Are Your Service Advisors Overwhelmed, and causing lost sales?

[Joe Marconi]

I was talking to a shop owner at the Elite Fly with the Eagles course this past week, and said that he feels that his service advisors do too much, and sales are suffering.  Between answering phones, scheduling customers, checking in customers, building estimates, finding the parts, car delivery, on and on, it's a whirlwind of tasks.

I tend to agree. I know is may be hard to do, but how can we get the help the advisor needs, or redefine the position?

 

 

[Transmission Repair]

This wasn't really a problem in our shop because of the low volume of vehicles that came through our shop.  Yes, our service advisors had the same whirlwind of tasks, but with only averaging 25 tickets a week, it was not overwhelming.  Conversely, general repair shops will write 25 or more tickets a day.  I can easily see how all the tasks could be overwhelming.

I would however, still help out the service advisor in a background capacity.  What I mean by that is that I would help doing tasks that didn't involve speaking to the customer.  We had a rule in our shop that "Whoever first talks to the customer, stays with the customer." meaning the customer never ever talks to more than one person unless it was a complaint of some kind.

I would help mainly road testing and diagnosis.  I also, from time to time, I would be helping out writing estimates and ordering parts.  I would occasionally do those tasks to set an example for my service advisor in a "monkey-see, monkey-do" atmosphere.  In closing, I do agree that if a service advisor is overloaded, it will certainly hurt sales.

[Joe Marconi]

19 hours ago, Transmission Repair said:

This wasn't really a problem in our shop because of the low volume of vehicles that came through our shop.  Yes, our service advisors had the same whirlwind of tasks, but with only averaging 25 tickets a week, it was not overwhelming.  Conversely, general repair shops will write 25 or more tickets a day.  I can easily see how all the tasks could be overwhelming.

I would however, still help out the service advisor in a background capacity.  What I mean by that is that I would help doing tasks that didn't involve speaking to the customer.  We had a rule in our shop that "Whoever first talks to the customer, stays with the customer." meaning the customer never ever talks to more than one person unless it was a complaint of some kind.

I would help mainly road testing and diagnosis.  I also, from time to time, I would be helping out writing estimates and ordering parts.  I would occasionally do those tasks to set an example for my service advisor in a "monkey-see, monkey-do" atmosphere.  In closing, I do agree that if a service advisor is overloaded, it will certainly hurt sales.

You bring up a good point, it may depend on the business model. I guess for high volume shops, this may be more of an issue. But, as you point out, any help would be appreciated and also help overall workflow.