Advisors as cashiers

[TheOne]

I only saw one comment that can be viewed as favoring service advisors handling cashier duties... did I miss something???

[sermgreby]

The question was: Is there anyone who does NOT agree that advisors should cashier who has actually tried it? If so what are the issues that did not work?

Not do you favor or not.

I went with advisors cashering a couple of years ago and the positives FAR outweigh any of the negatives so far.

[texaslp]

The One, I was referring to other threads on this forum on this subject.

[TheOne]

My mistake

[texaslp]

It's okay you're allowed one. Now you have to be really careful the rest of the year

[john]

I do not agree.

The fundamental skills that make a good service advisor do not match well with the skills that make a good cashier/admin person.

SELLING LOBOR TIME is the main job of the advisor - and many don't do a very good job at that because the system they work in is so disfunctional.

Dealers need to maximize the effectiveness of the revenue generators and stop trying to dump extra work on those people at the expense of sales revenue.

Service managers should seek to stay as far away from the cashiering function as possible for these reasons: financial control and accountability, and culpability in the case of fraud. The reasons these functions were split in the first place was because of how easy it is to to hide theft if one person creates and cashiers their own paperwork. I can create a paper trail that can cover just about anything I want to do. The collusion of two or more people (advisor,cashier, service manager) is more difficult to pull off.

In my years of auditing dealers, I found that those who create the RO should not then cashier their own work for reasons stated above.

It's not good business!

John

[sp7128]

"SELLING LOBOR TIME is the main job of the advisor "

I agree that the above is ONE aspect of the advisor.....

ONE of the other high priority duties of the advisor is to build trust and a relationship with the customer....Handing the customer off to an hourly employee that's job is to collect money can be looked upon by many customers as "exactly that, a hand off..."the advisor could sell sell sell to me, but now doesn't want to talk to me after he got money out of me."

Obviously many want to fight change, instead of looking at business operations from the customer side.

And once again it is easier for your cashier to steal, commit fraud etc from you, than anyone else in the store...and if you don't trust your advisors for handling cashiering, i'm sure you need to look at them again because they are probably creating creative ways of raising hours/ro and productivity or whatever drives their paycheck. (discounting from one department to inflate the sale of their department, but keeping the quote to the customer the same)

[TheOne]

Sp it isn't about trust. It is about trustworthy systems. If you want to trust the people hand them your wallet and ask for it back in two days. If you want to trust your system apply reasonable checks and balances as John just suggested.

I disagree with John on the point that a major function of a Service Advisors job is to sell labor hours. Obviously off topic, but needs to be addressed. Service Advisors sell "solutions to problems" and "problem prevention" (maintenance). They do not sell hours. If so try collecting one, or better yet go spend an hour in Walmart...see what you leave with.

Their job is:
Time Get the vehicle for as long as possible.

Smiles Make the customer smile during the process.

Dollars Get the customer to authorize the required amount of money.

If they do this then the downstream processes can function including those of production, cashiering, and accounting, etc..

[This message has been edited by TheOne (edited 06-25-2009).]

[sp7128]

I guess we agree to disagree with each other on certain aspects.....

If the advisor doesn't have the trust of the customer, chances are the advisor will only get the minimum sale and and more than likely the customer will be done with your dealership.

As for my wallet, I'd give mine to any advisor in our store, heck I'd even give it to the new or used sales managers.

I do understand all the talk of not having advisors as cashiers, as we had the same internal verbage 15 years ago, when the GM introduced the new way of business, but now looking back the GM was right.

There is NO way we would go back to cashiers.

And as for the advisors job is to get the car for as long as possible....I feel the statement should be, complete the job in less time quoted to the customer or complete the job in the time the customer had given you the vehicle'

People are always in hurry these days and we have to fit to their schedule over 90% of the time, if we don't fit their schedule, once again they don't come back. We (as dealers) get one a time shot at satisfying the customer, if we don't, they find the next closest place for service/repair.

[msheri]

If the issue is a cashier who is inconvenient to customers, maybe a relocation of work area is in order.
The protection issues are not just an advisor trust issue. By nature of the work they do, their work area tends to be open and approachable. The fraud issues can happen if the work area is compromised...and there are crooks who do prey on dealers (think key switches on cars, etc.) To effectively protect the information and money in their work area, you are effectively chaining them to the desk. It is not just who will steal from you, but how well you can protect the information. I would suggest an evaluation of the potential area in the framework of SOX compliance.