This is the first part of a series on the 5 key touch points in your service department. We are joined by Darren Bedford to discuss the first point, which is the booking and pre-call.
We hear from a lot of service advisors that they just don’t have enough time. Well one of the first things you can do to improve this, is to have a robust system in place for bookings and pre calls.
Don’t miss this episode if you are looking to fine tune your service department.
Here are the highlights:
{01:18} 5 Touch points
{03:50} Where problems can start
{05:40} Rugby pass
{07:15} Bookings compared to service work
{11:09} Other garages problems
{15:45} Good pre-call
{25:00} Top Tips
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.
To find out more visit
www.symcotraining.co.uk
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. Some of you probably already know me as Skippy. I want to start by saying thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. Hi and welcome to another episode of Selling and the Motor Trade. Today I'm joined with Darren Bedford and we're going to be talking all things service. And over the next few episodes we're going to be talking about the key touch points in the service department and what you can do if you're a service manager, general manager, head of business, what you can go and look at in your service department to get the best possible results you can. So firstly I just want to say welcome back, welcome aboard Darren. Thanks to having Simon. Really looking forward to this one. So listen we're going to be talking about the five key touch points and maybe some other stuff that people need to look at in the service department. Do you want to start talking about what are those five key touch points people really need to start considering? Yeah I always kind of look at the things that are going to drive the money on the day that the people come in and customer satisfaction throughout the business. And I think that really comes out to the five key touch points where you're doing them with the customer. So you're always going to have your booking is your initial thing and what I do is put pre-cooling with that because obviously if a booking agent books it maybe as a stronger pre-cool process, if it's down to yourself that's booked it and it's fairly short lead time you may do all of that work on the booking. I know there's lots of dealerships that operate different sides out there. The next phase once that's done is you're going to have the vehicle dropped off to you in the morning by the customer and there's another interaction there. We're going to have the vehicle health check call during the day. Finally the handover is going to happen later on in the day and then the end part of that is your follow up call to the customer. So all five of those key points have an area to kind of influence your business that you're doing on the day or they actually have the ability to sort of change the customer's point and it needs a bit of a road. It might be the booking experience wasn't great but you pick it up and win it when they're in with you. It might be the booking experience was fantastic but when you got to the actual drop off it didn't live up to that session. So you can be pulled back at any point but they are realistically the five key touch points that are going to drive your business. Listen down as always we're in danger of giving one of your great two day training courses on day service advisor. So maybe we need to really cut this down and let's just be talking about the booking and the pre-call. So can you guys know why you're combining both of those together the booking and the pre-call? Yeah it's really simple and it's sort of eluded a little bit there. Not everyone has a robust process for bookings and I'll give you some examples of that for pre-call sorry. I'll give you some examples of that. If you are taking a booking course or in a small team yourself you're booking for a short league time then very often some of those questions I think that people look at can be very repetitive. You know funding them two days later you don't. You did still want a loan car. This is the work you're still booked in for. Sometimes probably is a difficult call so I find in those situations sometimes that's swerved but I certainly think in a bigger organisation where a booking centre or call centre may have taken the booking there's always a process in place for pre-call. The biggest question that I'd always ask there straight away is how many of those people we get in contact with because if you've got 100% of the people coming in on that day let's say that's 30 people but actually our pre- calls only reach 20 of those people then a third of those people haven't had the same experience or the same information and they perform that's genuinely my book that's where you put them start to happen. You know it's little things that can be out there like payment details. You know there's lots of places now that won't accept cash that won't accept you know American Express get things like that that needs to be upfront otherwise that's a potential issue that's going to happen later that will take loans more time. Even since in the dealership the other day customer turned up for the loan car with their dog. Okay and again these things can happen they could have been nipped in the bud earlier on I suppose. But that's exactly what I saw. And then anybody who sat on my calls will know this is one of my favourite ones because if you ask a service advisor where they can get more you know what they want they all go on my time and I can't you know magic or one to give them that time but what I can say to them is this if you can have robust and strong systems that actually limit the amount that goes wrong then that's where you get your extra time from because I'm telling you this when a problem happens you have to find the time to put that problem right. You have to get a driver involved to pick their car up you have to phone them ten times rather than the maybe two that you needed to do before you maybe have to get a manager involved. We find the time when it's a problem let's invest that time earlier on to prevent them becoming a problem. And naturally a CSI goes through the roof as a result of doing it. Something else I learnt from your training course is whenever there's a past analogy in rugby there's a chance for it. Can you just tell the listeners about that? It just really resonates with me and I still think about that every time I talk about not just pre-course booking service advisor big team I suppose in other parts of a business. Absolutely absolutely and I spoke bookings this is a really good bookings and pre-course is a really good example because I've been into businesses where they turn around and they say oh yeah you know Stephanie our receptionist she makes the pre-course. Well in between incoming calls try to make outgoing calls with any structure and any period of time that you're going to be on the phone to a customer just generally isn't possible perhaps Stephanie doesn't know how important it is or what she's got to all the details that she's got to check. So what my analogy is here every time we pass that ball run to somebody they've got to receive it it's not just a question of passing it on to somebody it's got to be caught. Is the old batter in a relay race doesn't matter these guys have practiced practice practice running really fast and handing a piece of metal to somebody is as easy as anything surely but how many times do people at elite level still end up in a situation where they can drop that batter. Yeah that's really where it comes from. So let's talk about some of the challenges on getting that booking then. Yeah this is a big one for me at the moment and for anybody out there who really is interested in driving their department forward this would be the first measure forget sitting there pouring over accounts and all of those bits and pieces that are all good things that we have to do. Find out on a daily basis how many people you've got booked in and how many you've got for service work. There is a massive distinction between those two elements of the business. What we're seeing is a huge upturn in the problems the issues that need to be sorted out and a massive decline in the service work and the service work is not going to pace the money, pace the bills you know this is your bread and butter work that you don't want going elsewhere in order to be a dealership and a franchise dealership we have to commit to getting your problem sorted out. That's part of the job and that will always be there. But I need to stop for a minute but that takes you most experience technician out of the business. He's going to be the one focusing on it. He's going to probably be in most places I go into not 100% division he's going to be less than that as a target. So we're already saying he's going to be 75% efficient. He's going to be able to do the work but he's not going to be able to do it quick because he's working on different things all of the time. And then in a large amount of times the actual person who funds that is likely to be warranted who happened to be the lowest players in our dealership. So you know this is a dichotomy of we've got our most experienced, most talented individual doing the work that's bringing in the least money. What we really need to focus on is those services coming in and where does that affect those people taking the bookings? We're seeing what I do see in dealership and we see in the reported systems that we have silent and all those bits and pieces that we've done. We see service advisors in the middle of something with somebody else when that call comes in and McCool is. Can you tell me how much the service is on that X car? Yeah, sure. That one's the big one. It's 745 pounds. We do the oil. We do that. We might mention a few parts that we're using at our best customers. It's all right. Thanks very much. I'll give you a call back. I'll come back to you. And that calls lost at that moment. That's 700 pounds more than out of business. I'm not saying that that's a service advisors issue by any means. If you're tied up and you've got somebody in front of you, then the likelihood is you're not going into that with a pre-plan and a pre-kind of focus of obtaining it. Just take that measure. No, no, look, how much you've got booked in and how many of them are in for a service? Because the 10 of the numbers that I see in many places are frightening. I'll give you an example. I'm in the region of about 25,000 booked in and possibly three to four services booked in for that day. But again, the vehicle health checks, Red and Amber work, how do you sell to someone's coming in for a repair? And when you're trying to sell them tires, you're trying to sell them air conditions to have a service. For fuck's sake, have you fixed my rattle first? Have you fixed that? That must be an issue. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. It makes it very difficult. And I'd also go at the stage further. And then we have some clients where those cars are waiting parks and things like that that are on recalls, not necessarily recalls, but updates or something like that. Well, it's identified as an item. The minute that works completed in the workshop, the customer's waited long enough anyway. So it's kind of like, I don't want to hear about it at the start. When the car's ready, they just want their car back. Again, another one from the course. But to me, Red work is the most perishable commodity in your dealership. If you don't get it today when it's in there, if it's genuine Red work, which it should be, it's going somewhere else to get done, that's the simple, simple, simple way to look at any Red work that's identified. If you're not doing it, it's going somewhere to get done. Yeah. Yeah, that is so true. So true. So what advice do you have for someone that they're bombarded with, warranty work there? Someone's not bought the car from us. And we actually just turn around and say, no, to a customer. We can't really do that though, can we? We can't do that. I'd say that this is much more in the planning. What we need to be is strong with a plan. We need to know the text that we've got in their experience level, the expected time that they're working on it. We need to book to that. And we need to stop this kind of, oh, we're already fully booked on diet, but this one's really important. So I've got to squeeze it in. Because effectively what we're doing is straight away, we're saying we can't get this work done. We don't have the ability to get it done. Yet we're going to load some more in because that will make the situation better. And if you're looking and saying, yeah, we can always squeeze things in. Well, then you've not structured your days correctly in the first place because there shouldn't be headroom to squeeze things in. The only headroom that might be there is possibly stuff that you've left for your vehicle health checkup cell, which we don't want to squeeze out. We want to have that time available. But while that car's on the ramps, we can get the work done because it's not only a question of getting the work, it's getting the work done quickly while it's on your ramps that brings the efficiency to the workshop. In a prime example, technician goes out and identifies a set of brake pads on the front of a car, goes back, lets the service advisor know, if that service advisor can't get hold of that customer for an hour and a half or two hours, the time of the service has elapsed, the car's probably boxed back up again and put back out in the yard. Service advisor bounds out like Skippy and walks up to these technicians. There's great news, I've sold them, you know, the front pads. The technicians probably they're going, really? I've got a car backing, it all heels off, put them. And the whole efficiency of your workshop just dies on that particular event. Don't get me wrong, you know, I want to always say this straight afterwards. It's better to take the work than not take the work. But look at what you're rebooking, look at what's hanging over at night. These are all critical cars of running an efficient workshop. Okay, listen, I want to go backwards a little bit here. Modern cars, let's think about all the technology in a modern car there. You said before something that I just twigged in me, that service work is declining. Surely we're not going to suffer from competition with the complexity of a modern car. Surely they can only bring it to a main dealer. That's a really good point, Simon, really good point. Yes, we can, we'll always get that work. But I tell you the work that we will always get. We'll always get the customers taking the car and Scott problem with it. Our customers, they're going to find us up and come to us. Okay, but we're also always going to get other people's customers. So if another dealership sold your franchise car, yeah, they might have a try at fixing an initial problem. But if they can't, their service department will be telling them, you need to book it in with the extra franchise, they'll sort it out because they don't have the tools and the capability to do it. You're going to have Fred in the shed, as I affectionately like to say sometimes, who's quite happily bang the service off for you. And then say, oh, by the way, red lights are you need to book it in with the main dealer. Because they'll happily take that service work. Yeah. The service work is also predetermined by time period. So again, in many of the dealerships where they push the lead time out because of the situation that they've got going on, if we don't make it clear that we could get the service done, but it's the diagnostic that we'd be struggling with somewhat further down the line, then that customer can go off and get the service done elsewhere and take our booking in 20 days time for the diagnostic work. One thing's for sure that diagnostic was not going away. Is going to keep coming back to us because we are the top retailer. There's no higher place that somebody can go to to get that repaired up. So any problems that are out there in your catchment area are eventually going to end up in your workshop at some point to sort out whether it's your customer, somebody else's customer, a car supermarket who supplied it into your area. It doesn't matter that car will come into you for that franchise diagnostic work. And again, going back to it, is your least profitable area? Yeah, okay. So without going into a full training course, which is always a challenge with one of these things here. Someone listening to this, what does a good prequel look like then? What are some of those things you need to put into a great prequel? That's a really good question. And I think it's different for everybody. I really do. I think you need to assess what you've got and what your needs and requirements are. For example, I work with a dealer group that found it really necessary to ask customers at that point whether they want their car cleaned on the day. Because by knowing whether it needs cleaning or not, they can load the valetors, diary, and bits and pieces like that, that's not for everybody clearly. But I think some basics we're going to do. The basics we're going to do, check the availability of the loan file. Look at the work that it's booked in for. Check that the work that it's booked in for is the right kind of work. You know, what I mean by that is we're not getting them in for maybe an A service where it should be a B service, that the order runs right. You know, that perhaps there's no extra work. They're kind of basics that you need to sort of think about on your own. But I'm always looking for those type of things with bits and pieces that will be worth something to us as the dealership when we're making that call. If that call's important enough to make, let's turn it into an opportunity, a profitable one. I'll tell you straight away too that a really good opportunity to look at. Does it need a brake fluid change? Does it need an air conditioning service? Because both those requirements are timed out. They're not items that has to have handy technicians specified that they need doing. So if we can identify that upfront, we can book that car into the workshops with an air conditioning service on it. Are efficiency goes through the roof? So Dan, are you selling the air conditioning service now, not when they drop the car off or just selling the seeds on it or both? I personally, when I say selling, I'm not even really cool looking at selling. Hey Simon, I just had to look through your details. I see that you haven't had your air conditioning service done in the last two years. Can we get that done for you today while it's or tomorrow when it comes in? It's 249 pounds. Shall I get Andy to do it for you when it's here? It won't affect the time back to you. Any of those sorts of things could be introduced into it that's going to help you and your business because if we can do a little bit more of the cars that are in there, again, our efficiency goes up. Basic for me as well and sometimes missed quite a lot. But certainly in large retailers, this is much more of a common question or a common explanation. Payment methods. Lots of the leaderships out there now don't take cash and publish rightly so. Maybe don't take American Express. This is a classic of what I was saying to you earlier, Simon. If you make that clear when you're booking somebody in, you're not going to have that problem that you now need to sort of 530 at night where you're selling the DP to say, I know we don't take cash, but, and all of those problems that come in. If you have a robust system in place, do those type of things. I also think that having a look at the job card beforehand isn't a junior role. I think it's an experience role. I think somebody who's got experience eyes to have a look at that. That's an incommination potentially even with your workshop controller. So the word comes out and we know what we need to do. Well, look, you're down actually as a 10-foot waiter, but you know what? Our workshop controllers had a look at that. I think if you bring in a 10 o'clock, we're probably asking for a bit of problems. Is there any way you can get that to us early or something like that? Well, I see that you want the car back at two o'clock, but actually it's a major service with an M.A.T. on it. And if you want us to clean it, well, we're hardly likely not to be able to get it back. I'll tell you what, leave the clean, but I need it back at two. Oh, OK, that works. You've got that opportunity to sort of make the day run smoother before the day hits you and you kind of walk in there and just you're picking on the piece all day long. You know, it's affectionately kind of tuned to a bit more of a helicopter view, isn't it? That stuff. Yeah. The general principle. Yeah. So true. I suppose I'm listening to this and so many times we go into a business where their net promoter schools, their CSI schools aren't right. How often is it the prequel, the booking call, has it gone right? Have you noticed any effects on getting this part of the process right on what it has on the customer satisfaction? It has a huge effect as consumers. If we're where sign posted throughout our whole life, so you know, we'll be going to shops when we go into stores and and NANDOS is quite a good explanation. I kind of quite like these guys because they decided to see people in a different way and you order your food in a different way and all the rest of it. But their prequel is the minute you walk in there. The first question they ask of you, NANDOS before because the guy turns around and says, yeah, of course, I have a beer every week over there. He's going to go and sit over there and he knows the drill. But they also know that they're going to spend a little bit of time explaining to the guy that has not eaten here for, I don't know, two years or whatever, how actually it works. You know, it's been dragged there by the brain kids or something. He doesn't want to sit there feeling what's going on. Has it worked? So even a little sidepost happened all through our lives of those areas. And I guess prequel is exactly that. It's kind of that checking that how it's going to go, letting it go smooth. You know, I often use the analogy as well with both sales and service. You go to bed, kind of you just wake up and you go into work and you've got that list of work in front of you. But the customer went to bed the night before and he probably had that little list of, well, I hope it's nothing big. How big cars is it? It's MOT. There's all those things that are going there. I remember many years back at the car that was registered in December, which when it was reasonably new, there's never a problem. But, you know, I saw four or five years into ownership of this car. I was putting a dealership in December going, oh, I can't get back. And a nice unexpected bill on it. It was going to hurt, wasn't it? So yeah, yeah, right at the wrong time of year. It's the bad side trip. I was just saying, it's so funny. Nando's. I must be one of the few people that had never been to a Nando's until recently. I went there with Sean, my 18-year-old Sean. And having been to a Nando's before, I said, no. Sean Strohman said, leave it. I know it works. Exactly. Because he's the guy that says every week there. And it's just one of those things like, listen to your grandad. And this is my son, who I'm saying. Okay, that works here. But you're so right about that signposting. Okay? You're so right. The guy was going to take me through every single thing in the app and how you order and all that sort of stuff there. And we kind of, if it's done in the right way, we like it. The key to this is, if you feel like you're being driven through a process, and that process is clunky and awkward and all the rest of it, then you're going to have to be uncomfortable with it. And you are going to sit there as the grandad go. Or, I don't know, they just come and take on order and all of those sorts of things. But if it's explained to you in advance and it's done in the right sort, why? That's starting off that journey with a big smile on your face of, you know, what to expect, when to expect it, how it's going to work more. So when you're on the training course with a service advisor, and today's service advisor, do they leave with exactly what they need to do on that booking call and that pre-call? Do you give them a script? Or how do you make sure they know exactly what they should do? Never give them a script. I think I've kind of touched on some of this stuff because there's the different different deviates have different systems and processes and it's betting those systems and processes in. There are certainly some word tracks on certain things. A great example of that would be the explanation of the vehicle health check call that's going to come their way. I've found in a lot of deviates, this is very cloudy now because people have gone off to more explain the video than the vehicle health check. The video is the video that will explain itself when somebody presses play. If they press play, what doesn't explain itself is the vehicle health check, how it works. And if I make a nice explanation of that, then I team myself up. So everything changes at every single dealership. But yes, in answer to question, we have the team on there, we have them in groups so that we can go through them. And it's for them to kind of go like, these are best practices. This is what good looks like. What do I want to take into that process on my side? Now, as you know, Simon, we've never started that training with just the service advisor. Okay, because too often these guys go off on courses, they're going to manufacture, of course. They don't know what they've been taught and they come back and we're expecting them to change everything. It's not going to happen. It starts with the managers going, do you know what, we need that to happen? I'm going to make that happen on a daily basis. So yeah, in answer to question, they definitely leave with a plan of action. So I'm going to ask two final questions. I want to know what would be your tip for someone listening to this podcast now? But I'm asking two ways. What tip would you have for the service manager? Listen, I may be the head of business, maybe the dealer principal. What should they go back and have a listen to in their business when they get to work? So many people listen to these podcasts on the way to work or while they're going for a run the night before. So firstly, what tip would you have for the manager? And then again, I'm going to ask you what tip would you have for the service advisor who might be listening to this, who the manager's probably forward this episode on to? Yeah, they did. So first of all, from a manager's perspective, break it down into manageable chunks. Don't go, oh my god, I need to change everything or whatever. Just interrogate your own system. Have a look first of all, I've already said about the first one, how many good got booked in family services? Is that a scary percentage to you straight away? Go and have a look at your bookings process, who's taking the book he calls when they're taking the what the backup to that is. Sometimes the C and D ships got something really good on the phone so we get them to do it. They find a brilliant but who's covering it when they're not there at lunch? Those sorts of things. What's that process look like? Go and then have a look at this or be it. I would imagine a quiet eye opener for you is to get back the true information on out of those prequels that your team were going to make. How many did we speak to yesterday before they arrived? Because if you've got 20 cars booked in and we said, you're only speaking to 15, 16 of those people, we'd immediately got a black hole there that could be a problem. Now you might choose to sort that in a slightly different way, you know, maybe an email beforehand of some of the bullet points you want to make sure or maybe in the hearts, messages that you leave for those people. If you think about it logically, we should have those customers contact details. And if we're not able to get them to the prequel, there's a good chance we might not be able to get them for the vehicle health check call. So those details are better to get. A small example there, some of the years I've had service advisors check numbers, and your number is such and such and such. But actually what we train now is we get those individuals to say, listen, I'm not going to need to speak to you today. What's the best method to get hold of you today? Because today is much more relevant these days because sometimes people are working from home, sometimes they're in the office, sometimes they're in meetings and console. Now if I know in advance that I can't speak to them, then I can certainly agree to be to use a text, speech and alternative contact to come up with a plan that's going to prevent my day. Can I add to that as well? Maybe this is what we're going to talk about on the drop-off, but it's not just the time it's this morning. I'm sure we're going to go on to that when we talk about the next one. But I was just asking for one tip for the manager and also, I think I need to both there. It's a danger that we always run into, isn't it? We could go off for hours talking about those types of things, but hopefully what we do is give you a flavor of each of those areas. And as I said to you, look, don't sit there and go, oh, you know, style of political, we've not done this, we've not done that. It's going to be so hard to change it and move it. You can change any of that stuff with focus, bringing your team on board and taking them with you. But it starts by identifying what you want to do as a team, as a collective and how you're going to go out it and just break it into manageable chunks. If anything, follow these podcasts, because as these go out, we're going to hit those five key touch points and make good discussion for, I think you alluded to it. We time and time again, when we go into do-ship, we listen for podcasts in our meeting and we did this. It works. It gives us ability just to recheck our processes that we have in place and just make sure that they're fit for purpose. It's amazing how stuff can change around you. Your process might have been in place, my work might be strong. There's something changes around it and all of a sudden we're, why is it now not working? Yeah, that's so true. And listen, the salesperson, me wants to say to everyone, that's where today's service visor on our salesperson program just works really well. But, and listen, thank you so much for this. I think we should wrap it up there. And next time we'll be talking about the four other key parts of it. So, I imagine it's the drop off we need to talk about what we need to do next time when someone drops a car off and make sure we get that process as robust as we can. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Simon. It's been a pleasure as always. And a little forward to the next one. That just leaves 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.
