Increasing Service Area Traffic

Profits Would Help Dealerships Now, in Future

Dealers spend a lot of money buying advertising to push customers into their stores for oil changes and other service-oriented promotional items. However, many times most dealers break even or lose money on the promotions.

With a potential poor fourth quarter upcoming for new car sales, allowing customers to leave the service department without offering to fully service their vehicles is not wise. Now is the time to train service advisors how to assist customers more completely because losing money on any type of promotion just to drive traffic for potential new car sales needs to become an old way of doing business, beginning now and in the future.

Too many dealers train the sales force, but not the potential sales team in the service department. In fact, some dealers move poor car sales people to the service line. This approach causes dealers to leave revenue on the table, and misses an opportunity to build deeper relationships with customers who would appreciate knowing there are ways to make their cars safer and that there is someone at the dealership looking out for them.

The bottom line here is service advisors need to be trained to “upsell” and to build relationships with customers, as opposed to simply fulfilling the promotional order.

Is there really an opportunity to increase revenue to help in times of slow vehicle sales?

Well, consider this. NADA statistics indicate that roughly 17 percent of car owners use dealerships for service where they bought their car, except for warrantee work. That means 83 percent go somewhere else. Many of them go to places like Jiffy Lube. The average ticket for a Jiffy Lube customer is around $80. Jiffy Lube uses high school and college students, but they’re taught how to sell beyond the $15 oil change. There is no reason why your service advisors can’t do the same.

An added potential bonus is if service advisors can help build relationships with customers, too, that could lead to more car sales. (It may even be prudent to put a vehicle sales person in the 7:30 a.m. service line to talk with customers to further customer relationship building efforts.)

Tips, Facts for Making Improvements

Here are some tips and facts for improving the performance of your service department.

• Display your service department’s and competitor’s pricing when customers are in line to dispel the fallacy that dealers’ prices are always higher. (If you’re the highest you may be pricing yourself out of the market.)
  
• Display manufacturers’ models’ regular maintenance schedules.
  
• Use work orders as a selling tool. You can get your computer vendor to pull the recommended services and display those on the repair order. Also, have space for recommendations from a walk around. The car may need bodywork, for instance. Also, have the computer pull up recommended services from customers’ last visit that were refused, so you can say, “don’t forget during your last visit we discussed your need for new brakes,” for instance.
  
• Have customers sign off on refusals. Besides sales purposes, this may help with liability if a customer waives a safety-related item such as brakes.
  
• Use target direct mail or permission-based email for service remainders – targeted mailers. They work. (Your staff has to be trained to effectively use direct mail and email or you can use vendors.) Track the results – customers who come in because of the mailer, for instance, as well as upselling from the mailer. You should be able to get up to 30 percent customer return. Have service personnel call non-responders.
  
• Stay in touch with customers.
  
• If you can spend an extra 90 seconds with customers, service advisors upselling will likely increase.