The Repair Order

Repair orders that make no sense 0:00

Steve Shaw: Dave Rogers, tell me a story, man. I need one.

Dave Rogers: Have you read some of the repair orders recently that come out of the service departments you've been consulting with? I almost lost my mind today looking at some ROs. It's a lost art sometimes, I think, for some of these younger, inexperienced, Gen-whatever, whatever you want to call them, to write a repair order that actually makes sense. I wanted to kill somebody today, that's all. I was ready to lose it.

Steve Shaw: I have not had the privilege of reading any repair orders lately. I'd love to hear what some people have to say. Man, I can only imagine what that would be like.

Dave Rogers: I've seen some funky ones in my entire life. I used to have some advisors who couldn't type well and would type really dumb stuff on the repair order. We used to have a guy called Freddie Fumbles. He just couldn't get his fingers right, and the stuff he'd write in the complaints was pretty hysterical. I have no words for it sometimes. "Customer states" has to be abbreviated now. Nobody can write that out, so it's "CS," whatever that means.

Steve Shaw: CS, yeah.

Dave Rogers: Which is not really a good way of doing it. Does the customer know what CS means? They're constantly using acronyms and abbreviations. One opcode I saw today, the opcode is MPI and the description is MPI. It doesn't say multi-point inspection.

You have a BDC, they make the appointment and put the appointment in the screen, and for some reason it's beneath the advisor to hit F5 and review the repair order. They just want to print. As I was explaining to the manager today, I can teach a monkey how to do that. A monkey could print the RO if all he's doing is hitting the button to print. The skill is hitting F5 and reviewing it with the customer before they leave.

An opcode nobody should see, and an ID check 2:12

Steve Shaw: The best one I ever saw, and I'll probably get in trouble for saying this, was from a service advisor. I'm not even going to say who, but a service advisor I know. When the check engine light is on, his opcode is MILF. And I said, "John, could you explain to me what MILF means?" He says, "Yes. It's multi-function indicator lamp." And I said, "I'm not sure that's exactly what that says. Maybe you're dyslexic, but that is not how that works." So John likes to have the M-I-L-F light on his deal. And it's a fairly good-size auto group, a very high-line store. It probably goes unseen by most, but I did notice it.

Dave Rogers: Yeah, you have to be thinking that way to see it, but you're right. People see that kind of stuff. There's going to be some woman who comes in and gets written up, or a guy is going to come in and look at the history on his repair order and see MILF as an opcode. It's going to happen.

Steve Shaw: Listen, the other day on one of our rants we were talking about following the process and making sure everybody gets the same thing. I'm at the grocery store, and I must have been buying something alcoholic. The lady said, "Do you have an ID?" And I go, "Of course I do. I'm happy to show it to you." Us old people are fine with that.

And she said the last person in line was an older man, and she didn't ask him for his ID. That was fine. But then the person behind the older man, she asked for an ID, and this person went crazy: "How dare you ask me for an ID when you don't ask everybody else?" So you start thinking about these things from a car dealer perspective, presenting one thing to one person versus another. They're talking about an ID at a grocery store and how people can get upset. When we talk about process and how we need to take care of business correctly, we've got to be careful.

The write-up is where everything starts 4:49

Dave Rogers: We talk about hours, we talk about technician productivity, we talk about a lot of things, and the way the repair order is written up is a major part of getting these guys to diagnose the car as quick as they can: get the car on the rack, know what the complaint is, road test. If I was dispatching work in the shop, I would do what I told you I've done before. I'd hand the tickets back to the advisor. No work goes out in the shop. Nothing, because it's just ridiculous.

Steve Shaw: Never, never.

Dave Rogers: Go back to the old school: who, what, where, when, why. Who does it happen to? When does it happen? You ask those questions. There's nothing like it. And then there's the billing of the repair order. When you look at a great write-up, there's the customer information. How many times does the day go crazy at three o'clock in the afternoon because you can't reach a customer? You didn't get their cell phone, you didn't get their email, you didn't ask the best way to communicate with them. It all starts at the write-up.

I was cracking up. I was talking to one of the techs, and I'm like, "How do you fix these cars? How do you do it?" We've got to teach these kids how to write up ROs a little bit better.

Steve Shaw: There's a podcast called Customer States. I used to watch it a lot. It's from a dealership, and these couple of guys will video stuff and say, "Customer states noise under car," and you go back there and the drive shaft is falling off or something. It is funny. I have to stop watching it, because I'll watch two or three episodes occasionally and go, "Oh, I've got to stop. This is just absolute insanity."

Dave Rogers: Is there really? I wish I'd thought about it years ago, because I used to have pictures on my phone of all the goofy stuff I saw people write on ROs, and even invoicing. I went into a shop one time where the service manager before me was disgruntled right before he left. He closed a bunch of stuff to warranty that was customer pay. He just slammed it, and obviously somebody had to clean it up. His favorite opcode on those repair orders was "ganja." Ganja. It was this big long expression in there. I guess he got you, or he was high when he did it. I don't know what it was. He must have closed like $10,000 to warranty that was never going to be collected. I guess to get his last paycheck. Yeah, he was pissed off.

A dealer's pocketbook on every ticket 7:36

Steve Shaw: We can laugh about it all day long, and we laugh about it sometimes in our meetings. The unfortunate thing is there's a dealer's pocketbook attached to every one of these tickets. And I stand by what I said in one of our other rants: it's a litigious society. I don't think it's got to us so far in service. It's hit finance, it's hit sales.

Dave Rogers: It's getting there.

Steve Shaw: And I stand up and tell these guys every day, somebody's going to come in and slap you around, and some dealer is going to lose a lot of money because of the way something was written up. And then the world's going to change. That's when it'll change.

Dave Rogers: Yeah. You remember the Firestone thing, right? There was a dealer in Jersey where a truck came into the store. It was a Blazer or a Yukon or something. They didn't do a proper multi-point and didn't disclose to the customer that there was a bubble in a tire. They rolled the car on the highway on their way to a vacation, and there was a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against that dealer because they didn't disclose the bubble in a tire.

Again, I don't want to bore anybody with old school, but we go back to the basics all the time, the fundamentals, the blocking and tackling, and it starts with the write-up. I don't care if it's an appointment. I've always said a customer is going to give you only so much time on the phone or in person to tell you what's wrong with their car. A lot of times when they call, they're calling at lunch or on the way somewhere. They don't want to go into detail on that phone call. "Hey, my radio doesn't work, my tires are making noise, I need an oil change. Can I drop the car at eight o'clock?" Yeah, fine. Put the appointment in.

Then when you write them up, you've got to go through those details. "I'm sorry, Steve, I understand you're in a hurry this morning, and that should have been part of the appointment process, but we're going to need 15 minutes to get all the information from you." Maybe we're going to go out and look at the car. Maybe we're going to do a walk-around, depending on the situation. Not all stores have a drive-through. And that write-up area and that write-up time, like I said earlier, is a lost art when I look at some of these things. Anybody can write up LOF or tire rotation, but with these warranty concerns, especially at the premium stores, the high-lines, there's a lot of stuff that goes wrong with these cars.

Steve Shaw: Well, what's funny is, generally speaking, as you're well aware, I get hired to teach people to sell shit. I get hired to improve repair order performance. That's bottom line what I generally get hired for. We see it all day long, even in seminars. I did a seminar for 200 people the other day, and I could tell you more about those stores. But I promise you, there are very few dealers who are going to call me and say, "Steve, will you teach my people how to write up a repair order?"

So there's a manager, a driveway manager, maybe the senior advisor, but there's somebody in that store who is charged with these things. If those things happen that way, it's a dereliction of duty. Like I said, we can joke about it, and it's funny as shit seeing those things. But it's going to happen to somebody. It's going to go wrong, it wasn't restated, the three C's weren't on the ticket, and it's going to be a multimillion-dollar deal. Then it'll go to the big law firm that everybody subscribes to, whatever that company is.

Dave Rogers: Silverman and Silverman, 1-800-LEMON-LAW.

Steve Shaw: Whatever. They're going to send out a memo to everybody that says, "Hey, we just had a loss. A dealer was sued for multimillions because of a write-up," and all of a sudden it'll get traction. But nothing's going to happen until then, and nobody's going to spend one dollar with me. We used to do a class on write-up. Nobody came. We could do our whole thing on how to write a ticket, what to do, how to do this. Nobody ever did. "Oh, we know how to do that. Our veterans know how to do it, our newbies know how to do it. We're not coming to that. We've got no time." Okay.

Dave Rogers: They're too cool for school. That's the problem. It really is a shame. When I was up in North Jersey at a Chrysler store, we were in lemon law court probably five times a year in the nineties. I got my brains beat in by a judge one time because of a service writer. Freddie Fumbles is who it was. He wrote down that on acceleration the vehicle "chutters," C-H-U-T-T-E-R-S. The customer was Spanish, and the judge thought my service writer wrote it that way making fun of the way they talk.

The judge was really making a thing of it. After we listened to the customer for a while, it was judder, whatever you want to call it. We wound up settling that one. The judge was just making fun of it: "What is a chutter, Mr. Rogers?" I'm like, "I don't know, I didn't write the goddamn thing." "I think you were making fun of their accent." No, Freddie's just fat-fingered. He just can't type.

And it was the one thing back in the day that you did learn, because the domestics focused on it, Chrysler, GM. I never really worked at Ford. I was in and around Ford, but I never worked for them. They focused on the write-up and making sure it was there, and I don't see that anymore. The training's different. Like you said, nobody wants to learn how to write up an RO. But some of the stuff you see on these things, some of the comments, just the vagueness. You're right, there's going to be a lawsuit.

Customer permission, recalls and "check and advise" 13:47

Steve Shaw: Even to the fact that everybody now puts an MPI opcode on the repair order. And we have listeners in California, where you have to ask people's permission to do things. You have to ask people's permission to do a warranty repair. I can diagnose it and find out what's wrong, but I'm technically supposed to call my customer and say, "May I replace this part?"

When I was with Ferrari, we had cars where we couldn't get warranty claims paid because the customer refused an emission recall. Ferrari says, "Well, we're not going to pay the warranty claim." I'm like, "No, no, no, we offered, and they didn't want to do it." The state of California says we have to get their permission to do the emission recall, and the customer didn't want the recall done because of the loss of horsepower.

Dave Rogers: Or a modification to their car. We've had that before.

Steve Shaw: If we don't review these things and ask these questions, we're putting ourselves at risk. It's been many moons since I was with them, but people did those recalls on customers' cars, and it lowered the horsepower just so it would pass emissions. Customers went nuts. That's how we ended up in court: we did something on the ticket that was not approved. You're right. However that customer shows up, appointment or not, it becomes the obligation of that service advisor to make sure this legal document has been satisfied, that all the T's are crossed and the I's are dotted.

Dave Rogers: I agree. I've heard crazy stories where a dealership changed the license plate frame on the back of a car and got sued. That was some lawyer's car. And back at a Chevy store, the '84 Corvette was like an anniversary model back in the day. There was a recall on a control arm, something suspension-wise, and the dealership just went ahead and did it.

The guy lost it, because now his car wasn't original. Then he wanted the part back, and they said, "No, you can't have it back, it's a warranty part." It was a major issue, and the guy sued the dealership. So it starts with the write-up and with asking questions. In every state I've ever been in, you're supposed to get the customer's permission to do anything on their vehicle. I don't think it matters what state. California is always extreme in the way they do things, but whatever California does, New York does, and Jersey is going to do, and Connecticut is going to do. It spreads like a fungus.

That whole mindset, you've got to get the customer's permission. Years ago, I forget what store I was in, I forced all my advisors to write up every line with "check and advise" at the end, because I had technicians who would just do the work. And I'd get into the same issues you described: "Oh, it was under warranty." No. Every line is check and advise. Every line, you come back to me, you talk to me, and then I'll tell you what you can and can't do, because I might have to call the customer and get permission. I had to make that rule because they were just renegades. They would just do work on the car: "I thought it was under warranty." Wait, you thought it was under warranty?

Document every call to the customer 17:22

Steve Shaw: Well, I think that's the sucky part about going paperless. AI is futuristic, but even with computer-generated repair orders, think about this. Remember, every time we called the customer, we used to write it down on the RO: "Called customer, no answer," "Called customer at this time." All that stuff was protecting us, covering our assets, so I could tell my manager I actually did my job. Maybe I didn't do a good job at write-up getting the right promise time or the right callback time way back when I was a kid. But every time I called the customer, I documented it, and we would make our people document all these times. I can't imagine that happens anymore. I can't imagine anybody is going into the computer system and noting, "Called my customer at this time."

Dave Rogers: Yeah. That's the nice thing about texting, though. There's a record of it if you send it through the app. But that's about it. Nobody does it. The body shop repair orders, or the folders, always had the lines, and every time they talked to a customer or the agent, they wrote it down. We used to write on the front of the ROs. If I got your permission to do the work, I used to fill in the little box on there that I got Steve's approval for a thousand dollars, with the last four of the Social Security number. You look at an RO now, you never see any of that, ever. It's amazing.

Steve Shaw: When I first started, there was one page, the second-to-last page of a workbook, where we would talk about writing up a repair order. What did it last, 15 minutes? It was probably one of those things I even glossed over, because I'm looking around a room of people thinking they probably know how to do this. So it was almost like, why am I talking about it? But we haven't talked about how to write up an RO in years and years and years.

Back to basics, not urban legend 19:13

Dave Rogers: It's the foundation. Again, it's old school, but I challenge anybody to go out and look at their repair orders and get back to basics. I had this conversation with somebody the other day about the fundamentals, and she was talking about the next-gen people coming through and what they should focus on. I think a lot of them need to go back to basics and fundamentals, because they're dealing with urban legend most of the time. They start in a store as a service advisor, they're listening to the guy next to them and the girl on the other side, and they're listening to these urban legends. Then maybe they flip a coin and get to be a service manager, and now they're managing by urban legend. "Where did this stuff come from? Why do you do it like that?" They just don't know the fundamentals.

Steve Shaw: And how many people have done the grind? I know you did the grind, I did the grind, our friends did the grind. We got our ass handed to us writing service year after year, then managing the small store and working our way up. Walking to school uphill both ways for how many years before somebody would hand us the keys. And now it's like, "Hey, you've been here for a week. I think you're the new manager. You've got the tenure."

Dave Rogers: Right. I love some of the newer mentality. They want a career path. "I started last week. Can you tell me how fast it can take me to be the CEO?" You're a valet. "Yeah, but I want to be the CEO. How long do you think it'll take?" Oh, 10 years, 15 years. "I've got no time for this shit." They leave.

Could AI write the repair order? 21:02

Dave Rogers: But listen, maybe AI is the answer. Maybe we teach AI how to write a repair order. It's funny, we talked a couple of weeks ago, and I saw something in my email from NADA, an app where the technician can talk into it and the notes go into the repair order, into the system. I think I bookmarked it, and I want to go back and look at it. I was thinking about it the other day, because remember you said it was a little futuristic that you could talk into a microphone and put in your three C's? There's somebody who has a program that does it. So maybe that's where we're going with our ROs: voice to text populates the repair order on the screen. "Here, Mr. Customer, here's my phone. Tell the computer what's wrong with your car. I'm going to go have a cigarette."

Steve Shaw: Well, there was the kiosk. And like I have on my computer, hit function and talk to text, and everything I say goes to text, or now with AI it transcribes everything. That could be the thing. And as a technician, wouldn't I like to actually hear, in the customer's words, what's going on with the car? Maybe it's going to be voice-recorded repair orders. Who the hell knows?

Dave Rogers: We've just got to get better at it. "Customer states" is fine. I love the comment "customer states" and then something you added on the repair order that should have been a tech note. "Customer states replace broken ball joint." No. Now they just key the macro and CS appears before everything. They don't even know what the hell to write anymore. You know what's funny? The next time I go into one of these stores, I'm going to ask some of the younger guys what CS stands for. I think there are people who don't know.

The "miscellaneous" opcode and a GM tip 22:52

Steve Shaw: I bet you there are people who don't know what MPI means. I promise you, I was talking about MPI in a training class not so long ago, and a guy says to me, "Why are you talking about multi-port injection in this class?" Bro. He was a former GM tech. And I was like, okay, thank you very much. So it does happen, all day, every day. The one thing I want to talk about, maybe it's our next episode, because we're starting to get a little long here, is the repair orders. My favorite opcode is miscellaneous. Miscellaneous? What does that mean?

Dave Rogers: Don't get me started on that. It is amazing to me. We'll stay with writing a repair order. In CDK and a lot of systems, there are quick opcodes you use to write up a repair order. I call them complaint codes: LOF, alignment, rotation, whatever you pre-sold on the drive, CEL for check engine light, if you want to go that far.

But then it's the billing of the repair order. If you want to write the RO with the miscellaneous opcode in the beginning, that shouldn't be the way you close the repair order at the end. Again, I go back to the monkey. A monkey can write the RO. The skill is in closing it and selling. That's the skill of an advisor. But yes, miscellaneous: when you look at closed repair orders and opcode counts and you see miscellaneous as one of your top ten, I think I have a blood vessel that pops every time. Just talking about it, that blood vessel's ready to go.

Steve Shaw: Wait, wait, wait. You told me at your age it doesn't bother you anymore.

Dave Rogers: There are certain things that don't bother me, but you'd think being out of the store every day is better for me health-wise. I've always been able to maneuver around it and train people. But I have these problems, and I talk to the manager of the store, and I'm like, "Did you ever notice this stuff?" "No, I just never noticed it." Hopefully the podcast will get it through to some people. I've had some good feedback lately. I do think it's paying it forward, revisiting the basics and what people look at, even if it's just a reminder. We're not trying to sell you anything. I don't have a vendor here. We're not like those famous guys who have five nights a month and vendor after vendor. We're trying to give people the basics and fundamentals, because I think it's a little start.

Steve Shaw: It's definitely a lost art. We'd better wrap it up. Give us a GM tip of the day, and then let's get the hell out of here.

Dave Rogers: Listen, GM tip of the day: if you want to have some fun one day, grab some repair orders, the clothespins out of the cashier booth, bring them into your office and just read through them. Read what the advisor wrote, read what the tech wrote.

Steve Shaw: Leave the Automotive News magazine for another day and just read your ROs.

Dave Rogers: Put that aside. Just grab 10 and read through them. Maybe do it with your service advisor or one of the advisors in the room, lighten up a little bit, have some fun reading through them, and then see what could be improved. Because Steve brings up a great point: you've got to be looking out for the lawsuit. What they write on these repair orders sometimes might just shock you. So that would be my tip of the day.

Steve Shaw: Awesome. Well, it's good talking to you again, and I'll catch up with you soon.

Dave Rogers: All right, man, I'll talk to you.