Going Old School

Bring back the service introduction 0:00

Steve Shaw: Welcome back, Dave. What's on your mind today?

Dave Rogers: Hey Steve, how the hell you doing?

Steve Shaw: Man, I am awesome today.

Dave Rogers: I was thinking about it. We were talking one of the last times about promise times, and when I got done with that episode, I was thinking old school. Maybe it's time to bring back some of the stuff we used to do. Crazy stuff, like the introduction to service from sales, and setting the first appointment.

Steve Shaw: Oh my gosh.

Dave Rogers: A novel concept: when a customer is done, how about setting their next appointment, like the dentist does every single time? I know, whoa, that's crazy. So I was thinking about that after we talked, and maybe we should start focusing on some of these things as a reminder. What were you saying, that five, six years ago it was a buzzword?

Steve Shaw: Oh my gosh, yeah. It was probably pre-COVID, whatever year that was, '15, '16. I can remember working with dealers myself as a trainer: "Oh my God, how important is this? We've got to do the service department introduction and walk the customer back." Everybody had all this stuff set up. Remember, some of the dealerships even had the service manager mannequin, the six-foot-tall Steve Shaw cardboard cutout somewhere: "This is going to be your service advisor." That was the after-hours thing, with a little appointment thing on the guy's shirt and a sign. People did crazy shit like that back in those days, because that's how important it was to have that service department walk or intro. It's not even a thing anymore, as far as I know.

The oil-life light and the path of least resistance 1:45

Dave Rogers: It's funny, because I think what's happened, and I go back to drinking the Kool-Aid from the factory, is you've got a light on your dash that's going to tell you when to bring the car in for an oil change. Which, as we've talked about, is probably not enough. It's six months, it's 5,000 miles, 6,000 miles, five months. Pick the number that works for you and the customer.

I think we've taken the path of least resistance, and it gave people the excuse not to do it. "Bring your car in in a year, bring the car in when the light comes on." It's one less step, and it's laziness, is what it is. For me, it's a signal that we don't want the business. And let's be honest, most car dealerships aren't open the same hours they were before COVID. We were all shutting down early in COVID, and now you can't get anybody to work past eight o'clock. Seven, eight o'clock at a lot of dealerships.

So there's probably somebody back in service every time you're selling a car, at least 90% of the time nowadays. There's no excuse. Walk them in the back and introduce them to an advisor. Do the presumptive close even before you sell them the car: "After you buy the car, this is where you're going to bring it for service. Look, our top gun, Steve Shaw, is here. He's not busy right now. Steve, I'd like to introduce you to Dave Rogers here. He'd like to buy a car," or he bought a car. How many miles do you do a year, whatever it is, and then set the guy's first appointment.

And we have the technology now. I'll just say CDK. In CDK Service there's a little button right on the screen that says "set first appointment." We have it set up in our service, and it defaults to 180 days. So if it's Monday, it'll default to 180 days out on a Monday. Same with "set next appointment" when you have a customer's RO open; there's a little button for that too. It's not complicated. But I think everyone's taking the path of least resistance once again, drinking the Kool-Aid that says you can bring the car in after a year when the idiot light comes on to tell you your oil's due. And I think that's probably why the fad went away, because somebody found a reason not to do it.

Set the next appointment, like the dentist 4:02

Steve Shaw: Yeah, I don't know why it stopped. Maybe it was COVID. Maybe it was walking back to the shop. I'm not sure. I can't remember the last time we talked about it. It's probably in one of our value-based classes. We might talk about it in write-up processes, when we talk about process A to Z. Where does it start? It starts at the sale. But I don't see it there. There's a handful of people out there doing it, so people in the comments, don't kill us. But most people are not doing it.

I've had guys say, "Don't make the next appointment." Why? "Well, we don't know when they're going to come in." And I'm like, but isn't that what our phone process is for? We get them in the system, we print out a call log three days in advance, or however many days in advance, and we start working it. To me, that's one of the best things you can do to ensure my business. Especially if I'm a new service advisor, I'd want to collect all of those people as my customers. So six months from now I've got business, and then I'm going to reschedule that appointment, so I've got my next visit. It's like getting subscribers. It continues to go up and up, and three years from now I never have to do that again.

Dave Rogers: Right. You go to the dentist, you get your teeth cleaned, the checkup's covered by your insurance, generally speaking, whatever it is, a 50, 60, $70 visit. And they set the next appointment for you before you leave. For me, it's always six months down the road.

Steve Shaw: Yeah. Nobody wants to go to the dentist, but that dental assistant, or whatever they're called these days, he or she seems to be pretty darn good at making those appointments. Because if we don't know we're going back for a second visit, I promise you we won't.

Dave Rogers: No, and all the medical fields have been doing it. I noticed my primary care guy is doing it, he sets it out a year. I went to a dermatologist, they check you for skin cancer, and they schedule you for one year out. I don't understand why we wouldn't do that for basic maintenance on a vehicle. If the customer comes in with 20,000 miles on a car and the car is two years old, you don't have to be a math scholar to figure out the guy's doing 10,000 miles a year. It's not hard. "Okay, let me set the appointment for six months, 5,000 miles, and we'll get two oil changes in," whatever the numbers are. I think it's just laziness, or we're not staffed to handle it. The path of least resistance seems to be the biggest thing I see people do.

Steve Shaw: Probably the path of least resistance. Sometimes it baffles me, the things we do and the things we don't do. And then there are things we think we're doing, but we're not really doing any of it. I always ask in my classes, how many of your customers know the make, model and mileage of their car when they come in? It used to be a customer may not know their mileage. "I don't know if I've got 36,000 or 38,000." They follow the light. Sometimes people don't even know what year car they have.

That's because we've conditioned them, just exactly what you said: "We'll take care of everything." The sales department says we'll take care of everything, and we don't. And then you get into the Dave rant: the customer didn't show up for an oil change, they missed an oil change, they missed something. It just goes, what did they used to call it, the waterfall chart, when I was in the business. Retention would just fall off at a certain mileage.

Retention isn't new 7:42

Dave Rogers: Yeah, it used to fall right off. If you pay attention to what's out there, social media, podcasts, whatever the case may be, retention has been the big buzzword for the last year in the automobile business. Which is crazy, because as far as I'm concerned, we've been talking about it for 30 years: retain customers, get them to come back twice a year, three times a year, whatever it was at the time.

The whole idea that was drilled into my head was, I want to be the dealership with the most customers in my database. If you broke down, we wanted to write you up. If you needed an oil change, we wrote you up. No matter what it was, we brought you in, we wrote you up, we got your information, because I always figured you could market to them during slow times. That's always been the key with retention. So when you listen to people out there talking like it's some newfangled thing, it cracks me up. What's the best way to keep a customer tied in? Schedule the next appointment.

Steve Shaw: Schedule the next appointment? Absolutely.

Dave Rogers: They're going to get a reminder. Your system should be set up to send a reminder out a week ahead of time. The system should be set up to remind them two days out. The system should be set up to let everybody know they missed an appointment.

Who calls the 19 no-shows? 8:58

Dave Rogers: That's the other thing, back to old school. I was talking to one of my service managers the other day, and I happened to be looking at the appointment screen while we were chitchatting at one of our weekly meetings. And I'm like, "Who is the person who calls these 19 no-shows?" He just looked at me. "Who's the person who calls these 19 no-shows?" I'm looking at his appointment system, and he's looking at me. I said, "Your cashier sits there all day long and doesn't do anything. Can't she call these people?" "Well, doesn't the system email, doesn't it text out?" Again, it's basics, it's old school. If somebody misses their appointment, why aren't you on the phone with them instantly?

Steve Shaw: Well, yeah. And then you've got to ask yourself, okay, they missed their appointment, but why did they miss it? Because we didn't call them. We didn't call them the day before and we didn't call them three days before. We talk about that all the time. And it doesn't even require a phone call at this point in life. It could be the text message reminder or the email reminder. We do have tools that let us get those reminders out to a customer, or reschedule their appointment.

I'm a total fan. I love the old school stuff, but there are certain things I really like about new school, like you get the calendar event, and if something comes up, "Hey, can you reschedule?" Okay, great. And if I think about that as a service manager, I've got a shop to load. Now we're talking old school: load your shop appropriately. I think you broke it down once, how many cars to bring in. I've got to have a certain number of cars showing up in my shop. If my men are going to flag hours tomorrow, I've got to have enough cars for them to work on. So it falls back on me to make sure I have enough cars showing up that we can produce and make our budget. Unless we're lucky enough to have an overabundance of cars, which I'm not so sure is the case today, we need every one of those cars to show up.

Dave Rogers: I find it absurd that we wouldn't. I learned in the body shop business, and a good friend of mine is in it, and the first thing he said was, "Get the keys." You don't make any money unless you get the keys. That's the body shop business. I think the same thing goes in service. You've got to get the keys. You've got to get the customer in the door. We're not going to make money on anything if we don't get the car in the door.

Steve Shaw: Yeah, I love that. I remember that: get the keys. Write the estimate, get the keys, "Leave your car right here." Because if you allow the customer to leave, they're going to go somewhere else. That's absolutely the case.

Dave Rogers: Right. So set their first appointment to make sure you get them in the first time. And to get the customer back, set their next appointment. Let them know, A, you want their business, and B, "I'm looking out for you." "Well, why do I have to make an appointment in six months? I read somewhere you wait until the light comes on." "Well, Steve, you don't do that. Don't you want to keep this car? Let's talk about maintenance. That light means it's too late. We've got to get you in before that."

And to your point, which I think is important, use the new technology. We have data mining tools that go through the database and remind people when they're due for an appointment. They remind people their appointment is coming up. If the customer needs to change or cancel, that AI and that data mining tool can integrate and chitchat with them. But you've got to be the one who helps it out or monitors it and makes sure there's complete follow-up. Because if a customer says cancel, who's chasing that two or three days later to reschedule? That's where I think we fall short.

Advisors, the BDC and owning the appointment 12:55

Steve Shaw: Yeah, exactly. And we'll walk you through that in classes too. Whether it's the BDC's responsibility or the cashier's, ultimately it's the service manager's responsibility. Talk about old school: I grew up in the days when we didn't have enough business. We fought for every appointment we got in the store. As a manager, that was the biggest thing: I've got to fill up my shop. And old school, everything fell back on me as the manager. There was nobody else. I couldn't go to my dealer and say, "The cashier didn't call." "Who does she work for?" We didn't have that back then. So I might have been on the phone calling customers myself, because I had to fill up my shop. And I never had a pay plan so lucrative that I was making the money I wanted to make. Or if I ever got the money I wanted, I guarantee you I wanted to make a dollar more. So every appointment made a difference, getting every single car in here that you possibly can. Old school, it was my responsibility.

Dave Rogers: Right. And when you get a bigger store, now you've got to put it on your individual advisors. Primarily it should be their job to call the customer to get them back in, reschedule, whatever the case may be. If they don't show up, make the next appointment. Too many times I've seen that when advisors have a BDC, they don't even make appointments anymore. It's beneath them. They don't answer the phones, now they don't make appointments, and they transfer the call to the BDC, which is stupid. You're trying to build a relationship with a customer. You're trying to be their guy to service the car, or their gal. Isn't that what you always want to be? "I want to make an appointment." "Hold on, let me transfer you to my BDC." No, make the damn appointment. What does it take, two seconds?

Steve Shaw: Yeah. And these groups that have these BDCs, I was with a group just recently that has them, the advisor doesn't make the appointment. They shuffle it off to the BDC. And then the advisor goes, "Well, I'm not going to make my status calls now," and everything gets shoved over to the BDC. And then what does the advisor say? "The BDC sucks. Our BDC stinks. All they do is take appointments. They don't do the 50K or the 30K. They don't do this."

And you look at it, and half the calls that go to the BDC now are status calls, because the advisor didn't do that either. Holy cow, that's a whole other rant. We shuffle the responsibility over there, and now we're mad and we say the BDC stinks. But all the BDC does is sit there and fight for their lives all day long trying to put an appointment on the desk. It's a snowball effect.

Write the process before you buy the tool 15:56

Steve Shaw: And I think this is one of the conversations we have all the time: if you were good at the basics, would you be an amazing dealership?

Dave Rogers: Absolutely. You would be.

Steve Shaw: That's what I think we forget. "Let's go to the convention and find some AI tools. Let's find this tool, let's find that tool." Great. What did that do for you? How about if we were really, really good? A guy stopped me in class and was having this whole conversation with me about which tool is better for this and which tool is better for that. And I said, "None of them. I don't want you to get any tool. I don't want you to change what you're doing. I want to know, did you write down your process? Do you have a great process written down?" Because they were complaining about the differences between Xtime and Dealer Logics, or whatever the multi-point tool is. It doesn't matter.

Dave Rogers: CDK's, Reynolds, yeah, I got it.

Steve Shaw: I don't care what tool, I don't care what DMS you have. You can design a process that works around any of them. Whether you're in a group like yours or a small store, none of us is going to change the equipment. We're not going to change the DMS, and we're not going to change Xtime. Instead of all the time it would take to change Xtime or whatever it is to something else, all we had to do was go back and look at the process. Then let's write our process around the tool we have, and next thing you know, you've got a great tool.

Dave Rogers: Well, I would add to that: the best tool is the one you're going to use. If you think about a tool, if I need a screwdriver for the job I'm going to do next, but all I have in my hand is a hammer, I'm probably not going to get the job done very well. So if I give you Xtime, if I give you CDK Service, if I give you Reynolds and Reynolds, if I give you myKaarma, I don't care which one I give you. If you don't use it, you're wasting money and you're wasting time.

But I do believe you have to go back to the basics. You've got to have the fundamentals in. We've talked about it once or twice before, and I've always believed that if you don't have a really good process in place, technology is just going to report how much you suck. That's all it's going to do. It's not going to make the process better, because as I've always said, if you can't do it analog, you're not going to do it digital. It's just not going to happen.

Steve Shaw: No question about it.

Dave Rogers: So you've got to be the steward of the process. You've got to make sure everyone's following it. You mentioned BDCs. We could do a whole podcast on what to do, what not to do and what to watch out for when you set up a BDC, because I've seen advisors do some crazy stuff. When you take away their job and give the appointments to someone else, it's amazing how the guys who sucked at making appointments, and I say sucked at it, all of a sudden become experts on appointment making. They couldn't make their own appointments, so we gave it to a BDC, and now all of a sudden they're experts. "That appointment was made at the wrong time," or "We can't do that job on a Tuesday." You have to laugh at it, because it's just BS. They're making excuses.

Who pays when the appointments move? 19:20

Steve Shaw: Well, how about this? This is going way back to my days as a service manager at one of the publics. We had a budget. I've got a budget I can live within for service advisor compensation, a budget for support staff and a budget for management. So we're paying our advisors X, and we're within budget. Then all of a sudden it's, "Okay, we're going to hire somebody to take appointments." Well, where does that fit in the budget? My support staff was maybe a valet and a warranty administrator. Now you're going to make me put in an appointment coordinator. Where does that money come from? "Oh, since I'm taking it away from your job, I guess it's going to come out of your pay. So now as an advisor you're not making X percent, you should make less." Well, no, it doesn't really work that way, does it?

Dave Rogers: Never has.

Steve Shaw: It's a crazy, vicious cycle. Bottom line, at some point everybody has a budget, and those three compensation lines have got to work. I guess that's why everybody says, "Well, let's go to AI." But where's that going to go? Tools and supplies are a different line.

Dave Rogers: Yeah, the AI is going to go to outside services or data services or something. It's not going to go into personnel. That's why people sublet things. I've seen it even at the publics. You sublet it, and now you don't have the personnel expense, but your outside services went up.

Steve Shaw: Yeah, so now you can't hire Steve for training, because you've got something else in there.

Dave Rogers: Right, now you can't do anything you want to do. But when you talk about the advisors, they never go backwards when you take a job away from them. The job used to pay 45 grand a year back then. You had to answer the phone, you wrote up your ROs, you built out the ROs, you cashiered the customer. Hell, sometimes you wound up putting ROs back in the Reynolds and Reynolds color file behind you. And listen, they make a good living now. They make 80, 90, $100,000. But we took the phones away from them, they don't have to deliver cars, you've got a cashier who does that. Some of this stuff is crazy if you think about what we're paying them for.

But setting and scheduling the appointment, I do think they should take more ownership of it. They should be thrilled when a customer comes back, a new car customer: "Glad to have you in the family. Congratulations. What color's that car?" Talk about something stupid, just to get them excited. And be glad to take that first appointment. And listen, if you're tied up, the guy or gal next to you should take that appointment. Somebody should look at that customer when they walk in, and not have their head down hiding behind the keyboard or the screen. I think it's important.

The GM sets the culture 22:15

Steve Shaw: Well, we've weaved a long way from, I don't even know what the topic was when we started. Service introductions. Old school. That should be the title, right?

Dave Rogers: Old school. Yeah, I was just circling back around on that. That's kind of where I was going.

Steve Shaw: Yeah, we circled around to a lot of stuff here. We probably ought to wrap it up on that note. What's your GM tip of the day, old school?

Dave Rogers: Listen, GM: don't put a digital tool in until you get the basics done. You're the GM, you set the culture, you set the procedures. You should make sure your sales department introduces customers to the service department. Every customer gets introduced. If you sell the car when service is closed, there should be some kind of handoff process to make sure that customer's information gets to the back. And then set an appointment for six months down the road. I don't care what brand you're with, I don't care what make it is, I don't care who pays for what maintenance. Set it for six months, get them in the door and start that long-term process. That's where it starts. The service manager can't make the sales department do anything, but the general manager can make it all happen.

Steve Shaw: Well, you general managers, please remember that. You have the power.

Dave Rogers: You have the power.

Steve Shaw: All right. Well, let's get out of here on that note. I look forward to catching up with you again soon.

Dave Rogers: All right, bro. Talk to you later.