What can technology do for service sales?

There are only so many things you can do to increase revenue. You can sell more service, service more customers, keep more money or you can decrease costs.

Now, you being the smart manager you are, you might be of a mind to train your way to service sales success. I’ve been advocating every repair facility, dealership and independent shop should have a training plan for all customer facing personnel for over 10 years.

And we all know that a trained professional service salesperson (advisor) who uses a service sales process will outsell and outperform an untrained advisor, every time, no exceptions.

The problem is that we don’t train consistently in this industry. What we do is train just enough (in most cases) to fix or correct a problem or downward trend, and then assume that it will stay fixed forever.

The real problem…training is not permanent or self-sustaining. The benefits stop when the training stops. Think of it this way. What if a professional sports team or professional band stopped practicing and training together?

How long do you think it would be before they were out of step or out of tune? One week? One month? It’s hard to know, isn’t it? However, there is no doubt they would soon need practice, right?

That’s why any professional team, like your team at the dealership for example, can never stop practicing or training. We need it to constantly stay sharp and ready, to correct missteps and the reverse the inevitable degradation of skill sets.

That’s a fact.

So, if you are not training to increase service sales, what are you doing?

1.     You could be selling more.  Focusing on increasing the sales amount of every repair order will have an effect over time. This requires a concerted effort by your team combined with constant and diligent monitoring, coaching. Using the service sales process, walkaround, MPI and history review are all elements needed to increase sales per transaction. There are 2 problems. Many managers don’t know how to lead and many managers don’t have extended periods of time to train, coach and monitor.

2.     You could service more. One way to do this is to maximize the recall or fleet market and increase your RO count. Or maybe, you put the squeeze on your customer data base and mine it deeper and deeper until you are recycling back through where you started. That would put more cars in the drive. In fact, over the past 10-15 years, recalls have become a huge part of every service departments business. And, if you are an independent, you’ve been feasting on defections. However, as an independent, you are beginning to lose ground to technology. OEM’s have made sure that proprietary information will force people back to the dealership. And eventually, OEMs will engineer better vehicles and recalls will eventually slow down, decreasing your RO count.

3.     You could be keeping more by becoming a margin maniac. Tweaking labor, parts and labor and parts and labor and parts and the compensation and then labor and parts…until the margins are just right. Nothing wrong with that. I mean, who wouldn’t want to keep more of what you make. However, you get to a point where there just is not enough tweaking left in anything.

4.     Lastly, reduce costs. A fan favorite. Decreasing costs require as much diligence as margin tweaking as you need to review every entry and make sure that the charges are the charges they are supposed to be and that your profit to personnel ratio is correct and the number of mats in service reception match the invoice…and so on and so on.

Those are the 4 ways to increase revenue. So what if you don’t train very much, don’t have the capacity to increase car count, can’t tweak the margins anymore or have reduced costs so far that the greeter is the advisor and the technician and the cashier (hahaha..that never happens, right) what do you do?

You turn to to technology.

How does it deliver on the promise of faster, easier and better? Over the past few years there has been a major focus on customer transparency, building trust and increasing service sales using technology. And companies have responded.

Many have not responded in the manner we expected, but they have responded. With varying results and products.

Then there is this company called autonow, who took a different approach.

autonow started with a blank piece of paper and they asked the question “How can we provide customers with complete transparency?”

What they did was build an easy to use, intuitive software that allows the customer to track the entire service visit from service reception to service delivery on any device they have, without ever calling in to check on the progress.

Phone, pc, pad whatever they want to use. And because it has intuitive AI interface, updates happen instantaneously. They even built a “Friend of a Friend” easy to use “people add” feature, that lets the customer pick someone else to review the service visit, get updates and even pay the repair bill if they so desire.

Which means what you ask? Here is the bottom line. People want transparency, convenience, speed, value, and lastly, trust. And any facility that can consistently deliver on that promise will sell more and retain more customers. Here is another add to that. They will pay a little more if they get it, no questions asked.  

And that means more revenue.

Call 760-419-9002 or send an email to [email protected].