Building a Winning Service Team

Motor,  Feb 2005  by O'Connor, Bob

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Due to fierce competition, many independent repair shops have been experiencing a substantial decline in sales and profits. Some astute business owners have already significantly increased their share of available business by implementing processes and procedures to build highly efficient and productive service teams.

To become better competitors, independent auto repair shop owners need to identify and correct all of the shortcomings of their team members. In addition, they have to find ways to improve their ability to market better, strengthen their team's ability to produce more billable hours per technician and hours per repair order and provide better customer service. The overall objective is to retain the necessary gross profit dollars to remain viable and to continue to grow the business while rewarding the team and owner for their efforts.

Our company has worked with thousands of shop owners and their staff over the last 20 years and our experience indicates that most shops could accomplish this objective rather easily and in a relatively short period of time.

Every business consists of positions filled by people who perform a variety of tasks that enable that business to operate. All of these people comprise a team. Let's look at the people in a shop, position by position, and see how their contributions can make that team a winning team.

Owner/Manager

How well any team operates is determined first by its leadership, a role handled by the owner or manager of the business. So, to build a winning team, the owner or manager has to establish the concepts and processes all team members will follow. One important concept is the idea of vehicle inspections. All objectives and benchmarks need to be thoroughly conveyed to each team member, and a plan must be developed that provides each member of the staff with the training, tools and encouragement necessary to achieve the objectives. The shop owner must convince his staff to buy into the philosophy on which the business will operate.

Service Advisor

Service advisors often unwittingly either prevent or significantly hinder the implementation of an effective vehicle inspection program. Reasons may include:

1. They don't have time for the process. Many independent shops employ too few service advisors to adequately support the sales process and the technician's efforts. We've found that the winning team ratio is one service advisor for every two technicians.

2. Technicians will not do the inspections. Many techs view inspections as a waste of time because they feel the service advisor will be unable to sell the work or sell it in a timely fashion. This causes a great deal of frustration for the service advisor.

3. Service advisors frequently don't have enough time to estimate and present technician findings. This is usually a result of too many vehicles in the shop at one time and/or too few service advisors to properly process them. Often advisors omit the inspection part of the process of servicing and repairing vehicles because they usually have too many to handle and not enough time per vehicle to perform this valuable process.

4. Estimates may exceed the service advisor's repair order dollar threshold. Many service advisors are uncomfortable selling big-ticket repair jobs. When the ticket exceeds a certain dollar amount, they lose their confidence in their ability to sell it.

5. The advisor doesn't want to deal with customers' negative responses. Often when service advisors are presented by a technician with a significant list of needed repairs and service, they're hesitant to present them to the customer out of fear of a negative reaction-that is, the customer will decline to have the recommended work performed.

Service advisors play a major role in the implementation of a successful vehicle inspection program. They must know how to price and sell each of the items found. They also must become masters of controlling their production schedule by effectively managing the mix of diagnostics, general repair and maintenance work, as well as the number of vehicles to be worked on each day.

Customer "needs" are often quite different than customer "wants." Service advisors should be well aware of what a vehicle "needs" to properly advise the customer, and at the same time be able to dovetail the customers "wants" into the sales process.

Among the tools necessary to make the service advisor's job easier and the shop more profitable are point-of-sale marketing materials such as menu boards, signage, fluid comparison trays, lube stickers, inspection and diagnostic forms and examples of failed components and parts. In addition, the advisor must have state-of-the-art computer and estimating systems and well-thought-out service menus.

Finally when implementing a formal vehicle inspection process, the service advisor must fully understand the whats-in-it-for-me principle (WIIFM). Menu sales with the estimating done in advance makes sales easier, increased repair order dollar averages means less individual estimates to prepare, increased gross profits lead to increased earnings, happier technicians and happier customers lead to a happier team.