go out. We've got to get the loan card. We've got to phone the customer. Just haven't got time to do it. Slow it down. Find more work. Keep it on the ramp for longer because you're finding more work. It is really chicken and egg though, isn't it? I mean, I think it's worth saying I'm not talking about going looking for work that doesn't need to be done. I want to make that 100% clear. What I'm so looking about though is we've maybe have that previous vehicle health check so we can have a look at that previous vehicle health check to see if there might be some things on there that may need doing this time around. We know that that vehicle may be booked in for a repair, but is that the right repair? In particular, if it's a booking center, sometimes they might book in a service, but when we have a look at it, it should be a B service or whatever, there might be things on top of that that you're company offer that you could get that vehicle done while that car's in as well. Even to have to accessories and things like that, how many times we talked about the person who buys a car and then goes and gets a set of hats from an independent or something like that? It depends on your own setup and your own systems that you have in place, but there's a wealth of items that we could be fitting to those vehicles, dog guards, tow bars, those sorts of things, all of which is, while that vehicle is in with this, just gives us an opportunity. Okay. Also, from you, of course, you talk lots about the importance of video, and I don't think anyone listening to this would think that video isn't a real important part of a modern service department. But do we really want it dominating the conversation at the drop-on? Yeah, it's a really good question, Simon. It's one of those that I think we often hear in the roles that is about spinning plates and of course, the new plate that comes along, we put some effort behind it and we're spinning that plate whilst perhaps taking the grants, it's some of the stuff that's in place for us. I look at video like this. It's a fantastic tool. Okay. It's brilliant for backing up what you say. It's certainly a picture pane of thousand words in terms of sometimes if you're explaining to a customer, but you can actually show them something bad. That is a whole heap more visual and helps the person understand perhaps what that repair is. But video is this. Some people will watch video, not everybody will. Some people will watch it multiple times at strange hours of the night, 10 o'clock in the evening, 10 times. We can't control it, we can't legislate for it. What I do know is very little of the video is actually watched within what I would call the golden hour, the sufficient time for that decision to be made to give your technician the approval to go on and get that work done. We should bear that in mind. It's a tool for us as a service advisor to use when we have that conversation. The reason why I'm stressing that is this. What I've found is a lot of people have dropped off the importance of the vehicle health check. We would always do on the course a restatement of those. If you think about the five key touch points that we've talked about, what's coming next is, later on I'm going to be finding this customer to talk them through the work that needs doing on their car. I'm going to want to make sure that I explain fully how all process works and how easy it is for the customer to make a decision. My morning drop off would be, hey listen Simon, while your car's in with us today, we're going to complete a complimentary vehicle health check. Listen, most of those items I'm sure are going to be agreeing, they'll be good to go. Any amber items, what we're doing is we're letting you know that they might not make it to the next service. But listen, any of those red items, I'll be straight up the phone because we need to get those sorted out for you today. The reason why we leave that statement is multifaceted. It will be one of the last things that I leave in the customers mind. I'm obviously going to follow it up with a vehicle health check and I'm going to use the same lines. What I'm clearly doing is telling the customer how the process that we use to evaluate the work, how simple the system is and how easy it is for them to be able to prioritize what needs to do. So if I leave that clear explanation, I'm not expecting the customer to remember it, but it means when I do pick up the phone and I speak to them later, I can bring those pictures back again and of course using the color, we all think pictorially, we don't see the words written down. But what we do is a little bit of amber flushes into our head. When we say green, you know, little bit of green, you know, red, you know, it all conjures up in the back of the mind. Okay, I can see how this method works. Lead on a positive. Hey, listen, most of your items are going to be green. They're good to go. We build some trust in the amber. Hey, listen, if there's amber items, what we're doing is we're just advising you that they might not make it to the service. But the ones we really do need to sort out their red ones. Now of course, nobody's going to have an issue with that state because they've not got any red work on their car, but they clearly understand how the system works. Yeah, I know I'm asking you to do a two day today's service advisor training course with all the follow up in like a half now a little bit here. But can for a service advisor listen this, would you just run through the drop off there again? What are you actually going to do? So they're dropping the car, they come and speak to them. Just will it point some of the things they're going to do there? And again, it depends on your processes, the systems in place. But when I've done this on the course with people, we normally come up with about 20 operations that we need to run through with that particular customer. Anything from sort of taking the details down of the car to loan car information, to you know, seeing driving licenses, all of those factual things that kind of have to be done. And he's going to vary for each of your customers, which obviously again makes it a somewhat of a slightly difficult task. And that's why I recommend that what we actually did was get down on paper, what we want good to look like, what do we want to cover at that morning drop off and then start using those as grips to make sure that you're doing it with every single customer, every single time without fail. And the reason why that's so important is this, I can guarantee you the one that you don't do it with will be the one that blows up in your face. You know, it's if you don't explain the payment methods to somebody, maybe drop off, that's going to be the one that causes your problem, potentially later on. But in terms of the actual drop off, what I would tend to do is go through all of the kind of bits and pieces that you'd need to do, the routine stuff and all of those items that you might be expected to do. But I'd always leave that customer right at the very end by the extent, and I'll just run through exactly the same thing. Listen, Simon, while you're causing with us today, we'll complete a complimentary vehicle health checks, dead simple, well, some traffic light bases. If there's any, there should be, you know, mostly your items should be green. They're good to go. If there's any amber items, what we're doing is we're letting you know that they might not make it to the next service. But hey, listen, if there's any red, I'll be straight on the phone because we need to get those sorted out of here. Now there is a finish to that, which I'll touch on later, that will also help make sure that you can get back in contact with those individuals and things like that. But, you know, in essence, that's a quality kind of explanation of how the day is going to run, because that car's going to go in, and that vehicle health check should be back with the service advisor, not when the car's nearly finished, not while the oil's being dropped, not while the car's done and boxed up and put back outside, but it needs to be done the minute that car comes in, and it needs to be back with the service advisor. You know, in my world, if we could have a big clock on the roof of each car ticking with an hour ticking away, it'd be really interesting because, you know, we've got the technicians' time. Let's give them 10 minutes to get that done. You know, then it goes perhaps through to pass for them to put the parts on their, well, 20, let's give them 20 minutes to get it done. Then it comes back to the service advisor to get in contact with the customer. Let's give them 20 minutes because we're not going to be able to drop everything and dive straight onto it. We're already talking about there 40 to 50 minutes of that hour. So before you're in a position where somebody's actually talking to a customer to get the go ahead, what you've got to look at is anything past that is affecting your efficiency of your technicians standing around. Efficiency and morale. You know, what technician wants to be standing there going, are they going to prove it on they're going to prove it? Do you know what? Let's put it back together again. I only to find out if they manage to upsell it. Well, what about time bound stuff like a conditioning service? When you're building that into your drop off, or are you doing an extension service up the prequel? Are you doing it with a drop off, or are you doing that on the vehicle health check call? No, that's a great question. And I'll tell you where most of them take place in my experience, they generally happen as part of the vehicle health check. They don't need to. I would certainly at morning drop off that would be the point I would be explaining that to each and every customer. It's worth noting now as well, don't just do that in the summer months. I know we're coming into December's and things like that, but it's an all year round operation. If that calls over two years old, then it needs to, but it's a time bound operation. Okay, which means that you don't need Andy, a technician to specify that it needs to. And of course, by handling that up front, okay, and you either put that into your bookings process, or you may be put it into your drop off process where you have that conversation. That's again, another great way to increase the time that that vehicle is going to be on your ramps. Because if you have the conversation there and then the customer says, yes, the other thing about it is that operation is giving you more time on the ramps. Technicians is a lot more productive because that could be worrying away while he's completing the work. But also the other part of it is it's never going to be sacrificed. What I mean by that is I've seen situations where service advisors phoned up and said, you've got a problem with your brakes and your air conditioning. And customers virtually about to say, yes, to an air conditioning service. And then goes, oh, well, if the brakes need to do the brakes, leave the aircon. Well, the aircon is no less important just because the brakes need to do it. So again, if we've got that in and we've got that work up front, then we don't stand the chance to get both of those repairs as well. I just absolutely love the air conditioning because of course we're plugging the machine in and do its magic while the technician's getting onto other parts of it. And there's nothing worse than my bug there. And you've been there is when the vehicle health check is coming through after the job's being done. Okay. The customer says, yep, get the tires done. Get the air conditioning service. Yeah, I'll do all that. And of course, what's the tech doing? Find the car, get it back on the ramp. It's why it's on the ramp. The efficiency is it's even a great example of this. I'm at the air conditioning. Imagine that that cause got an hour service. You've got your hour clocks ticked away. Okay. And all it needs is in the air conditioning service, but we, you know, Andy, our techs highlighted that to us. So we've then contacted the customer and sold that air conditioning. All looks positive on the, on the upside of it. But here's the negative. Okay. It's then going to have to be with Andy stood over it while the machines were in a way doing all of its tricks. And he's not actually going to be able to do anything else while that's happening. Whereas actually if that was done right at the booking process or done at the drop off process, he'd be able to incorporate that within the work suit just becomes more efficient as an individual. So, you know, these are the little, little things that will move that needle, we move those bookings. We might not go from one hour to two hours, but we can certainly move that up some degrees. And also notice from your guide that, could you give everyone a guide when they go through and these are the things they should do on those five touch points there. And something that just brings to mind there is the best method to reach you today. It's not just and your phone number is and your email address. I suppose it's a method to contact this morning, isn't it? This morning is definitely the way to do it. Okay. Well, you don't want to do shoot yourself in the foot if you're not getting these back through. But if you're not, I'd urge you to speak with your manager and say, we need to sort this out because until they come through and they are treated the importance that they are, you know, that they have, then your efficiency will never evolve. But yeah, that that came out of it. We've all been there, you know, that if we don't have a process that we're working to morning drop off. All right, Simon, I've got you. Let me just check your email, email, sign in that. Yeah. Okay. Fantastic. Your mobile number is yeah. Okay. You know, but fine. See you by off Simon goes. I guess it's even more important these days because if you've spoken to them once on a particular number, there's no guarantee that it wasn't a day that they were working from home or it's a high, you know, they have high breed roles, all these different things that go on these days, you can't assume that that's going to be the best way to contact that individual, even if you've got previous experience. So we changed all that checking the addresses to, hey, listen, we're going to need to get hold of you. What's the best method? And that, again, it just ties in with the vehicle health check. So we finish off the vehicle health check explanation, you know, on that point, if there is any red work, Simon, why is the best method to get hold of you this morning? Because if Simon can't take a call at work, you know, he might be able to say, well, actually, I can't take a call. But if he texts me, I'll be all right because I made a meeting and I'll do it below the zoom light. Okay. It might be that he has to say, do you know what? I can't take a call, do a text or see emails because I'm tied up all day, in which case you can at that point arrange with somebody, you know, the plan that if there is anything, who do I now need to speak to? And again, what you're preventing there is a log jam of people that we've got a vehicle health check completed for, but we can't actually get back to them. So it's these little things that make the difference move the needle. And you remember I was saying to you, Simon, in the last session, and this is fundamentally where it comes from, is this, if you don't start to take those little actions, what does happen in your environment is things go wrong. When things go wrong, you have to find the time to put them right. You have to get that banger involved. You have to go and collect back customers car. You have to get an extra clean done on it. You have to almost witness that one customer's car through the system to ensure nothing happens because we're now in the hands of the gods that if it's something's gone wrong with them once, there's a high probability that something else totally beyond your control may well happen as well. So it's really, yeah, absolutely. And this is where I just want to reiterate how all these five touch points touch in together because you're needing time to do all this. And on the pre call, if you haven't made sure they're coming in at quarter two nine, nine o'clock or quarter past nine, this is where you might have three or four people deep waiting for you. Of course, the poor service buyers that is rushing through this and not doing that properly. So they really do it so many times we get service management. They just help us with upsell, just help with the net promoter scores. But actually, it's you got to get all the touch points right, haven't you? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing I think I only fed to point out we're scratching the surface on the content before we go into it, be sure sort of sound bites that we're doing here. You know, so there are things that we won't necessarily mention that, you know, we would do a drop off. It's not an exhaustive list, but it's just a pointer is to some of the ways that you can screen like your systems and usual kind of pitfalls from all the courses that we've run that give us that kind of, you know, these are some of the common issues because, you know, the problem that you have is if you don't have your systems in place, the rarity of each of those incidents that can happen, be that we don't necessarily draw conclusions that we need to do something about it, you know, a particular area because, you know, it was three weeks ago, the same problem happens. So therefore, we don't think it's necessarily that important. But again, I highlight another thing. And that's what we do know is lots of your customers out there won't always tell you if there's a problem. So, you know, if you've been told that it's a problem once or even twice, then there's a good chance there's others out there that will fall in exactly the same category just because you haven't heard from it doesn't necessarily mean it's not something worth looking at just changing, you know, there's loads of information out there these days. Customers are surveyed by Google, they're surveyed by the manufacturers, all those sorts of things. But there's very little that pulls all that together. I'd just say anything that's raised as an issue, look how you can improve it because if you've got strong systems, you can start to build stuff in there to improve that naturally. I'm going to have a little bit of a bet with you now. So with the five points, we talk about the prequel, OK, or taking the booking depending on the business, this is the drop off in the morning. Our next one is called the actual upsell call. With these podcasts, we have so much data. I almost bet so many people go straight to number three and like, get the guys to do the red and amber work. We need more upsell, upsell, upsell. Do you think that's what's going to happen? Now, if that is the people that go straight to it, I urge them to come back and listen to these two first. You've got to get the prequel, you're going to get the drop off right if you're going to have any chance of getting the upsell bit of it right. Yeah. I know it's just cliched as anything, but unless you've opened something up properly, you've got no chance of closing that. And it's the same in sales world. You know how many times you're often asked to go in and help somebody on closing and bits and pieces like that. It's seldom actually in that area because actually, if you do a really good job, then the clothes almost becomes natural, just becomes that kind of, yeah, well, why wouldn't I go ahead and do it? It's just that logical. So it's the part where it's often gone wrong is actually the early parts of that process. Yeah. I think you haven't talked about that. I know it's for time there, but I suppose we'll shoot more in the end. I know you always like to have the vehicle help check laminated on the service visors desk so they can point out it's going to look just like this. There'll be three different colors there. Some people, I just want to get your views on why that could help the service advisor. Do you know what it's more to do with this? More as an 8-bit, more funnily enough to the service advisor as much as it is to the customer. You know, the customer benefits from that information. Funnily enough, of course, once I had somebody say to me about the vehicle health check saying, wow, customers have seen vehicle health checks. They know what they look like. They've been around for years. OK. And probably somebody who invented it, I would imagine that came out there. You met the guy once, didn't you? Yeah. Yeah, I've met a few people that were responsible for vehicle health checks in my time. Yeah. None of them the same person, but a few people. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, principally they happen around for ages, but my kind of comment with that was, well, look, I get to the dentist, you know, every 12 months if I'm lucky, six months if I'm not. And they show out all these commands and, you know, somebody diligent, he writes it down and all that. I've been doing that for many, many years and I still haven't got a clue what's going on. You know, this is your domain and this is how your systems and your processes work and the vehicle health check underpins all of that. You know, clarity in that area is a huge part of it. I don't want to go too much into that because we're going to, you know, do that next session. But, you know, the amount of times I hear a service advisor give out conflicting information with things like, you know, Simon, you've got a couple of tires there in hand, but so we'd recommend you do something about that in the future. But also, Andy, our technicians recommended that you get that air conditioning service done. You know, he's advised that that needs to do it. If you start using the same words, advise, as, but advises red, what I often talk about is you end up with like a muddy brown color, you know, keep it clear how it works, ready stuff that needs to do today. Okay. It doesn't mean because you put it in red that you're spending that customer's money because the customer still has the choice to make the decision, but you're the professional, you're the expert in this in your opinion or your technicians opinion, which is what these people have paid for that needs doing today. And it's as simple as that really. What complicates is we kind of put in their language that kind of takes down the importance of it. And as you know, as you know, all too well, the body language is often a lot of what the customer picks up on and think, well, if they don't, it gets that thought they'll do something quickly, then I'm all right. You know, one of those springs to mind is the tire situation there. How many times we've had people, you know, phone up and say, Mr. Customer, your tire, it's currently a 2.6 millimeter. And the customer says, well, what's the legal limit? Well, 1.6 millimeters. Oh, I've got plenty of time then, haven't I? You know, as a service advisor, I've got nowhere to go with that. But actually get your tire depth gauge out and look how fit the millimeter is. Just set your tire depth gauge to a millimeter and look at how much notice you're giving that customer. You know, it will dilute the message with some of our languages. Well, listen, let's talk about that call on the next one of these sessions there. So listen, if people want some of your tips and ideas there, the best way is to reach out at darren.bedford at Sanco Training or LinkedIn. We've got cheat sheets. We've got lots of stuff there that they're welcome to. Absolutely. Yeah. So on the next in the series there, which comes out, it's going to be all about the vehicle health check with call, the upsell call. And again, I think there's lots of people going to drive straight into that one. So if you haven't heard that one yet, well done. I'm impressed. Okay, and we'll see you next time, Darren. Great. Thanks very much, son. That just leads me to say that all details of this episode and other episodes on the selling in the motor trade can be found on our website simcotraining.co.uk. Go there to get a copy of our book, Words That Sell Cars. Go there to sign up to a free trial of our sales fitness online sales training program. Easiest way to get hold of me is Simon Bowkett through LinkedIn. Thank you.
