hours per advisor

[Texdealer]

How many hours can an advisor handle before you start to loose quality care for your customers?

[MovingForward]

I personally think that measuring hours that an advisor can handle is not a proper way of looking at things. I believe if you want to look at it in terms of what work load can they handle and still perform good and retain good CSI you have to look at either repair order's per day or customer's per day.

If you are looking at hour's per day that is going to vary depending on how well they sell. Here is an example of what I mean. If you have a guy that averages 1.5 hours per RO I would say he can handle approximately 22.5 to 30 hours per day. On the other hand if you have a guy that averages 2.0 hours per RO I would say he can handle approximately 30 to 40 hours per day.

I personally feel for an advisor to be able to sell properly and handle the customer properly they need to handle 15-20 RO's / customers a day max.

Just my $0.02

[robc]

I concur that ROs/day is a better measurement and hours is just multiplier of that. I also target that 15-20 range of CP and WTY (INT are either handled by a single advisor/manager or are not counted)

[Whiner]

Interesting topic. I have been thinking about this and a variation on this topic quite a lot lately.

Not only how many repair orders can an advisor handle but how many "managers" does it take for a given number of advisors.

Or do you let your advisors handle "difficult" situations. Not just customers but warranty issues with manufactures, tech assist, customer assist, etc.

There seems to be an almost overwhelming amount of administration these days. It is easy to forget that we need to make money.

[tgoodwin]

Texdealer, thats a pretty interesting question. I believe every dealers is set up to run differently. For our dealer, the better measurement is if our employees are happy and productive. We use 2 different measurements to see if they are over or under loaded. The first is ro count, the second is individual advisors pay as a percentage to gross. Finally we can just feal if they are not happy and overwhelmed. I have found a set of service bench marks that can help guide you. I don't believe bench marks are anything but a place to start to get you in the ball park. If your interested here is the link: http://www.dealerinfolink.com/servicebenchmarks.html. Hope this helps

[Texdealer]

Thanks for all the input!

[tcollins]

It also depends on the level of service you expect and the amount of work your asking of your advisors. Do they handle all the internal, do they book/flag/schedule themselves? Are they required to cashier and answer all the phones? Are they expected to keep the customer updated at every status change? The 15-20 number could very easily become the 10-15 number or less unless your willing to accept some obvious problems. You have to use the benchmarks as a starting point and then balance capability and expectation before deciding what is an acceptable number.