What do the success of service-based companies like Uber, Grubhub, or Airbnb tell us about today’s consumer? We know that people are looking for retail experiences tailored to their individual needs and desires; that people are more empowered than ever before to make informed purchasing decisions in the digital age; and that technology factors hugely in everyone’s daily activity.
What ties all these threads together in a way that those in the automotive service industry can turn into actionable insights that drive revenue and profits? In a word: convenience.
We live in a convenience economy. In an era of Yelp reviews and brand boycotts organized overnight via social media, one constant you can rely on is that people will spend money with the companies that make their lives easiest for the least amount of time and effort.
Convenience is what drove the rise of smartphones, which didn’t invent internet access, but simply put it in your pocket. Convenience is what drove the rise of Amazon, which didn’t invent the all-in-one superstore, but made it accessible from the comfort of your living room.
The same ethic could be applied to eBay or Google, or for that matter to any number of companies in industries ranging from banking to top-performing fast food chains.
Our next questions, then, are: Does a renewed focus on convenience have value for your service department? And, if so, what does such an approach look like on the ground?
Increased Business Through Convenience
I won’t keep you in suspense: The answer to the first of those two questions is unequivocally yes. Today’s consumer prizes convenience in the dealership at all levels and in all departments, be it vehicle sales, F&I, or service. What’s critical is identifying how exactly an ethic of convenience fits your service department, and where exactly the added revenue comes from as a result.
Of course, the first challenge that springs to mind is that, by nature, the service repair industry exists in a world of inconvenience. Nobody wants their vehicle to break, and most people don’t want to take the time to have their vehicle maintained.
So, dealership service departments are working from an inherent disadvantage in that there is an involuntary aspect to your whole interaction with the consumer. They’re only there because they have to be.
An additional challenge facing dealers is that the service repair industry has traditionally been a reactive industry – existing simply to fulfill the incoming requests of consumers, with service advisors viewing their roles more as order takers than moneymakers or relationship builders. By design, this has put the responsibility on the consumer to identify a need and initiate the subsequent interaction by reaching out to the repair facility.
Facing these kinds of headwinds, how do dealers approach increased business through convenience? Expanding hours in your service department certainly helps make it easier for consumers to do business with you, but to really maximize your share of customers’ wallets, you need to take the responsibility from them and make their experience truly convenient.
The Tactical Approach
I advocate for a five-step tactical approach that reprioritizes the service process for customer convenience. By investing in such a system, you also ensure that your service department will make the most of every maintenance or repair opportunity by managing the upsell process, promoting better communication, equipping advisors with sales tools, and measuring results.
The five steps to the tactical approach are:
1: Identify needed service. A system that incorporates a multi-point vehicle inspection while building an estimate simultaneously eliminates misquoting and saves time.
2: Propose the service to the customer. In addition to recommending appropriate service, a system that supplies your advisors with powerful customer-facing tools also refocuses your staff on the value and importance of the upsell. In an industry that sees over 300 million repair orders written per year, imagine the revenue impact of adding an extra hour of labor to each for upsold services.(1)
3: Record if the service was accepted or declined. A system that flags recommended services that a customer declined to have performed as ‘recommended not done’ or ‘done elsewhere’ creates a logical point for your service advisors to follow up from. It also keeps the customer relationship alive regardless of what services are or aren’t performed during a given visit.
4: Follow up if the service was declined. Flipping the old reactive model into a proactive one shifts the responsibility for continued interaction from the customer to you, making the process more convenient for them while enabling you to keep in touch and show that your service department genuinely cares – a win-win.
5: Recommend the service again at the customer’s next visit. As I mentioned earlier, having a built-in process for following up on any recommended work that wasn’t completed during a previous visit maximizes your opportunity to grow customer wallet share. It also provides additional opportunities to pursue valuable upsells.
Alone, none of these steps may seem particularly revelatory. Taken together as a single, streamlined process, this system forces your service department to procedurally do the right thing every time – and helps management measure the entire process.
By institutionalizing a tactical approach that prioritizes consumer convenience while eliminating inefficiencies and increasing upsell opportunities, you empower every advisor to follow the same steps as your best advisor.
Do you think you’d sell more customer pay service if that were the case?
Source:
(1) NADA 2017
About the Author
Jay Harper, director of product planning and development at Naked Lime Marketing, oversees the team responsible for the strategy, direction, and market position for all of Naked Lime’s dealer services. He formerly served as the manager of XtreamService, managing the hiring, training, and development of the XtreamService Marketing Services team. Email: [email protected].
