Are We Flushing Our Customer's Away????

[Think Now 2009]

This was an e-mail sent to all Dealers and General Managers by a Vehicle Manufacture recently, Please give me an opinion of these comments!

ATTN: ALL DEALER PRINCIPLES AND GENERAL MANAGERS

Over the past 60 days, I have heard from many of you about the volatility of service traffic you have experienced recently. While none of us has all of the answers, I am sending this letter to each of you as a call to action. Each of you on this distribution list have either your name on the building, your family's financial futures invested in the business or you are running the day-to-day operation for your owner. I cannot say the same for the people making the decisions on what is sold to YOUR customers on the service drive. Don't get me wrong, they are great people that in some cases are retaining enough gross to keep the lights on every day.

However, I am asking that each of you become personally involved in ensuring that only factory recommended maintenance is sold to your customers. These are challenging times and customer retention is more critical than ever. We can't afford to lose potential future vehicle sales because an advisor being paid a $20 spiff by BG or MOC sells a flush to an unsuspecting customer. Are you aware of the percentage of your service grosses associated with flushes? If you don't, please ask your Service Manager. Are you aware of how much your advisors and management are compensated by these 3rd party vendors? If not, you should ask. I am not asking you to reduce your grosses in your service department. Every day, brakes, batteries, filters, wipers and other recommended maintenance items go unsold because the customer was "flushed". In addition, 70% - 80% of the customers you sold to do not come back for service. Why? Read Attachment #4 for a possible answer.

---------------- has not validated any of the 3rd party flushes as providing your customers any real benefit. In fact in many cases it causes long term damage which is not covered by our warranty. But don't take my word for it. I have attached (4) related articles that validate my recommendation.

Attachment #1 Position Letter from Toyota on flushes
Attachment #2 Position Letter from Ford on flushes
Attachment #3 Article from an industry service leader, ATcon.
Attachment #4 - One of several articles written on flushes. This one is likely the most impactful. Please read.

As I stated earlier, we have addressed this issue before with most of your Service teams. The decision whether or not to "flush your customers" is up to you. I strongly encourage you to investigate the content of your scheduled maintenance bundles, the price points they are being offered and ask yourself if your customers are being sold something they don't need.

I appreciate your time and consideration of this important action. Have a nice weekend.


------------------
Think Right Now

[djs]

I was one of those dealers that received that letter. I was incensed. One item in particular is nitrogen. It is valuable in the cold country to keep the tire sensors from being on every morning in the winter. One of the letter signers should have left there home phone so we could give it to our customers to call when they have a problem. These franchises have all the answers until they have to run a store and then they fall flat on their face. THey need to stay out of our dealerships and stick to building vehicles or they need to give us an opportunity to make some money. The average toyota customer RO hovers around 1.0 hrs per RO. With no upsell that does not leave much to pay for the big facilities these people ask for. Another example of someone believing their own press.

[calgm988]

I'm probably in the minority on this one. In particular on the issue of "flushes". I agree with the letter and recomendation from whatever Manufacture sent it.

Don't think you need to sell those products to your customers. They don't need it and if they knew what little value the product offered, they wouldn't want it. If we just concentrated on "keeping" the customers we got, by providing exceptional service and maintenence they wouldn't defect to those third part vendors.

We haven't sold those products and haven't needed to. Our RO count is up YTD. Our hours/RO is highest in our disctrict. Express averages almost .8/RO. Improvements are needed there, but we'll do it through training and knowledge.

My perspective, good letter - follow the advice. There was a dealer group in So. California that just got sued and has to pay back millions over selling "unauthorized" products to their customers. Might set a new precedent.

------------------
"focus on the purpose, not the outcome."

[gmcgrew]

Calgm you are correct that flushes are not needed if the car is maintained for real world use. Most of the new standards for maintenance from the manufacturer are not applicable in real world use. The flushes and nitrogen fill for tires are useful in some areas of the country because of the harshness of the climate and lack of maintenance the manufacturers preach. I may be off base here but I believe that the local dealer knows their climate best and the majority have their customers interests in mind when setting up maintenance programs.

There are a few dealers that abuse their customers and we have to deal with the bad publicity that follows. The majority however do the best they can to take care of the customers because they know customers are a limited quantity no matter where you are.

[fixedopsmike]

BOY ARE YOU GUYS ILL INFORMED.
Yes there are some fly by night flush companies out there but in todays fixed operations if you don't offer flushes in a timely reasonable manner you are doing a disservice to your customer base. Case in point we test brake fluid moisture content in our service drive triage everyday (as well as all the other fluids that wear out) and we catch the fact that customers are in danger of ruining very expensive components of the ABS System if the brake fluid is not flushed. It is very common to see customers of all brands spend $1000.00 to $2000.00 for ABS pumps, or accumulators failing due to moisture in their brake fluid. Most Manufactures don't have a scheduled time to flush brake fluids (theyre in the business of selling parts not labor). I have managed dealership service operations for over 30 years and I can say without batting an eye if the flushes didn't bring value and preventive care I wouldn't be selling them. When you consider the value of road side assistance and added repair warranty coverage selling flushes to my customers is a "no brainer". Having worked for 9 different manufactures through my career Ive discovered the factory could care less how much labor you sell or where your service absorption comes in every month, but they do care how many parts, brakes, tires, and batteries you bought this quarter. If you don't have staff selling a quality product that they personally believe in and can sell the value of the product to your customers, then youre going about it all wrong. The support of the
Companies we partner with to do preventive maintenance is critical They must have a vested interest in seeing that we sell quality products
that our customers can see and realize the value in them. Showing customers how to save money doing quality preventive maintenance is
easy, and Im sure hell would freeze over before any automobile manufacture recommended any flush services unless they decided to get in the game and start selling B-G Products themselves.
How do you manage 90% service absorption rate in todays market and economy? You sell preventive maintenance flushes on your service drive.

------------------
Fixedopsmike

[Think Now 2009]

FixedOpsMike!

Well said! If you really look at the Manufactures they want you to SELL their Vehicle New, they don't care about Pre-Owned, Sell their Parts--Don't evern THINK about selling something from the aftermarket so you can match or beat the competition, Sell their extended warranties......Now you would think that If you sold their extended warranties they would want you to service the units so they don't fail! But a lot of Dealers don't sell their extended warranty programs because it is just not profitiable for the Dealer....They just want to sell Parts when the things break.........Keep On selling those needed fluid exchange services. I do totally believe you should test with a test strip and not by looks.....There are some fluid tests strips on the market!!

Well spoken Thanks!!

------------------
Did I Make You Think?