This post was originally published on Auto Success
Time is valuable. Let’s let that sink in for a minute … Not only your time and your team’s time, but your client’s time as well, and in many circumstances, the implementation of simple processes lead to large differences in quality, liability and profit.
Selling service appointments is an easy process to establish and affects the entire repair process. Let’s take a moment and compare the service department to a gasoline engine. At its basics, a motor is an assembly of multiple smaller parts that consume materials and produce a desired output: horsepower. Engines require a balance of fuel, air and spark, in that order, to run properly.
Service is also an assembly of smaller parts working together to consume materials and produce a desired output, but in this case, the consumables are visits (appointments), available advisor/tech time and parts. In that same order, they produce the desired output: profit.
Just like a gas engine, if you add fuel but do not increase air and spark, the engine runs too rich, and your outcome is diminished.While balancing the flow of all consumables is important, we are only addressing the flow of fuel (appointments) in this article.
Let’s start by establishing that this is a philosophy of selling appointments, not enforcing them. Pushing away customers who need immediate assistance or making the repair process inconvenient is not good business sense. While it is impossible to control 100% of the business coming through the door, you can control around 70%. In the end, we want to burn all the fuel, but it’s not productive to burn it all in the first two hours of the morning. Without effective appointment scheduling, most advisors spend the first two hours of the day lighting fires they spend the rest of the day putting out.
The following items are frequent symptoms in shops with weak appointment scheduling:
- Customer lines
- Technicians frustrated with poorly written customer complaints
- Unapplied time
- Weak fix-it-right-the-first-time scores
- Breakdowns in advisor follow-up
- Poor warranty performance
- Missed approvals
- Lower CSI scores
- Dysfunction and stress
- Lost customers
- Employee burnout and turnover
- The need for more than a 1 to 4 advisor-to-technician ratio.
Whether your dealership uses a BDC to set appointments or not, if your shop is struggling with any of those items, it is wise to review your appointment scheduling processes and phone scripting. The following techniques should be discussed and a process established.
1. Determine a percentage of total hours to prefill in a day based on technician skill sets. Do not load a day completely tight. Make sure there is time for upsells and walk-ins.
2. Evaluate your highest traffic times of the day and sell away from those times. For instance, if the busiest time of the day is 7:00-9:00 a.m. and you have a customer who is setting an appointment on a completely open day, do not ask them, “When would you like to bring it in?” Instead, suggest a time in a less active period. If that won’t work for them, offer another time before suggesting any old time. As the date approaches and your schedule is filled, those early morning appointments will be valuable. The power of suggestion is effective; use it.
3. The moment the call comes in, recognize this is an opportunity to earn a lifelong client. Each team member must be aware that the client will judge your dealership by the interactions they have with your team. The best way to avoid a negative interaction is to honor the customer’s time and your capacity by setting appointments 15 to 30 minutes apart. Right before ending the call, confirm with the client. “OK, Mrs. Smith, we have you scheduled to meet with Emmy at 10:05 next Thursday morning. This is not the time the tech will be working on the vehicle, but rather it is the time that Emmy has set aside to get you checked in properly. If you come in early or late, you might have to wait. Is that time still OK?” Then wait for them to answer. In all sales, you are selling for the other person to do something; in this case, it is for a verbal commitment from the customer.
4. When the customer arrives, the advisor must be available. If a different customer comes in early or late and arrives a few minutes before an appointment, the advisor should start writing up the off-scheduled customer and thank them for making it in. However, the advi-sor should let them know if the scheduled customer arrives, they will need to switch over to honor that appointment but will come right back to finish writing them up. They can also check to see if another advisor is available to help with either customer. The advisors should use the time in the scheduled visit to perform a proper walkaround and verify all non-drivability items at the vehicle. Be sure to ask detailed questions about what, where and when. Properly written customer-state complaints improve warranty and fix-it-right-the-first-time scores. Proper walkarounds build trust with the client and elevate the customer’s perception of the advisor as a technical assistant rather than a simple order taker. The time spent with the client improves the advisor’s closing ratio for needed maintenance and reduces many of the issues that arise from an erratic schedule. A properly tuned and balanced service department will outrun any erratically run shop. Getting control of the fuel source is imperative.
