The Repair Order Trick Every Top Advisor Uses

The service manager who preloaded every RO 0:00

Steve Shaw: Welcome back, everybody. Welcome back to Fixed Ops Focus with Steve Shaw and Dave Rogers. Dave, what's happening?

Dave Rogers: How you doing, buddy? Everything's good here, man. How are you?

Steve Shaw: I'm doing wonderful. I'm programmed now to say "welcome" because of our live show.

Dave Rogers: Yes. As a reminder, this should drop Thursday, and there won't be a live show Friday. We're celebrating the July Fourth holiday a day early, because the production crew's off, and recording a live show ahead of time seemed kind of hypocritical and weird. So for those of you listening Thursday morning, take Friday afternoon off and do something fun with your family, or hit the bar early for a three-to-five happy hour.

Steve Shaw: That's awesome. Record a live show that's prerecorded.

Dave Rogers: That just didn't sit right. So we were talking earlier in the week and had that interesting conversation. I'm curious where you wound up with preprogramming the repair order. We talked about the annual inspection and stuff. Tell me and the audience what Steve Shaw's been conniving lately.

Steve Shaw: Well, I always have something on my mind. Let me tell the backstory. If you come to one of my classes, I always talk about selling alignments. This is super secret, and it's worth a lot of money. We talk about how to sell alignments and why to do it, in class and on the drive. And this is the best thing ever about training. A dealer's service manager, the most brilliant thing I've ever heard, took the class and said, "Why would I leave it up to my advisors to ask a customer every time they come in if they want to buy something? I'm just going to preload the repair order. We already have the multi-point inspection line on the RO. I'm just going to preload every RO with an alignment." And the customer would then have to decline the alignment on the repair order.

Craig told me the story while he was in the dealership. I said, "What? They're preloading the repair orders with an alignment?" In my brain, it might have been slow motion, but it took about a second to go: that might be the most brilliant idea I've ever heard. Then I started making phone calls. And the kicker was the closing ratio. I always say in class that if you ask every customer with over 12,000 miles for an alignment, you should see somewhere around a 25 percent closing ratio. This guy has nearly 80 percent closing on alignments.

That got me crazy. While this was going on, I was driving from Marathon, Florida, back to Tampa. So I had six hours in the car to ponder this amazing idea. Don't give a guy like me something to think about in a car for six hours by himself. That's how it all started.

Dave Rogers: That's when we talked. You called me up while you were driving, all excited and fired up about it.

F&I already makes the customer say no 3:40

Steve Shaw: I was jacked up, man. I talked to you, and I must have called a dozen fixed ops guys I know. "I'm going to blow your mind." And everybody had a reaction similar to yours: "Well, I don't know. Can I do that? What would happen?" And I keep coming back to the fact that we do it in finance. We preload. We make every customer in the finance department say no to us, for lots of reasons, many of them litigious. That customer is never going to come back and say they were never presented an extended service contract. If something goes wrong, the dealer's covered. So it got me thinking: what's wrong with preloading the repair order with an alignment? That was the start of everything. I'd be interested in your thoughts, because I'm so fired up about it, and then we can go on to the next step and where I'm at right now.

Dave Rogers: The first thing I thought of was how to do it, because the DMSs aren't smart enough. We've done forced marches. We've loaded the service menus, the maintenance intervals, into the DMSs. I've been in Reynolds stores where you do have to go through the menu. But it's so clunky and so inaccurate. So after we talked, I thought you need something like a menu program. We use Darwin in F&I. The F&I manager gets a couple of minutes before each deal and loads up the mileage and the kind of car it is: new, used, lease. They load the different scenarios, come up with a few menu items, and present the options to the customer based on the situation.

Sometimes there's early intervention, where the F&I manager comes out and meets the customer: "Hey, Steve, how many miles do you drive a year? Do you usually lease? Do you usually buy?" They ask a few questions, go back to their office and preload the menu with three or four options for each scenario. We could do it. We have menu programs. We have software that does that. You could do it with a regular menu if you wanted. The fluid companies make menus for us, handwritten ones, and we have the online ones. I think it's a great idea to do it like F&I, too. Make them opt out. Your vehicle is due for an alignment. Your vehicle is due for a four-wheel tire balance, a state inspection, whatever the annual thing is. It's going to take a little time and a little thought. But I think it's a home run idea, to be honest with you. Let the customer decide they don't want to do it.

Make it a tool for the advisor 6:56

Steve Shaw: You analyze things much more than I do. I'm like, "I have an idea, I'm going to get it done come hell or high water, and let the chips fall where they may." But I think that's critical. We've always espoused preprinted ROs, and back in the day we had pre-writes.

Dave Rogers: We still use them.

Steve Shaw: You still do pre-writes. We're still putting the repair order up, putting it in a bin or a basket, so when the customer arrives, it's ready. It's not even rocket science. It's just, duh, why wouldn't I put it on the ticket? I'm saying alignment first, as a starting point. You could say menus. If I'm doing a pre-write and you're coming in at X, Y and Z mileage, I'm going to put your 30,000-mile best care package on the ticket. That's what I'm going to present to you. It doesn't mean the customer can't say no. Why can't I do that in the pre-write?

But this is where it goes two different ways. In your scenario, we're still leaving it up to the advisor to say, "It looks like I need to do this." Where I got really geeked out was: what if we just put an alignment on, just like an MPI? Every ticket, no matter what, gets an MPI. It's forced. Think back to when we first started doing multi-points in 1997. People said the same thing: "You can't have a multi-point line on the ticket. What if the customer doesn't want a multi-point?" Well, take it off. Who cares? It took us years to get past that objection. So what if every RO that came off your printer had an alignment line, and the customer has to say no? At 5K, it should say balance, but hypothetically, over 10,000 or 12,000 miles, every car on the planet can use an alignment once a year. So why couldn't it just be on the ticket? Then there's no argument.

I called some career service advisors I know, and at first they were thinking the same thing: "Well, what if this, what if that?" And I said, "Bro, isn't it a tool for you?" If I'm an advisor, and it's already on the RO, it's not me saying it. It's the RO. The computer says, "Your vehicle requires an alignment today." It takes the advisor right out of it. It's done.

Dave Rogers: I agree. There are a couple of things. There are people listening who'll say, "I've got volume stores with people writing twenty ROs a day, banging through them." I think you have to exclude some of the express stuff, and some organizations aren't going to have the time. But I do think that after X time, you could preprogram an alignment, a multi-point, whatever you want on there. A lot of these guys already put their little comment on the RO, "Call us if you have any problem," their CSI slogan. I've seen some of these guys who are wimpy put their three percent credit card surcharge on there. I got a text from a dealer the other day, the introductory text: "Hey, Dave, thanks for bringing your car in, and just a reminder, if you pay with a credit card, there's a three percent surcharge." Why would you do that? That's stupid. Everyone's in CYA mode, and they don't want to have these conversations. That's the difference between an F&I person and a service advisor, at least the latest rendition of the advisor: they don't want to have these conversations.

Track every deleted line 11:25

Dave Rogers: So preprogram it and have it slap on the RO. You're right. The first thing I said to you is that I'd love my DMS to tell me who deleted lines. I want to see what's deleted, and that's got to be a daily, hourly, weekly, monthly report. You've got to be looking at it constantly. Because if advisor A deletes 99 percent of them, we know advisor A just doesn't want to sell. That's one of the biggest problems in this business. I've had this pop up in the last couple of weeks: we just have advisors who don't want to sell. We've got the wrong person in the wrong seat. That person maybe should be in admin, behind the scenes. People don't use billers and bookers anymore, but that's where that person should be. We're putting bodies on the front line, and that's why we're getting the answers we get.

But I love the idea. I really do. I'd just love it to be smart. I was actually going to the next level, to AI: upload my appointment list, look at the history, and throw it on the RO or the pre-work order. Maybe you do a quick write-up sheet. Does a customer really know what an RO is? They really don't. We use drop-off envelopes and express write-up sheets. So if you made a document that spit out of some AI or a menu program, and it looked like a repair order, and the customer signed it, it is in fact the repair order. What you do afterward in your DMS is totally different. Even if none of this was on the DMS repair order except what the customer is coming in for, plus all your preloaded lines, I think it would work great. It's one half step extra. And if you can get AI or software to make it work, there's no credibility issue, and the advisor can't say, "See, that's why I don't use this thing. It's never right. I got my ass handed to me." That one instance is what they always use not to do something.

Steve Shaw: It's the one out of a hundred, and they hang their hat on it. "What if this happens?" Well, what if you sold 80 percent of alignments instead?

Dave Rogers: What would that do to your paycheck?

Steve Shaw: And you were talking about the high-volume store. We had that discussion one time about appointments or no appointments, where a hundred cars show up at eight o'clock in the morning. If the RO is preprogrammed, the customer's not leaving without deciding. As fast as they want to go, they're either going to say no or move on. If it's not preprogrammed, I, as an advisor, have to stop you and take time out of my schedule to sell. So the reciprocal is that if it's preprogrammed, it goes much faster for the advisor. It becomes a tool: "This is your RO, sign here, and get on your way." And then the customer stops.

And one guy said to me, "Well, what if my advisor doesn't say it, the alignment gets done, and the customer shows up at the cashier's window and has to pay 100 or 150 bucks for an alignment?"

Dave Rogers: Oh my God, it's the end of the world. You'd have to give a guy a free alignment.

Steve Shaw: Exactly. I write off 150 bucks and have a conversation with my advisor, and I tell him if he does it again, it's going to his policy account. I think that'll happen once.

Stop building rules for the five percent 15:16

Dave Rogers: And the more I think about it, an express advisor isn't going to do an alignment by accident. If it's on the RO, the customer declined, and for some reason it didn't get struck off, he's not going to go do an alignment. There's a way of doing this. There are logistics. We used to lick and stick and handwrite ROs. Now you've got electronic repair orders, techs clocking on the line in the computer, so they have to do something with it. There are hurdles. But we have to stop with the "what if" for one percent of the people.

I've said this for years: we make rules in our stores for them. I'm ballparking it, but it used to be that five to ten percent of the people who came into your store were just assholes. Now it might be fifteen or twenty percent, because people are empowered by social media. But we make the rules for the twenty percent of assholes and forget about the eighty percent who are there to do business with us because they like us. They're decent people. We do it all the time. We should just ignore that small minority. They take up a lot of our time, I get it. But focus on the eighty or ninety percent. And like you said, if you have to deal with five or ten alignments a week where it goes wrong, big deal. What's it really cost you, sixty bucks if you cost it out? You give away more than that on extra parts techs throw on warranty jobs. Let's be real here.

Steve Shaw: Exactly. When I was first starting out in the business, doing consulting and training for some big auto groups, we talked about exactly that. What percentage of your customers, if you really had to nail it down, are out to get you? We settled on five percent. This was ten or fifteen years ago. And we all agreed: well, fuck them. We're not going to deal with it. It's not worth my time.

I used to give a whole speech, excuse my French, about Target. If you take something back to Target, it's a process, because they may believe their clientele is out to get them. So they make you jump through hoops to return something. On the other hand, at the Apple store, you could walk in, pick something up off the shelf and walk out, and nobody would say a word to you. They're trained not to stop you, because Apple believes its clients would never do that. And if somebody wants it that bad, they're not going to wrestle them or confront them. I'm sure they have a loss ratio, but it's part of doing business. So we can look at ourselves as Target, where our customers are out to get us, or we can believe most of our clientele is like Apple's and here to do business, exactly as you said. Let's not think they're out to cheat us, because I don't think that many are.

Dave Rogers: Agreed. That's like parts departments with prepaid parts. That's one of my pet peeves. They take a credit card over the phone, which they're not supposed to run anyway, because if I key your card in manually, I have no case to protect myself if it's a bad card. Why are you taking a credit card over the phone for a special-order part when you know damn well that if the guy gets to me, he's going to get his money back? Why are you gearing everything for the one or five percent? The car business has been doing that for probably 125 years. Maybe not; I wasn't around in the fifties. But in the eighties and nineties, we morphed into being afraid of getting caught.

Signing for diag is another one. "Steve, you want to get this noise checked out? I need a $200 authorization." I understand if I think you're a stiff, a deadbeat, and I want to test your commitment. You're one of the five percenters. I might charge you $399 for diag and see if you really mean it. But for a regular customer who's been coming in to me and has a value in the screen, why am I doing this? It's so stupid. Because your tech is going to complain that he doesn't have diag time. You're afraid of the one tech who's going to scream about it.

Steve Shaw: Exactly. But on parts, the parts manager might have a valid point: "I'm going to charge the customer for this part, because I know damn well my service department isn't going to follow up with them." So instead of taking the money from the customer, the parts guy should ding the fucking service department: "This part is sitting on a shelf, and it's going in your receivables account until it gets put on the car. At the end of the month, if it's not on the car, you're paying for it." I'd look at that as a better process than charging the customer. Then the service department is on the hook.

Dave Rogers: I agree. I had a conversation with a parts manager on that same subject the other day. They have a return policy where you can return it to the manufacturer within fifteen days, no questions asked, and it doesn't count against you. And he's just mailing parts back after fifteen days. "You special-ordered it for the customer. Why aren't you getting him in?" "Well, service didn't get him in." So you order the part and ship it back. "What if the customer comes in on day twenty?" "Well, then they should have got him in." Are you guys morons? Pick up the phone and call the customer. Some of the stuff we do in this business is ridiculous, and it's geared for that small percentage of people. Margins are margins, and sometimes a couple of pennies and percentages make a difference in some models and some areas. I get it. But unleash the hounds, man. Let it go. I'd rather race than be conservative sometimes. And if you think about it, you could do this with more than just alignments. That's where I was going with it. How much would it really take to load your next-day appointments into a pre-work order system: this guy needs this, this guy needs this? Add it to the pre-work order and see what he says. Throw the mud against the wall and see if it sticks.

Minimum requirement, two additional services and fries 22:54

Steve Shaw: Then I called Tori Fetzner from Pro Series, because he has a fluid maintenance company, and we talked about adding fluid maintenance products. In all the research I've done, what we generally ask for on the repair order is the minimum requirement, two additional services and fries. That's four items total. That's not too much and not too little. And generally we get the minimum requirement and the fries, and usually one of the two additional services, so we get three items. So I'm with you 100 percent that we should be doing exactly that.

You can make the argument that the advisor should do it the day before, and I'm good with that 100 percent. Before you go home tonight, Mr. Advisor, look at your tickets and prepopulate everything, because there's no AI tool I'm aware of right now that will do it. We pay our advisors for that. I know I'm Steve the knucklehead who just does training, but as a former fixed ops director, I guarantee you the first thing I'd do Monday morning after hearing this is add alignments to the ticket. Then, like you, I'd figure out what other items to add, because I don't want it to be optional for an advisor to do it or not. Maybe I'd put a fuel induction service on. And Tori said to put a battery service on. Two simple things that are universal.

Dave Rogers: I was going to say battery.

Steve Shaw: It's easily explained and easily talked about. These are good things you could do for your vehicle along with your service today. So I've got the minimum manufacturer maintenance, a battery service, a fuel induction service and an alignment. I've got those four or five items on the ticket. The customer can say yes or no. You're golden.

Dave Rogers: I think you'll get some blowback in some areas. I can see North Jersey being a bit of a challenge, and Philly. But if your approval rate was sixty percent, you're thirty-five or forty percent ahead of the best-case scenario under the old way. You're giving the customer the option. It's not like you're jamming them: "You have to do it, Steve, or I'm going to void your warranty." It's, "Hey, this is the annual alignment that's due for your vehicle, and we're going to do it for you today." And if you say no, I take it off the RO. I'm not going to beat you up over it. I like the idea. We've got to get some pilot stores doing this, because a lot of people in my stores tell me they listen to our podcast. Let's see if they pick and choose which ones they listen to now. "Did you listen to that episode?" "No, I didn't hear that one."

Why your goal is to get a "no" 26:15

Steve Shaw: Well, think about this. This is what I know: most people don't want to hear the word no. For a salesperson, and especially a service advisor, no is the end of the world. Our advisors do everything in their power never to hear the word no. And there's a fallacy out there in sales that if I get the customer to say yes to this, they'll say yes to the next thing and the next thing. That's bullshit. That's been debunked. I don't usually argue with people when they bring it up, but just because you get me to say yes once doesn't mean I'll say it five times, and if you get me to say it nine times, I'm not going to say it ten. But our advisors have bought into that: as long as they keep saying yes, I'm good.

One of the people who's very instrumental in my thought process is Chris Voss, the former FBI hostage negotiator. We've adopted parts of his training, where he says your whole goal is to get a no. If I say, "Hey, Dave, would you like to do this today?" you're more likely to say no. But if I say, "Hey, Dave, is there any reason you wouldn't want to do this?" you say, "Nah, go ahead." Because the consumer is preprogrammed to say no. So why don't I put it on the ticket and say, "Is there any reason you wouldn't want to do your alignment today?" "Nah, go ahead." Cool, we're done. That's advanced. That's some cool shit.

Dave Rogers: I've had this conversation with advisors for years. The customer comes in: "Can I have my car back at nine?" "Nope." "Can I get a ride home?" "Nope." "Do you do this?" "Nope." "Can I pick it up at nine at night?" "Nope." "Do you have a loaner?" "Nope." And then the advisor is stunned when they ask the customer a question and the customer says nope. "Hey, Steve, would you like to buy this?" "No." You just said no to this guy five times. You're more the psychology guy, and I've heard the yes thing in sales, where once the salesman gets the done deal, he asks for the mud flaps and the accessories, "Would you like to make this individualized?", and they say the customer keeps saying yes until they say no. I don't know if it's true. But I do know that if every time I ask you a question you tell me you can't do something, why am I going to say yes? It's a negative attitude. And most advisors are programmed for "no, no, no" for some reason.

Steve Shaw: I say that in class all the time. If you've been asking a question a certain way your whole life and getting no's, and I come and tell you a different way to ask, and you think you'll get a no with my way, it's because you're stuck in the old way. It requires the person being trained to say, "I've got to do it differently." We have to reprogram our advisors, even for this. I'm calling it marketing on your RO. You were calling it preloading.

I remember hearing a long time ago that we spend zero time marketing to customers while they're in our store. They sit in our dealership, and we avoid them. My book is called Master of the Waiting Room. I remember talking to a group of advisors at a Toyota store once, after work, and I said, "Let's go sit in the waiting room and have class." They said, "Why?" I said, "For one, it's a lounge, and we can sit down and talk. And two, that's where your customer is." And they said, "We don't go in there. That's where all the bad people are." We've got to be comfortable in the waiting room talking to these people. They're our customers. But we're so worried about getting our ass handed to us that we avoid it. We don't market to the people who are with us in the store.

I'm on a total rant, man. I'm so fired up. If you carry that back to putting it on the ticket: let's market to them. Let's call it marketing. "Hey, we have these services available to you right now. Did you know that?" And they'll go, "No, I never heard that. I didn't know you did alignments. I didn't know you did tires. I didn't know you did battery service." All of a sudden the customer has an option they didn't have before. I'm fired up about it, man.

Dave Rogers: I like it. Years back, at a service manager meeting, I talked about how we're in the retail business, a retail environment. And one service manager got mad at me: "No, we're not. We're a service industry, like air conditioning and heating repair guys." I said, "You're not. You're out front. You're retail. The techs are production; they're the service industry. But we're retail. Those are the two parts of our business." He got all feisty, and I said, "Dude, this is why you're never going to grow." He'd based everything on a tech mentality. He was a former tech who got promoted and never opened his eyes or read a book or expanded his mind. That's a lot of the problem. You take a guy from the shop, a technician, an engineer, somebody mechanically inclined with that personality, and it'd be like taking one of your accountants and telling him to go out front and sell something. As a general rule, they're not going to. So you get that "Ooh, I don't want to go out there, there are people out there." It's so true.

Next time: the math 32:50

Steve Shaw: Talk to somebody. Well, it's thirty-two minutes in, so we should probably wrap this up. But I think we need to leave a teaser, because this topic isn't over. I did the math, because I have this new best friend, Dave, and his name is Claude. So let's come back next episode and bring in the math on RO preloading, or marketing, or whatever we call it. What do you think?

Dave Rogers: Part two is going to be the next one. The cliffhanger. I'd just say to the general managers: make sure you listen to part two. It's definitely a keeper.

Steve Shaw: Stick around for the math. All right, I'll talk to you later.

Dave Rogers: Bye, buddy.