Why Technicians and Service Advisors Need Marriage Counseling

Life in the retail automotive industry is taxing. Managers and employees work long hours and, in many cases, are with their co-workers more than they are with their families. Miscommunications, tension or arguments can detract from the efficiency of the dealership, and thus decrease overall profitability.

Technicians and service advisors work very closely together. Communication between them needs to be smooth and efficient. A company culture filled with friction can easily prevent a dealership’s service department from living up to its full potential.

A recent article in Ward’s magazine does a really good job of covering the need for improved relationships between technicians and their service advisors. Technicians are paid by how efficiently productive they can be. The more work they can complete in a day, the more money they make. Service advisors, on the other hand, are paid primarily on commission. According to the article, this can cause problems between the two groups

Service advisors need to be able to effectively relay the customer’s vehicle problems in order to provide the necessary information to the technician. However, in many cases, service advisors don’t have the level of knowledge needed to get this across in the repair order. This then increases the workload of the technician, and decreases the amount of billable hours they can accomplish in a day.

To help alleviate this problem, consider implementing training on a dealership level. Ask the service directors to sit down with their technicians and find out what pain points they are experiencing, if any, with the advisors and vice versa. Once the initial meetings are completed, simply implement training designed to bridge the gap between these two groups and improve their relationship.

A dealership can only be as efficient as the performance of its employees. You can install all of the technology you want to increase efficiency, but if your service advisors are writing up erroneous repair orders, this then forces your technicians to spend their valuable time investigating the problems so as to complete the repair properly. The result will be unhappy service advisors, unhappy technicians, lost revenue, poor CSI scores and, most importantly, unhappy customers. This is a steep price to pay for something that could be alleviated through better communication and training.

1 member likes this

Comment

You need to be a member of DealerELITE.net to add comments!

Join DealerELITE.net

Comment by Harold Pritchard on May 29, 2015 at 2:21pm: Hi,

One thing we did, and this was back in the eighties(yes, we realized this was an issue back then), was to have each technician spend a day at the service desk shadowing an advisor. You'd be surprised how that relationship is cemented when they had a chance to walk in the shoes of the "other side". Respect for the challenges of the advisors led to a stronger bond. It was certainly a wise use of "unapplied time".

Comment by David Lu on May 29, 2015 at 12:50pm: Just how do we implement Marriage counselors within auto dealerships? The more important consideration is how do we improve the processes and communications between the departments? How can we use technology to solidify communications not only between the service advisor and technician but the owner as well? I have seen one product that does this very well by using the Multi-point inspection and ongoing conversation between the owner, advisor and technician, parts is also part of the equation. The product allows the advisor to text or email the owner with the results of the muliti-point inspection with complete pricing on the fly rather than after the fact. Some Dealers also use the product to market used vehicles with full disclosure of condition lessening used policy expenses. Declined services are tracked and marketed as well. It works !!!

Comment by Richard Holland on May 27, 2015 at 3:38pm: Thanks for the comment, Steven!

Comment by steven chessin on May 26, 2015 at 12:18pm: Richard - The above your techs and service advisors failing to communicates is Sean Bradley's, There is a MASSIVE Disconnect Between the Showroom Sales & Internet Sales / BDC Departments."

At the Olympics our basketball team of millionaire all-stars lost to 3rd world teams that were not as good as most college teams until they decided they needed to play as a team or lose as an un-team. Maybe besides the training some sort of wake-up call is needed - otherwise people just repeat the mistakes of yesterday all over again today.