Don't Underestimate Service Advisors’ Impact On Shop Success

Don’t Underestimate Service Advisors’ Impact On Shop Success

Failure to understand your service advisor's role as “front man,” will create chaos in your shop.

You probably didn’t wake up today and say, “Hey, let’s have a mediocre day!” However, even with the most optimistic outlook, an untrained or improperly motivated staff can quickly turn a great day into a mediocre one. 

Your service advisor is your shop’s “front man,” but a poorly trained staff member who doesn’t know the key elements of the position will, without a doubt, create chaos in your shop at best – at worst, you’ll lose customers, referrals and find your shop in a downward spiral from which you may have difficulty recovering.

What traits should the role of “Front Man” encompass at your shop? Three critical character traits come first, which are the same for any of your employees. At the very least, your advisor should be hungry, humble and smart. 

“But Vic,” you may say, “doesn’t conventional wisdom direct you to someone technical who understands the nuances of working on cars? That way, they can share their vast wisdom with the customer who will be so wowed that they are sure to buy from our shop.” 

The opposite is true. While technical abilities can be helpful, in most cases these traits get in the way of your shop’s number one job: providing a fantastic customer experience. 

When a customer drops off a car, they are usually concerned about getting home, not what might be the cause of their concern at that moment. Having a technical background myself, I understand that technicians love to solve problems. I recognize the desire to begin the analysis right away, however, this will cause you to lose focus on the relational interaction with your customer on the initial visit.

Though it is a rare case that a customer will want to know the why and how a failure occurred (think of an engineer), most customers want to know four things: What’s broken? Can you fix it? What will it cost? And, when will I get it back? 

So, if technical expertise doesn’t necessarily guarantee a great service advisor, what does? Additional traits that make up a great service advisor include: they need to be detail-oriented, people-focused, have stellar communication skills, have emotional stability, know how to work with external and internal customers, and, lastly, they need to be goal-driven.

To ensure that your service advisor has the best opportunity to succeed, keep these 5 Keys in mind.

Key 1

Know the roles. In every shop, big or small, across the U.S., you will find people performing three key roles. 

Owner

He or she is the rainmaker in your shop who generates vehicle visits each day the shop is open. An owner’s number one job is to create awareness of the shop’s abilities by marketing and networking with local business and community groups like the Chamber of Commerce, schools and civic organizations. 

The owner’s main area of focus is building and maintaining strategic alliances through public relations. Think of the owner as the circus promoter.

Technician

Whether it’s a world-class technician or novice lube tech, the role of a technician in your shop is simply this: to generate the greatest number of labor hours each day with a target of 125% efficiency. 

Solving intrinsically difficult problems is where the technician thrives. They love to focus on the mechanical nature of the vehicle, the process of solving the problem. Their reward is the completion of the vehicle and nothing is more satisfying than taking something that is broken and fixing it.

The technician is the performer and producing labor dollars is their number one job. Consider the tech to be the lion tamer or the trapeze artist – their skills will amaze you.

Service Advisor

The service advisor’s role, on the other hand, is pretty much like the ringmaster of the circus. They coordinate a lot of varied tasks in a given day. The service advisor’s job is to take the vehicles that arrive at the shop each day and generate labor hours by providing an exceptional customer experience to external (vehicle owners) and internal customers (technician). 

Just like Liam Neeson in the movie Taken, service advisors have a particular set of skills that make them good for their role. The set of skills is acquired over a long period of time and, when put to use properly, can propel your shop into a top-performing level. 

A top-performing advisor likes working with people, so if that doesn’t describe someone in your shop, you shouldn’t even think of putting a person in the service advisor position.

Key 2

World-class service advisors aren’t born, they are made through skills learned over the years.

Observing a world-class advisor is a joy – it’s like watching a skilled heavy equipment operator. They effortlessly handle inbound calls, answer questions from technicians and order parts, all while assisting the customer in an efficient manner so your shop receives a five-star review following the service completion.

Sound likes a unicorn, right? It’s not.

Working with entry-level advisors and watching them flourish as they learned their trade along with applying sound communication and business practices has been a joy. The best service advisor my shop ever had was a girl named Kathy. 

Kathy was a manager at an employment agency we were using to fill a new advisor position that opened up. Kathy decided to apply for it even though she had no industry experience.

She checked all the boxes: attitude, demeanor, desire to learn and master new skills. But, the most important skill she brought was her ability to connect with our customers. Everyone loved her and her sales continued to climb during the time she spent with us. Kathy went from an entry-level advisor to become a world-class advisor through the development of her unique set of skills honed every year she was with us. 

Key 3 

Train relentlessly and implement an ongoing training plan specific to the duties covered in a service advisor’s world. 

You’ll find loads of technical training available to keep your techs current thanks to the rapid rate of technological advancement on vehicles. But, how often have you seen classes for service advisors derailed because the several techs in attendance were already well versed in the fundamentals? Proper training begins with an evaluation of your team’s current skills, discovering the gaps, and filling those in with the needed education. 

You can find many resources, including online courses for the fundamentals (check the ShopOwner website for videos designed to help service advisors pass their ASE C1 test, for example), other online group classes offered by coaching companies like ours, as well as advanced training offered at trade shows. Whichever direction you take, know this: if you aren’t training your advisor, his or her skills are regressing.

Key 4 

Add tools to their tool belt. 

Besides training, what business-building tools do you offer your advisors? Do they have access to productivity-boosting tools such as:

  • DVI;
  • SMS with a text messaging feature;
  • Check-in kiosks;
  • Text-to-Pay;
  • Intelligent caller ID software that displays a customer’s history on inbound calls; or other tools?

Key 5

Use the consultative term for the position.

As you have been reading this, you might have noticed my consistent referral to the position as a “service advisor” not “service writer.” Consider the role of the position – it really is more consultative than just an order taker.

A service writer is more analogous to a person taking your order at a local fast food joint – increased service means asking if you want fries with that. A true service advisor, on the other hand, will not only take the customer request, they will also invest the time in consulting on the work requested and offer additional services to ensure the customer’s visit was worthwhile to you and them.

In today’s shop, it takes all three roles of the owner, advisor and technician in your shop to pull off the Herculean feat of grabbing five-star customer service. Each role has uniquely different duties and skills that when meshed together create harmony almost as beautiful as Mozart’s greatest symphonies. Music to the ears and money in the bank for the Greatest Show on Earth!

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