waiting room full

[DEALERGUY]

How is your waiting room? Is it full? How do you handle walkins vs appointments? Our waiting room is full all the time. Mostly I think its to many waits. Do any of you have a program going where you drop off customers at the mall or diner or something like that. Over 60% of my business is walkins. Should I discourage that? If there was a way just to get these people out of my service department for a few hours that would be a great help. I heard of dealers actually dropping customers off at a movie theater. Some ideas would be great.

thanks

[flyboy]

It is not too difficult to get movie passes for discounted rates, esp during our working hours. We set a deal with a local theator, 2.55 per ticket.

We offer rides to the mall down the road. Some I have known have used the pagers like restaraunts have, letting them know their vehicle is ready. Set a specific drop and pick up site.

I once had a deal with a local restaurant, discount for brunch type of stuff. Maybe a Starbucks could be used for relief, buy those coffee cards, earn points for the store at the same time.

Parks, museums, libraries are all viable options. Think out of the box. Actually, how about asking your customers at the cashier station what they would prefer? Maybe like a quick exit poll.

HTH

[pjdevereaux2003]

I worked in a dealership that used a 12 passenger van to take customers to central business district each day at 7:30 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. It would pick up at 4:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. Made dropping off and picking up their car very easy for the customer and kept the waiting room empty.

[Themightyant]

Yeah, we have used shuttle service but the real issue is in your scheduling and how your advisors handle the write up...observe your service lane and find out what question your advisor is asking...I found the common question in my department was "Will you be waiting?"...I coached my guys to change the question to "When will you return to pick up your vehicle?" and we have seen a considerable decrease in waiters...

[john]

A full waiting room is a good problem to have, but if it is creating problems and customer complaints something must be done. It sounds as though you do not have an organized effort to train your customers in the proper way to receive efficient service. If you let customers dictate how and when service is performed, you will get chaos. On the other hand, some effort to be flexible must be made.

Without knowing your exact situation, I would say the problem lies in how you make your appointments - before they ever come in, they must be informed of the way to get service done so they won't have to wait - that will probably cure 50% of your problem.

I advocate a reservation script that each advisor uses in making reservations and that covers instructions on what a reservation is for and what to do to prevent having to wait. Say something like "the reservation time is for write-up and your car will be sceduled for service during the day as work flow allows, we have shuttle service -------and your car should be ready at 5:00PM." If a customer decides to do it his way and creates a "waiter" situation then it must be OK because he was informed and you should not feel obligated to solve a problem he created.

There are a number of other factors that effect the waiting room population.
1.How do you handle Quick Service? Do you have 1 hour oil changes?
2.Are you surveying your customers to see if waiting is a problem for them? You can learn a lot from asking your customers.
3.Do you explain your appointment system to them at new car delivery?
4.Do you try to control 70% of your day at reservation time with an understanding that there will always be those who cannot comply with policy?

There are a number of fairly simple things that can be done to ammend this problem but without knowing more detail it's hard to get too specific.

John
pika68@aol.com

[This message has been edited by john (edited 03-02-2005).]

[This message has been edited by john (edited 03-02-2005).]