For those of you lucky enough to have a highly motivated, highly skilled service advisor, there is not an awful lot I can say that would convince you how critical he or she is to our having a successful shop. You likely already know. But for those of us not so blessed, I would take a moment or two here to highlight what that person could do for your business and for you, the business owner.
As owners, we often like to see ourselves as the center of the shop universe, but in real and very practical terms that service advisor is or should be central to all that we are doing or would want to do. That includes everything from marketing, to increasing tech productivity and assuring the quality of our customer service. There is no one else in the organization who interacts with our customers, our technicians and our various systems as our service advisor routinely does, and no one who can impact those areas like the service advisor.
More than anything else, the service advisor is the face of your business, and as such he or she must have great communications skills, have great empathy for your customers, be fearless in making recommendations and be a true believer in what we do as a tire or automotive repair shop. I hope you notice that knowledge and automotive experience are missing from that list. It is not that automotive knowledge is unimportant in a service advisor, it is just not as important as these other attributes. Remember that your service advisor is not technical staff and if anything, great technical knowledge in the service advisor role can often be a hindrance to making the sale.
A great service advisor will take the observations and recommendations made by the technician and translate them into terms that the customer can understand. In doing this, he or she will identify the need and urgency for the customer. Many among us, us men in particular, love to impress the world with how much we know. Too often this leads to a disconnect, as we are trying to explain to a customer what the Check Engine Light on their dashboard represents and why we want to address it.
The unfortunate fact is that a great many of our customers come into our shops very suspicious of us and our intentions and our use of highly technical explanations to make a sale is the surest way imaginable to assure a refusal. If they do not understand, then we are not connecting; and if we are not connecting, then the chances of our making the sale are reduced. Great service advisors always care, always empathize with their customers and always believe in the recommendations they are making.
Above and Beyond
In addition to the sales counter, our service advisors are both guardians of our internal procedures and quality control managers. When I was a service manager or had the opportunity to develop policies and procedures for service advisors in a tire or repair shop, I insisted that in as many instances as was possible, that my service advisors walk to the car and have a short discussion with the technician on what he was recommending and why. This had the double benefit of making sure the tech was following the prescribed check-out procedure and not making inappropriate or incomplete recommendations. This is not intended as a bad reflection on technicians, but provides reasonable oversight of a critical task.
More importantly, it gives the service advisor the opportunity to see, touch and explore why we make certain recommendations, which makes for a much better presentation to the customer. Customers watch and react to how we speak and act when we interact with them, and the confidence that comes from having seen the service or repair items we are recommending makes for a better presentation. Knowing that it is not possible or practical to look at every car, the best service advisors out there look at as many cars as they possibly can. Empathy for that guy’s brakes is much easier if you have actually seen that he has gone metal to metal. As a former sales manager of mine used to say, “You will always be selling, if you’re always compelling.” Great service advisors know this.
So along with meeting and greeting our customers as they wander in and acting as guardian to our quality standards and internal procedures, we ask our service advisors to keep tabs on the status of three or four techs, seven or eight cars, keep track of ordered parts, special customer requests, answering the phone and to do it all with a smile. Of the many truly talented service advisors I have known over the years, the very best ones not only make all of this look easy, but are charming and attentive to our customers in the process.
Grassroots Efforts
Great service advisors rarely just happen; mostly they are mentored and grown. I think it very important to start with an individual who is reasonably social and not only is willing and comfortable interacting with customers, but someone who even enjoys it. Selling is so central to this position and so important to the viability of the business that finding staff members who can represent our business the way that we want it represented and do this while fostering great and lasting relationships with our customers is a critical skill.
I am not saying you should go out of your way to hire someone who doesn’t have automotive experience, but I am saying that automotive experience should not be the highest qualification. Finding someone who is great with people and comfortable with customers might be much more important. The most critical steps are our providing appropriate training and setting standards for excellence. It is very, very rare for a great service advisor to show up at our door lacking in that, so we need to do everything possible to grow them from the ground up. He might be standing at your counter as you are reading this but we have never asked for great so we haven’t seen it. I might suggest starting your search close to home and expand it outward.
How do we measure a service advisor and how do we get from good to great? In looking at a service advisor, I look at three main areas. The first is the dollar value of their of their estimates and repair orders. This tells me if we are not only making recommendations for the things that the customer came in for, but also tells me if we are checking service history, scrutinizing the courtesy checks we are seeing and whether or not we are selling maintenance services. Any service advisor who cares at all for what he is doing will sell the broad spectrum of repairs and services that are out there for the simple reason that those are the things that are required to keep our customer’s cars safe and reliable.
The second is CSI results. Are there patterns there and are we taking care of or angering our customers? A great service advisor will be the frequent recipient of praise. Great service is such a rare thing most of us are happy and willing to celebrate it with praise.
The third area is the profit margin of the tickets he or she sells. If your service advisor is building value into the estimates he or she is writing, the profit will be there. Customers hate paying high prices but want value. Rather than apologizing for a large repair bill, a great service advisor would go to great lengths to make the customer see and appreciate the work that had been done. Customers want to know that spending that money was a good decision. Great service advisors rightfully feel good about the important service they provide customers. Less capable service advisors discount and apologize for the work they have recommended or have done.
As Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theatres and chairman of HDTV, has said, “It is so much easier to be nice, to be respectful, to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and try to understand how you might help them before they ask for help, than it is to try to mend a broken customer relationship.”
Our service advisors truly are the face of our businesses and there are some really ugly faces out there.
