Auto Dealer Monthly Magazine is the daily operations publication serving the retail automotive industry. This automotive publication serves dealer principals, officers and general managers with the latest best practices.
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PRODUCTION CONCERNS Te industry benchmark for shop productivity is 120%. To meet that standard, your technicians must produce 48 fat-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 ©ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/JBRYSON 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 doesn't 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 prof 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. Afer fve days of training, she went to work. She fnished her frst month at 1.8 HPRO. By the end of her second month, it was 2.1. 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 staf. Twelve to 15 repair orders per day per person is a reasonable number. Tat's 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 profts, then you will need to start planning to hire more staf, quickly. If you are successful in growing your trafc and fail to add staf, your sales per RO will immediately begin to decline. More customers should never result in less gross proft. Each advisor should be free to spend 15 minutes with each customer during the writeup and another fve to 10 minutes at delivery. Hire that additional advisor the moment your trafc begins to increase. Your next service advisor doesn't have to be an experienced technician, and they certainly don't have to be male. Your recruitment strategy should be focused on fnding applicants with excellent customer service skills and no bad habits. 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. Te afermarket 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 afermarket shops and win. And remember: You do yourself a disservice by failing to recruit from the aftermarket ranks. Tose 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 traffc going up or down or fatlining? Te only good answer is "up." If your trafc is fat or going down, you can assume that your customers don't like doing business with your fxed 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 re- turn 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 efectively 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 won't 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. It's a team efort. Focus on building gross proft 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 you're successful, you will have given yourself the pay raise you deserve. Don Reed is the CEO of DealerPro Training and one of the industry's leading experts in maximizing profits from fixed operations. DReed@AutoDealerMonthly.com FE BRUARY 2014 • AUTODE ALE R MONTHLY.COM 27