Is My Car Done Yet?
Ahhh...that infernal question that your Advisor is perpetually unprepared to answer when asked. Usually, it’s uttered by a waiting express Customer that has been warming a seat cushion in your well-appointed lounge for just a bit too long, especially when they're seeing others leave before them.
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No doubt you’ve heard your advisor give a series of answers: “Let me check with the shop”; “I just have to finish your paperwork”; “Oh, yes! Everything is ready in the cashier’s office”, amongst a dozen other possible scenarios, all of them disappointing to your Customer that feels like they’ve waited too long. That last one burns my cookies the most: The car is done and likely sitting in plain sight, ready to go…but your Advisor hasn’t gone to get the Customer.
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The tendency to blame the Advisor is pretty common. Poor organization. Poor follow-through. Lack of time management. I have been guilty of this, both as a manager and a consultant, which has rarely produced anything but resentment and hard feelings.
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Which has gotten me to reconsider the causes of this all-too-familiar scenario, and wondering what today's Advisor role really needs to be.
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There’s a lot of talk going around the Service and Parts world about the fact that vehicles are lasting longer than ever, and that the average new vehicle purchaser is keeping their vehicles for well beyond a decade. For us fixed-ops types, this is a good thing, as long as we can keep that Customer engaged with our dealership service department. More service visits at my dealership means they're more likely going to buy a car right here with me.
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I’ve been in many high-volume dealers, with Customer bases exceeding 10,000 VINs, many of whom service barely 1/3 of those vehicles after their fifth year in service. Despite having a huge capital investment in a facility with over 50, 60, or even 100 available bays, they still take two hours or more of their Customer’s time to perform basic maintenance services.
Right with the perception that we’re too expensive, our habitual inability to meet the Customer’s convenience threshold is almost always the reason that people don’t come to us for regular maintenance and competitive repairs. That’s a significant problem that we’ve been unable to overcome for the better part of the three-and-a-half decades I’ve been in, around, and supporting, car dealerships.
UNDERSTANDING THE WORK
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We should zoom out and talk about the industry as a whole over the last two decades. For most manufacturers, the serviceable components have been supplanted by sealed or non-adjustable replacement parts or assemblies. Sealed wheel bearings, longer-lasting (but much higher-priced) suspension components, pre-assembled modules, and a litany of other combinations have lessened the available flat-rate hours today’s new vehicle takes to repair. Design challenges are corrected through software updates. Maintenance has been reduced, if not outright eliminated, for just about every mechanical component. This is great for the parts department and the OEM, but it's hard to make hours, and thus harder to accumulate hours per RO.
Gone are the days of timing, valve, and brake adjustments that were revenue-generating, but ethical, service intervals. Fluids that are engineered to last 100,000, 200,000, or even longer have reduced or eliminated ethical opportunities for their replacement. I’ve seen a variety of figures thrown around about how much less revenue-generating hours are ethically available on a new car, but I would put forth that a 2025 model easily has 20% less than a 2010 model.
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Sure, there are exceptions, especially for those of us servicing high-line OEM Customers, but this is a challenge faced by just about every dealership wanting to maintain the returns they’re used to.​
IS OUR CONFIGURATION RIGHT?
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Its a very common truth that, using an example 50-bay shop with a technician in every stall, usually less than a quarter of our shop is dedicated to maintenance service. The rest are full of A-level, B-level, and C-level technicians deployed towards performing repairs and diagnostics commensurate with their training and certification credentials. This runs contrary to the fact that express is a primary defection cause, and often represents our biggest opportunity for market share and owner retention.
This traditional configuration is not working for our team members, either. It worked well when moderately consistent effort would yield Repair Order averages of 2.5 hours each, and techs could make good dispatching three or four vehicles in a day. However, most OEMs struggle to achieve 2.0 hours per RO these days, with the overall average in the 1.5 to 1.7 range. Now those same techs have to work on six, eight, or even ten vehicles a day to make their hours.​
THE ASM IMPACT
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This higher car count also has a cumulative effect on the Advisor. Whether for maintenance, repair, or a campaign the repair order still has to be created, processed, reviewed, closed, and paid for. Most of, if not all of, those tasks fall squarely into the lap of the Advisor.To achieve an understanding of their work, we should start by listing all the steps an Advisor has to take to have a quality outcome. Then determine how long each step should take (on average). Add all those times up to get our cumulative, or sigma, cycle time.
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That should look similar to the table below:
When we do the math, that totals 32 minutes (32') of cycle that the ASM needs to complete for each RO.
We’ve long held that an advisor can achieve a quality output for each Customer when handling roughly 12-15 ROs in a day, which neatly works out to exactly 480’, or 8 hours of work using our example table above (32’ X 15 ROs = 480’ / 60 = 8 hours). Many of us are working on adapting technology to reduce cycle time for certain process elements, but there are just some things that can't be sacrificed if we want to meet a quality standard, so that has limits.
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Theoretically, an advisor should be able to operate at the above pace and keep up with the demands of that position with little trouble.
FUNDAMENTAL PLANNING OUTDATED?
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The initial flaws in this thinking are two-fold.
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First, it assumes that the work can be processed at a consistent rate and, as any business that directly contacts the public knows, retail Customers do not operate in a consistent manner. They come when they want or need, and that does not always line up with our ability to process them in an efficient manner. More than half of the waiting Customers are typically on site before noon in most dealers, creating a logjam of processing needs that the advisor just can’t keep up with.
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Second, the advisor does not get to handle these in a predictable order. They switch from doing a write-up to walking a Customer to their car, then to creating an estimate, then back to doing write-ups, and so on. Operating in such a bespoke way adds time to each task, as the Advisor needs to set up and gather their thoughts each time they switch to a new phase in the overall cycle.
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The slightly less obvious flaw is that we’re simply putting a huge share of the required processing in the hands of ONE PERSON, and the quantity of work required exceeds their capacity during high-demand periods. It also is a very rigid system that lacks flexibility to meet varying demand. When their capacity is overburdened, tasks have to wait, which leads to delays in the Customer experience, and your Advisor fielding that question: “Is my car done yet?”
WE HAVE TO CHANGE – BUT HOW?
I’ve stood in front of thousands of GMs, Fixed Ops Directors, and Service Managers in my career and discussed these challenges. In both classroom, roundtable, and in-dealership environments we all have agreed to their nature and reality. What is missing is a willingness to embrace the change necessary to change our fundamental way of operating.
Some very successful people are able to see the gap that lays in our path but are unable to see how we’re going to bridge it. It’s a very complex problem that will require many individual solutions that are designed to work together.
So, what are those changes we need to develop?
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First: The Advisor position needs to be broken down into a series of more manageable and predictable roles to create flexibility and scalability that meets varying demand
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Second: Our management of the ASM through the compensation plan must be revised to reflect a more Customer experience-based foundation
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Third: Dealerships must have a reckoning on what is considered success, specifically with per-repair-order and gross-profit retention expectations in their Service operations
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Fourth: Dealership management teams must develop a new Customer journey map that offers a Customer experience that meets their needs
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Fifth: Dealership management teams must develop a new Service Process map that helps the team deliver that experience
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Sixth: Dealership management teams must develop and maintain measurement systems to help keep their teams on track to deliver that experience
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Let’s not sugar-coat what this means. These six tenets represent a fundamental re-ordering of how we run our Service operations. Implementations will be complex and full of potential pitfalls. They will take courage, determination, patience, and perseverance to tackle.
This will not be easy, but it is necessary in order to retain that the Customer has evolved past our ability to provide the experience that they want.
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If you want a partner that can help guide your teams through this revolutionary process, let’s talk!
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-Scott