Service Advisors Road Testing Cars

[Doug]

How many of you have advisors routinely road test cars ?

At our shop, we have the shop foreman or myself road test cars with noise complaints, tough driveability issues, or other special circumstances. We usually have him ride with the customer to see/hear/feel exactly what the customer is talking about.

My dealer says the advisors are "spoiled" and *they* should be road testing these cars....first with the customer and then after the tech is done.

Personally, I would rather have the advisors stay at their posts and do their jobs: sell work, answer phones, and take care of customers. After a couple days of informal research I calculated that each advisor would have to spend 60-90 minutes each day away from the phones and the service desk.

What are the rest of you guys doing ?

Thoughts ?

By the way, we have 14 techs and 3 advisors, 5 carlines.

With my thanks,
Doug

[MBailey]

Doug,

I agree that your advisors should spend as much time as possible on the drive. Losing 1 to 2 hours per day is going to keep them in a constant state of turmoil and will hurt your sales and customer satisfaction. (It seems that many dealers just don't understand the depth and complexity of the service advisor position).

I also have 3 advisors with 13 techs, and my advisors very rarely go on test drives. (Of course under certain circumstances they do, but it's not an everyday occurence). We normally handle these situations by utilizing our shop foreman or a senior tech, or the technician that has already worked on the car (in the case of a recheck). I also will take test drives and frequently do the final QC drive on difficult or repeat repairs.

[ReggieDay]

Doug,

I agree with you wholeheartedly. I am in a small market with 7 techs and two advisors. One of my advisors codes all warranty claims and the other one handles customer contacts on setting up appointments on special ordered parts. It is all they can do to stay on top of things and handle their customer loads in a polite, professional, and profitable manner. I see no advantage whatsoever in adding this additional responsibility on my guys.

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Reggie Day
Service Manager
McComb, Mississippi

[john]

As a Service Consultant and a past Parts and Service Director working with 5 stores, I have always taught my managers and advisors that it is their job to verify the customer's concerns. It is a policy - not a rule. The policy should be applied most of the time (90%) but the key is to do what is needed and will be most effective in identifying the concern and affecting a repair.

It is important for advisors to have test drive times that will allow them to identify the problem before the reservastion is made - how can you commit technical assets before you even know if there is a problem or what that problem is? I recommend that advisors invite test drive customers into the shop prior to the reservation being made during times of slower write-up and phone activity(3:00 to 4:00 pm). After the test drive , make an appropriate reservation and commit appropriate technician time depending on your assessment of the problem.

When the advisor test drives, it keeps the technician in the stall producing revenue. The advisor can spend time with the customer building their confidence in his sincere desire to help the customer and establishing a relationship that will lead to sales down the road.

When the technician drives with a customer, his time is lost inventory (labor hours) to the service department. The technician will probably not have the people skills that the advisor does and may anger the customer with his lack of empathy and desire to fix the technical problems regardless of how the customer feels about the problem (brake noises bother customers a lot but do not bother may seem normal to technicians).

Managing test drives is essential to achieving fewer repeat repairs, managing customer expectation, building confidence in your advisors, qualifying the customer for technical time commitments, and a professional and profitable service operation.

John
Service Solutions, Rockford, IL
pika68@aol.com

[This message has been edited by john (edited 07-16-2001).]

[Doug]

My thanks to all for responding.

John, I can't help but wonder if you misunderstood my original question or if it wasn't made clear.

I think we all agree that road testing with customers is essential. This, I think, is fairly commonplace nowadays. Anyone disagree?

We routinely have the foreman road test with customers and then he gives the advisor an assesment of how the job should be dispatched and then the advisor books an appropriate appointment.

My contention, though, is that road testing would not be the best use of advisors' time. If each advisor (3) road tested 4-5 cars each day with the customer and then again after the repair, with a road test being anywhere from 10-20 minutes....well, you do the math. It would leave an already hectic service drive shorthanded for a considerable amount of time each day.

This, coupled with the already high expectations which advisors are expected to fulfill, would be a bit over-the-top, in my opinion.

Of course, a great deal of the decision would vary from store-to-store, depending on the advisors' technical prowess and the scope of their other duties. Certainly, having a non-technical advisor road test cars wouldn't be too beneficial.

Traditionally it has been preferred to NOT have advisors involved with diagnosis (or pre-diagnosis) and I'm curious, John, if you hold a different viewpoint.

At our store the foreman (technically proficient and very good with people) road tests umpteen cars each day. His technical background allows him to make an intelligent assesment of the situation....something the advisors may not be able to do.

In the end, I would prefer the advisors to stick with advising rather than have them driving around town listening for a rattle or waiting for a "check engine light" to come on.

This idea of our advisors being "spoiled" because they don't do the road testing is the result of a recent twenty-group meeting.
I'll discuss it with the dealer tomorrow but just wanted to make sure I wasn't way out-of-line with my thinking !

Thanks to all
DD

[PROUSER]

In the dealers I worked for 5-7 techs there was no foreman. Technicians were paid flat rate, so It was really unfair for the dealer to expect the techs to go on test drives all of the time. In every dealer whether it is a tech who is customer oriented, or a writer who is technically oriented, this is a position that needs to be filled. I believe many dealers are missing the boat on this very important issue! The dealers where I worked could never understand this so the customer always suffered.

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GLK

[pete@consultadc.com]

Hi Doug,

I just had to put my 2 cents in on this one. First, I disagree with your dealers opinion of your advisors. (Consultants) The advisors place is not to test drive vehicles as the norm because they are NOT QUALIFIED to diagnose concerns! If they were then they would be producing hours and selling parts instead.

I think you are 100% correct in your current mindset.

Advisors need to be at their post, not in the shop and not test-driving vehicles. They need to answer phone calls when they ring, make appointments, get out from behind their desk -- greet customers, perform a walk-around, present maintenance menus, , communicate with active workflow customers/technicians, research history & extended warranties, make calls to sell, review repair orders for 6cs and perform active deliveries.

I would like to address the input from John.
With the current "drive thru society" we deal with, how can you expect the customer to come by the dealership at the dealers convenience for a test drive and then make a second trip to schedule the "reservation"? How does that affect CSI, TSI, TSS, etc?

Customers have one thing less today than ever before. TIME. We need to respect it.


Yes, technicians are not the best customer contact persons sometimes, but they are the best-qualified person to perform a test drive.

Doug, it sounds like you have your act together. We work with dealerships and automakers all over the world and we do not have any clients that have their advisors "test drive" vehicles.

Good Luck
Pete
pete@consultadc.com

[john]

Doug,
If reservations are being made correctly and the customer is being qualified in the process, no customers needing a test drive should be brought into the service department during prime drive time. If a customer has a problem that he cannot duplicate in the lane, he should not be brought in untill the problem can be qualified. It makes no sense to bring in an intermittent problem, drivability issue, transmission shifting issue, steering/brake drift or pull, or intermittent concern that the customer can't duplicate in the lane. Look at he frequency of CND, NPF responses from your technicians. The probability of repair in these cases is very low. You waste write-up time, technician time, and in many cases create ill will in the customer. The expectation in the mind of the customer is that the car will be repaired at the end of the day.

My solution (I took a store from last in CSI to #1 in the group/region for 4 years in a row using this very process. We grew form 1 advisor to 5 advisors and over 20 technicians in 6 profitable years. I also staffed 5 other award winning stores using these techniques). By the way - we test drove at the customer's convenience not ours. In many cases the car was a visitor from another store that had had multiple shots at a fix. We never let our customers get that far.

I believe it is the technician's responsibility to test drive his own work. If you have an effective repeat repair process in place, it is in the vested interest of the technician to make an effectice repair. Quality is built into work at the time it is done (Dr. Demming). You cannot inspect quality into your technican,s work after it has been done, My advisors only test drove work from a technician if he had shown a propensity for repeat repairs. We put him on a program that required another tech, advisor or manager clear the car to be released to the customer. Our repeat repair rate was one of the lowest in our group.

The real problem is a systems problem that wraps around reservations control, customer control, service advisor responsibilities, dispatching, phone control, repeat repair control and why we do some of the things we do (customer qualifying matrix).

Test drives by technicians set up an automatic "front seat diagnosis" that will bite you every time. I want an advisor to describe the problem and be able to tell the technician how, when, where, why, who, how long, about the problem. Technicians tend to go for the what - when they do, they short cut proper diagnosis and rely on "the last one like this was a --------" diagnosis.

If you are having 4 to 5 cars a day per advisor needing a test drive, I would suggest that you have a service systems problem. You are treating the symptom not the real issue at hand.

I really like this healthy discussion. Thanks for the forum.


John

[mark vandersteeg]

the service consultant should be involved with the total customer contact. they should have a technical person available for inspection or further diagnostics but the customer will want to talk to someone knowledgeable. how can the service consultant stay knowledgeable and maintain total communication with the customer if they are not involved with all facets of the service consultation. yes..it takes time. most consultants are overbooked and overworked so that they don't have time to be with the customer. on a road test you can build a relationship which will build trust. once you have trust, the customer will become your advocate thus freeing up their wallet and sending you referrals.

i think in a 9 hour day a consultant can only handle properly maybe 15-18 customer interactions that generate an r.o. for a problem (not just maintenance r.o.'s). having to talk to many people can be confusing to a customer and they will wonder who their actual advocate at the dealership is!

this is the reason that many customers prefer to go the smaller service outlets or corner garage...they know their "service guy".

make sure your consultants aren't doing to many unrelated functions such as: booking(invoicing), cashiering, answering informational phone calls (ie..what are your hours of operation?, what is the torque on the head bolts on my 62 corvair?, do i need an appointment for an l.o.f.? etc...), giving people rides to work, searching for history r.o.'s, and so on.

your whole service operation has to be taken into consideration so that you understand the tasks that they do and make sure they have the time, tools, and personnel to do it right.

the service consultant has the toughest job in the dealership by far!!!

[ScottM]

I would be willing to bet that your dealer comes from a sales backround not fixed ops? I now what the answer is. I am a former fixed ops managers who was succesful in acheiving top level CSI and fix it right first time scores with multi-lines. I believe in having a qualified tech or shop foreman doing road tests for these reasons.
1) Keep the advisors selling service and communicating with customers.
2) Reduce the amount of time and expense associated with comebacks and the occurances of combacks.
3) Prevented unnecessary write up of normal or unvarified condidtions in the first place.
4) Improve CSI and fix it right first time scores.
5) Makes the customer be part of the solution and demonstrates willingness of dealership to help the customer.

To put it another way I have had the very same experiences having computers repaired with a tech that was permitted to "verify" concern and explain the next course of action adding invaluable credibility to the level of service I received. These types of activities set dealers apart from one who attempt to meet expectations from those who exceed them! Good luck!