Swiss wisdom
Everything I learned about the car business, I learned from the Swiss I learned a lot living and working in Switzerland. I remember my first visit for a business meeting. I was waiting for a colleague outside the hotel when I …
Category: From the Service Bay
The importance of work order review
Work orders aren’t paperwork — they’re profit, protection, and a powerful management tool hiding in plain sight When I was a service manager, there was never a time you could walk into my office and not see a stack of work …
How to boost hours per RO
Your service advisors can sell more service and keep customers happy Hours per RO, simply put, is the total labour hours sold divided by the number of work orders written in the same period. For example: if we wrote 927 …
The LinkedIn advantage
Using social media well can help attract and retain key talent I always tell managers that they are always in HR mode. I tell them how they should always be thinking about how to grow their team and develop existing …
Are you in the tire business?
Based on our observations most dealerships are missing out on opportunities for tire and alignment sales When we ask general managers or dealer principals: “Are you in the tire business?” 99 per cent of the time the answer is yes. Once …
With leadership comes incredible responsibility
A reflection on leaders that have truly made a lasting impact I was recently on vacation with my wife in Europe and we decided to stop in Zug, Switzerland where we used to live for a year. We wanted to …
Planning to fail
Planning is considered the single most important element of the administrative process. The higher up the ladder you are the more the involvement and time devoted to planning. If it is so important why are so few service managers …
The survey says…
There’s no reason for service to fear CSI surveys if they are handled correctly How a manager reacts to surveys plays a huge role in determining the overall culture of customer satisfaction in our service department. Let’s say ten good …
Lean principles can apply to service
The lean philosophies used to build cars can also be applied to servicing them. If done right, everyone wins. We sell time. In our service departments that’s what we sell, time. For every dollar of time we sell in service …
How to boost tech productivity
Keeping your techs busy will help boost service revenues and keep customers happier too We want to talk about a concept that is very important to us. It is in fact so important we wrote a book about it called …
Build teams to deliver a better customer service
Avoid the hot potato dispatching process that doesn’t work for anyone During our dealer visits and our own experiences, we have seen many ways of dispatching work to the technicians and apprentices. We want to reiterate what we mentioned during …
How to make Express Service work
Express Service at dealerships often fails. Follow our advice for greater results We have, in previous columns, discussed appointments, being prepared for the customer’s arrival, and service reception. We thought this would be a good spot to introduce Express Service. …
