Should Techs Write Estimates?

Episode Transcript

*This transcript was generated using Artificial Intelligence. Errors may occur. If you notice an error, please contact [email protected].

Tom Dorsey (00:00:04):
Good morning and good afternoon. Welcome to this week’s edition of The Digital Shop Talk Radio. I’m Tom Dorsey, and today we’re going to be talking about should you have your technicians write an estimates in your shop. And it’s one of those kind of, there’s two, I guess you would say extreme versions that we run across a lot in the industry, right? Is you get a shop that the techs are in the back, they’re in their cave, they’re never allowed out, right? There’s a lock on the door and the service advisor is the main conduit and interface between the motorist and the shop, and they kind of run call the shots. And then on the other extreme, you kind of get, well, maybe some shops, they don’t have as much faith in their service riders. Maybe they’ve hired service writers for a different role, more as a customer service representative, and the technicians are the ones who are coming up and doing a lot of the deeper dive and a lot of the work to build out those estimates and make those recommendations.
(00:01:09):
Now with the change in the technology that we’re experiencing, especially the improvements in the communication tools that we have, well AutoVitals has kind of opened up some possibilities. And so today we’re going to talk about those possibilities. I’ve brought on two great operators and they both kind of somewhere in the middle and I don’t want to steal any thunder and we’ll let them get into it, but I’d love to welcome first Neil Daly from Oceanside Motorsports in Oceanside, California. Welcome back Neil. Hi, and joining us. Welcome back, Bruce Nation from Westlake Independent in Westlake Village, California. Good morning. Good morning sir. And we were going to have Dave Murphy on for Murphy’s Auto Care, but I think we had some time zone conflict and he’s on a plane, so no worries. We’ll have Dave on a future episode if you’ve ever had a chance to meet Dave or see him in some of the shows and conferences that we do, that’s going to be a great show upcoming.
(00:02:14):
So I’ll tease it a little bit, look out for it because it’s always a treat and it’s always a lot of value talking with Dave Murphy. So we miss him. We’ll see him soon. And then of course, welcome my half of my expert panel of experts Uwe Kleinschmidt, founder of AutoVitals. Good morning. Good morning. And so let’s just dive right into it, gentlemen, because the hour will run short because this is going to be, I think a pretty dynamic topic. And so out there in the audience, make sure you got a pen and paper and you’re ready to take some notes because we’re going to open your mind to possibilities today if we could. Let’s talk a little bit about how well Uwe, some of the technology I think that we’ve, and some of the lessons we’ve been learning actually in the way that the shops implement the technology has opened the door for a lot of possibilities and for folks who are regular followers of the show, you probably heard us talking about a little change of roles, shops like John Long and Adam Bendzick and some of the others are out there pushing the production manager type role, which is a hybridization a little bit.
(00:03:26):
And it’s something that you probably wouldn’t be able to do so successfully in a paper-based shop or back before we had the ability to leverage this communication and workflow management technology. Uwe, if you could give us a little insight into what we’re kind of learning through our turbo group, some of the things that we’re working on development and how we’re structuring some best practices around some of the stuff that we are learning about the improvements in communication at the shop level.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:03:57):
Happy to do that. Let me just start with really some basic stuff which came in when the digital inspection got introduced and we were plain forward thinking technicians put comments on the notes and the inspection topics and they went straight to the customer and then we got some very, let’s put it involved feedback, which was how dare you, we can’t do that, right? There has to be some quality control on the language and whether that’s an educational topic and so on. So we introduced the separation of what we call shop eyes only view and the customer view where then the service advisor or the person, whoever is responsible for the presentation to the customer would have the last word on what is being presented. And that was kind of the beginning of what you mentioned with changes in communication. And to this day we have often an involved discussion on can I take text comments and go give them directly to the customer? And it has a little bit to do with a slightly exaggerated question, should text wide estimates. So to what degree is the information a tech can put there relevant to the customer or not? And I would love if I don’t want to steal your thunder, I would just ask Bruce and Neil how you have started using, for example, the shop eyes only in customer notes and put a process around it and maybe we can talk about how that process evolved over the years.
Tom Dorsey (00:06:10):
Sure. Why don’t we kick it off with Neil because I think Neil, we met with Neil yesterday and Bruce and I don’t want to, same thing, I don’t want to steal any of Neil’s thunder, but really interesting concept and really close to the production manager type role. We’re just calling it maybe something a little different. Can you give us some insight, Neil into how to answer Uwe’s question, how you’re evolving that and kind of what opportunities do you see before as you structure that role?
Neil Daly (00:06:42):
Yeah, so I think we all know that if our techs aren’t holding wrenches then they’re not making us any money or themselves. And so them creating estimates as every shop can do their own way, but that doesn’t make a ton of sense. But with the more information that they can give the service team about the work that’s needed on the car, the better and the smoother their repair will go on that car. So we use the shop eyes only feature for the technician to recommend Labor Times and the parts needed to fix stuff. Our process hasn’t required for anything that’s a diagnostic, so they don’t have to do it for everything this car needs because especially in Bruce’s shop, they’re working on the same stuff all the time and most of the stuff in the inspection we can figure it out on the service counter, how to quote that, but on a diagnostic, it’s really, really important that we get exactly what the tech wants to fix that. So we require them to give the part numbers. They still have an estimator to find that stuff for ’em if they need, but we use the customer eyes to say what the diagnostic process and what’s wrong with it. And then Shop Eyes only has recommended labor time and the parts needed to fix that concern.
(00:08:10):
And then our model in our shop, instead of having your service advisor that’s just in the middle of everything that does all jobs, we split the roles so that one person is a rear facing advisor, basically our estimator, and then we have a front facing advisor that’s like a customer service person. So she’s super bubbly, really great with customers, not crazy knowledgeable about cars, although she’s really getting there. But our backend guy is really technically a, he’s a car guy, he knows a lot about it and we rely on him to do all the estimates. And then I guess that’s what you would call kind of the production manager. I think some people are using technicians for that, right? Because when I thought production manager, I kind of think foreman and that’s not exactly how we roll, but that rear facing advisor has been really, really huge success for us.
Tom Dorsey (00:09:17):
In some shops it is more of a tech based role like a foreman, some it’s more of a rider estimator type role production manager really focused on also doing the dispatching. But there are plenty of shops that do have that lead tech or that foreman tech that does dispatching also. So I think it’s really depends on your operation. Your volume has a big, big thing to do with it, the type of work that you’re doing, because like you said, Bruce is a specialty, he specializes, and so a lot of that stuff can become where systemized and consistent. Bruce, how are you managing that in your shop and how do you keep from, I guess, robbing the technician’s time but still giving them a voice to the motorist?
Bruce Nation (00:10:03):
Well, because we work on the same, mostly the same cars we get, the service advisor knows, he knows what this is going to pay. Everybody knows what to expect. A brake fluid flush, a trans flush or a front brakes, rear brakes, all these things are set up. Everybody knows how much they’re going to get paid for it. Everybody knows the hours involved. Whenever you get past that though, when you get to something different, something we haven’t seen, or for example, I’m familiar with Honda, not so much with Toyota, and I get a Toyota and I need to go talk to the tech a control arm or something like that on a Honda at 1.2 and then on a, it’s four hours on a Toyota of some different ones and I don’t really know the difference. And so I’ll communicate with the technician and make sure that everybody’s on the same page.
(00:10:56):
If it’s something we don’t understand, we ask questions, but leaving it up to the technician, I really don’t, that’s something, the message from the messages that the customer will see will come in shop eyes only to the service advisor. The service advisor then changes that to something that he wants the customer to see something. Sometimes he’ll push it a little further. Say, if you don’t do this, you’re going to die in a fiery crash. And sometimes the technician will say something like that and he doesn’t really want to present it to the customer that way. That depends on what we want to do, but that needs to be up to the service advisor and technicians are like service advisors in that we give ’em a lot of tasks. The digital inspection is a task for them and it adds time to things. So if we have to add even more time, then to me that’s anti productive. It just doesn’t, doesn’t lead to more productivity in the shop from my view. The same thing with a service advisor though also, if you add more tasks to the service advisor, average appar order goes down. I think we all know that.
(00:12:25):
So it’s kind of a big deal. So I try to take tasks away in other ways like answering phones, things like that. So service advisors don’t answer the phone. That’s the biggest thing. Managing phone calls really, but we get information from the tech when we need it. But when we don’t, we don’t. And we always get the estimate made by the service advisor. But I like Neil’s idea of the back facing service advisor doing the estimating because the point Uwe brought up yesterday was that you can get a service advisor selling with their own wallet a lot of times and whenever you got the back facing estimator, they’ve never met the customer. They don’t know about the four starving children at home or something along those lines, if that makes sense.
Tom Dorsey (00:13:21):
A great point. Yeah, no, definitely. That’s a great point. And that’s where that handoff can be very valuable because to what Neil said yesterday was that they just do their job. You just tell ’em what to expect and they don’t think anywhere beyond sell what’s in front of ’em. This is what the estimator gave me, here’s what I’m going to talk to the customer about. I’m really not going to think too much into it, right? I’m not going to sell through my wallet. But at the same time, what happens in that translation, that’s a critical step right there. And a lot can be lost or miscommunicated and then it’s either results in confusion to the customer or in the worst circumstance it would be just an outright misinformation. You told me something else and now this guy’s telling me this. What’s going on here? How do you prevent that? Actually, let me take that to Neil because Neil’s got a little bit more experience running that type of a framework. Neil, how do you make sure that communication’s consistent in its, I guess quality controlled?
Neil Daly (00:14:33):
So basically as you’re playing the telephone game from what the technician said is wrong with the car and then it passes through multiple hands before it actually makes it to the customer, especially when our friend facing advisor doesn’t really start out as a car person. I can’t think of an exact example, but we know that there’s some components that are called the same thing that are definitely, definitely different. There’s a difference like a fuel vent valve versus an exhaust valve. They’re both valves. So I could see how you could lose some communication and quote the wrong thing, something that’s really helpful in that. And for the routine stuff like your maintenance that you were talking about, Bruce, that should all be like can jobs and it’s even more rad when that is automatically done based off the inspection results, which I think you guys already have.
(00:15:22):
I don’t think I’ve set that up, but we’re kind of more talking about the weird stuff. And most of the time when we need to present something that’s a little bit more complicated or complex, the front facing advisor will take the inspection and the estimate back to the technician and say, Hey, I’m selling the right thing here. And then she’ll get a little bit more educated on it. Also give a chance to find any holes in the estimate like, oh no, that one hour is to replace the exhaust valve. Once the cylinder heads off that needs to be 19 or something. So we’ve used a process called the verbal contract from a TI, and that’s where you take it back to the technician, make sure like, Hey, I’m about to sell this and once I sell it, that’s it. You can’t say it’s the wrong job or you need more time or whatever.
(00:16:13):
We’re doing the right thing. And then the second question to that is, is there any maintenance that we can relate to this? At the same time, there is a digital way to do that and we could do it by just the technicians have our management software on it and we can just say, Hey, log into the ARO and make sure revision one looks good. So that’s a way to potentially save some time. But we are still doing the in-person thing where we will print out the estimate and take it back to the tech and make sure it’s right.
Tom Dorsey (00:16:50):
Yeah, and so that’s a little bit, well, I mean it takes some time to do that, right? Matter of fact, it’s another thing that happens too, can be inconsistent when we’re busy. What were you going to say, Neil? It looked like you were going to,
Neil Daly (00:17:04):
Sorry. Yeah, Bruce said this too and it got me because the potential savings and times in time from taking that 30 seconds or a minute, even if it’s longer, is so much more worth not having an O-ring for the job or that snag when the tech is ready to go and fix the car. Any kind of snag after that point is a huge red flag for me and I would so much rather take a couple minutes ahead of time to try to prevent any of that before starting a job. Open all the boxes. How many times have we gotten halfway through a job and then they open the box and they’re like, holy crap, this is the wrong thing. And then your rack’s dead and so is your production for that day. So yeah, it’s taking a little bit of time now to try to save it later
Tom Dorsey (00:18:01):
And the investment of that time, that step is, I could see it is a critical step. It’s just does it have to be a manual step or can it be automated? I mean, Uwe, what are your thoughts along there after we had that discussion yesterday, I’m sure you had some secondary thoughts there throughout the day on how we could help.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:18:28):
As Neil was just talking, I immediately thought about there might have to be another workflow step, which gets automatically entered. The moment the estimate is done and there’s a tech sign off,
Neil Daly (00:18:47):
I definitely considered that
Bruce Nation (00:18:49):
That would be, I think that’s basically what we’re doing. Anything that’s not routine, we’re checking with it. We’re making sure that are the parts you need. And sometimes as you ask the technician and make sure, are these the parts you need, that’s when the technician remembers another part that he hadn’t thought of. So it definitely helps to get out there and get with the technician, make sure that the technician has everything he needs and because he’s the technician, he’s the guy fixing the car, he’s the one that knows, should know best what he needs.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:19:27):
So I’m thinking about kind of a semi automated step. So you move the thing to the estimate in your workflow, which might send out the inspection results automatically to the customer or manually and at the same time there’s a task for the technician, check this off because there’s still some time to correct that until the customer has seen the inspection result and calls back or the service advisor calls the customer. So there could be work done in parallel without lengthening the whole process unnecessarily. Is that something you,
Bruce Nation (00:20:13):
If you took, I would love that, but let’s say that right now we put together a repair order and what if there was an option somewhere between creating estimate or waiting for authorization to waiting for work finished just right in there where everything’s made, the repair order is completely put together. At this point you’re going to send it to the technician, but it’s not going to be as a waiting for work finished, it’s going to be waiting for your approval. And that’s another workflow step, that’s all that is. It’s not going to send anybody anything, not going to send anything to the customer. It’s just going to go strictly to the technician. Strictly internal.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:20:56):
I just want to avoid that we pile up workflow steps, so can we,
Bruce Nation (00:21:03):
Well, that could be used only when you want to use it. It doesn’t have to be used on every job.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:21:09):
So the question is how often does it happen? Because I heard you guys say maintenance jobs, easy service advisor writes it down, you have Ken Jobs, check, check, check, check. So how often is what Neil calls the wheel job is going to happen? And you also said it’s for every diagnostic job, which is probably on at least half of your vehicles in the shop. Can you give us a kind of number? This happens.
Neil Daly (00:21:47):
I think you’re right at about half and it really depends on how, I’d say mature your shop is. Bruce probably does more maintenance than we do and we always need to remind ourselves that we are a maintenance shop, but when you lose sight of that or you stop exit scheduling, all of a sudden you’ve got a week full of repairs. So it does happen, I’d say most of the shops at least half of the time is a repair versus a maintenance ticket. At least
Bruce Nation (00:22:20):
I believe that even though there may be diag on a ticket, I think that at least two thirds of diag on a ticket becomes routine once it’s diagnosed. Okay, so don’t think in those instances, I don’t think it’s necessary either. So I would go down to say that if you’re working on 15 cars a day, maybe three or four, something like that would be what I would say three or four because I think if you’re working on cars, I think that pretty soon it just becomes, for me at least it becomes routine even though there’s diag.
Neil Daly (00:23:03):
I think instead of adding a workflow step, because you’re right, it doesn’t happen on enough cars for that to be relevant, the workaround to it is to have the technicians have access to your POS. If AutoVitals did it, which you’re kind of taking on a giant feature request, if you do this, you would need to make it possible to let the technicians see revisions. We have revisions or an estimate before it ends up on the ARO and sign off for it because that’s also what they’re familiar to see. I can’t just print an estimate and bring it out to a tech. They’re going to be like, what the heck is all this? That’s a lot of money. But if I print the tech worksheet that has part numbers and labor times, it’s something I understand and that would be rad if it were digital. But yeah,
Bruce Nation (00:23:58):
I would say send it to their iPad rather than print it. That’s what I would like to see.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:24:03):
But still is not many revisions. It’s one, right? It’s an estimate. Not saying I have three options here. Hey, do you want to select the right one or is any of those right? I mean it’s one
Bruce Nation (00:24:19):
I think you put together what you think is right as a service advisor send it to ’em and they either approve it or disapprove and if they disapprove, then they have to explain what’s wrong with this
Neil Daly (00:24:32):
Process too, because we’ll have four separate estimates for every car because quoting the big, we’re quoting everything from the inspection. So you have the dag of the customer concerns, then the red’s, yellows and maintenance, and if we put that all together, it would be too confusing, but the technician also has the opportunity to go in and say, Hey, even though this is a red, you should do this with the yellow at the same time because they’re in the same area. That’s the kind of editing that I think would be valuable and as part of that kind of technician QC on the estimate.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:25:08):
And would it be actually a job specific thing I can think of you mark somewhere a job or a job line or two or three on the estimate and say, Hey, tech or specific tech name, can you verify? And we just turn that into a smart marker and done for this, there is no workflow step. It doesn’t happen so often. And I would also combine it with the question Adam is asking if the estimator was a skilled person from an estimating knowledge standpoint, could we just save that step?
Neil Daly (00:25:55):
Yep.
Bruce Nation (00:26:00):
Well, I’m more of a process guy. I like to set up a process. So I believe whenever you set up the right process, it takes less skill if that makes sense to everybody because
(00:26:12):
Skilled people right now is really a problem. Finding the right skilled person is really become a problem. And I mean how long does it take somebody to train a McDonald’s worker because they got a process. I mean it’s hard to compare those two. And of course we’d all love to have the estimator that knows everything about every car, but the fact of the matter is we’re in a time right now where it’s very difficult to find these people and I think that the main thing is we get consistency to the customer and good strong processes are what gets that to happen.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:26:56):
Can I paraphrase what you just said?
Bruce Nation (00:26:59):
Yes.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:27:01):
It is assumed that the techs know all this much more than the service advisor.
Bruce Nation (00:27:10):
Yes, but I would not assume that in my shop.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:27:16):
I see.
Bruce Nation (00:27:19):
But the process to me is everything. What process does a service advisor and the estimator have that gets the consistent message to the customer and to the technician? And I think that’s what we’re talking about here. What should that be?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:27:44):
And again, I might be out here on a limb, but how do we know that the tech comes back with four hours instead of two? For example, in a service advisor who has no real ability to say, is four too high? Is he trying to get more work than necessarily, there’s no
Tom Dorsey (00:28:04):
Flag there at all, right?
Bruce Nation (00:28:06):
It’s just, yeah, well you have to have some knowledge. There has to be some skill there. I’m around a lot. I think Neil’s around a lot and when things like that happen, you’ve got to watch the guy. You’ve got to try to get the culture in your shop so that doesn’t happen.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:28:26):
So you would solve that through an audit or
Bruce Nation (00:28:29):
Solve it through an audit? Well, you would try to catch it before it happens before the job doesn’t get sold because you’re $250 or $300 too high on an estimate, but that’s a good point. But at the same time you still, there’s software to tell us what things should pay and then we compare what it should pay to what the technician thinks. We do that a lot.
(00:28:57):
So I got a job that pays three and a half in Mitchell and I go out and I’ll go check, what do you think? Mitchell says three and a half, what do you think? And he’ll say, sometimes they say, well, three and a half is too much, two and a half is right. I might still get three and a half, but at least I know I’m in the right area. Maybe it’s his skill level that makes it two and a half and sometimes it’s the opposite and you’ll say three and a half and you’ll say, no, no, that’s at least five hours. I don’t know what they’re talking about here. These are most of what we deal with. And then we of course matrix that out.
Tom Dorsey (00:29:37):
A lot of shops use the shop eyes only notes to help facilitate that though, right? I mean they’re going to put an hours estimate in there. They’re going to put a parts list in there that help give guidance to the writer right there in the text recommendation,
Bruce Nation (00:29:56):
The parts list in my shop, the parts list would come up as more part of the description of what repair is needed. I need to replace X, Y, and Z. There’s your parts list along with it. And then at that point we might go to, I look up manufacturer’s parts, websites all the time. And for example, I’ll go to Honda Parts now and I’ll get a diagram of what we’re wanting to do there and it comes up pretty quickly and he’s saying, well, we need to replace the strut mount along with the strut, for example. And so I’ll pull up an exploded view of that strut and see what else I think he might need with it. Then I’ll go and tell. I say, look, this is what I got. I’m ordering these other items with it. Would this be correct?
Tom Dorsey (00:30:50):
Right, right, right. That’s interesting. And also to what Neil was saying, it might be as something like a checkbox in the inspection sheet where a technician can link recommendations together. We prioritize through the severity, but if I were to say, because like you said, Hey, if I’m going to be replacing this, we might as well do these other things. If the knuckles coming off, we better be doing this too. Let me link these things together to give further guidance on how that should be communicated to the customer. Neil, what are your thoughts, buddy?
Neil Daly (00:31:24):
Yeah, I think we’re not talking about requiring less skill in these positions. It’s more for our front, the split service advisors, it’s more just more focused on either end. So the estimator rear facing advisor could be the guy that’s combining those jobs together and kind of taking a logical approach to what instead of the tech doing all that. Again, the more the tech puts into it, the more they’ll get out of it on the repair side, but you do have to have a very skilled rear facing advisor as far as car stuff goes, but especially moving forward and some people watching are probably just like, I don’t have this problem at all. You have a rockstar service advisor. What we’re kind of prepping for is not having that one really, really good service advisor, which we know are out there. It is a lot easier to find a really, really good car guy that doesn’t really have customer skills and then someone that has great customer skills, skills that can work with that person. And that’s kind of what we’re planning for. So yeah, he can catch that stuff and put it together. If you’re doing an oil pan gasket that’s in the red and demands are in the yellow, Hey, we should do this altogether and this is my recommendation for the customer,
Tom Dorsey (00:32:50):
Don’t sell one without the other. And here’s how he explain.
Bruce Nation (00:32:54):
What I might do in that instance is just as a service advisor, just change it from yellow to red. I mean I would know whether, and my service advisor would certainly know, but I think as we look at the future, it’s going to be hard to get that. And the big question is how do we do this? All of this stuff, all this stuff we talk about here are good ideas, but how do we do it without taking too much of the technician’s time and too much of the service advisor’s time?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:33:29):
Yeah, that’s what goes through my head all the time. We can build the fanciest features the moment they need another step, it’s probably likely to not be used.
Bruce Nation (00:33:44):
Yes.
Tom Dorsey (00:33:45):
Okay. We have to remove steps.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:33:47):
We have to remove
Bruce Nation (00:33:47):
Steps. Yes, that’s exactly right.
Tom Dorsey (00:33:51):
So Adam had some interesting input right here. I don’t know if you guys saw it in the chat, but he says he’s been fortunate enough not to have, have the techs do estimating so far, however forward thinking. I have thought about the scenario and I think my preference would be to develop team leads in the back where our A techs did the estimating for themselves and whoever they manage in their team. Reason being, I don’t want to slow down production, so while the Atec is building the estimate, the B techs are under them, can rack another car or something like that to keep the things moving. And that’s almost that foreman type role, right?
Neil Daly (00:34:32):
Yeah, I’ve seen that model where they have all of the technicians doing inspections and then the foreman grooms them into the most logical approach for this car and we’ve seen it if you just provide, here’s an inspection, here’s an estimate, and then go sell it. Versus a technician that comes and said, Hey, I just did this inspection. This is what I think is really important for this car and this would be also really great to do today. They’re so much more likely to sell that package that comes from the tech versus just what I’m reading from the inspection. So that’s where that model really helps. I think Midwest Performance Cars does that with their foreman that kind of grooms and estimates everything. At least the last time I talked to ’em,
Bruce Nation (00:35:21):
I’d want to watch closely the productivity of the A Tech in that situation.
Neil Daly (00:35:28):
I got the shop name wrong there. It’s not those guys, it’s Rick Young Texas, I think wherever they are.
Tom Dorsey (00:35:38):
But yeah, I mean it’s that same question, right? It’s just like taking the minute or two minutes or however long it was to get the tech to sign off before the estimate goes out to the motors, make sure that it’s right because you’re going to avoid all of those hassles that happen if it’s wrong. This is kind of the same way you have to kind of do the math and like Bruce said, observe, what’s the effect on that productivity? Is the little bit of productivity slippage worth, is that a smart investment because the results are so much better. We’re selling bigger packages, our aros increasing whatever it might be, our efficiency is increasing and make that decision once I think you’ve done that analysis.
Bruce Nation (00:36:24):
Yeah, look at both the shop productivity and the A techs productivity and maybe the A techs going to need a little different compensation package for it, but that all depends on, you got to have a really consistent car count to have these processes work effectively all the time, if that makes sense.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:36:48):
And so how big does the shop need to be? So it even applies what we were talking about because I imagine a one service advisor, three tax shop wouldn’t be able to afford that separation or am I wrong?
Bruce Nation (00:37:05):
You’re absolutely right. I believe I would think somewhere around five techs.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:37:13):
Okay.
Neil Daly (00:37:14):
Yeah, I think that’s right. The thing too is moving forward, I think that model of one advisor for three techs is also getting harder to accomplish, but when you split the roles, you also don’t have to, Hey, I’m crazy because they’re not going crazy doing the one job. We’ve burned through advisors for years because it’s so stressful.
Bruce Nation (00:37:40):
Yeah, you burn ’em out,
Neil Daly (00:37:41):
They are happier and you can get younger people that you can train, so you can’t pay ’em half as much as an advisor. So you do, I think have to up the budget on the advisor side, but I think two advisors to three texts is way more logical moving forward better if you can add a fourth but
Bruce Nation (00:38:06):
Or a backward facing forward facing like you were talking about, or the way I do it is service advisors with assistance. So I have an office assistant that does, for example, I’ll put together a, they’ll do all the documentation on a repair order, they’ll do all the answering the phones messages. We make a, for example, if we’re making an appointment, I don’t just type it into the calendar, I put it down onto a phone message with a carbon copy or the carbonless hand that to the office assistant. They add it to the calendar, we do whatever we can to remove tasks from the service advisor. And so more service advisors to me is more expensive. Taking away tasks is maybe a little better depending on who your service advisor is and what their capabilities are.
Tom Dorsey (00:39:01):
Hey Bruce, you said earlier that you have removed answering the phones from the writer. Is that the office assistant that’s answering the phone? Yes.
Bruce Nation (00:39:11):
Yes, that’s correct. Office assistant, office assistant does everything. Greets the customers as they come in, makes sure that she has the name in front of the service advisor before a service advisor answers a phone. They know who’s on the phone and what their question is and is their car in the shop,
Tom Dorsey (00:39:32):
And so is she also doing the email capture and text opt in and all that good
Bruce Nation (00:39:36):
Stuff? Yes, all of it.
(00:39:39):
Very good. And I split that up. I keep two part-time. One works the morning, one works the afternoon, and so there’s no involved and it also keeps it consistent, so if one needs to be off, the other can cover the shift because that to me, not having an office assistant, that’s really, really bad. I can’t remember a day that I just haven’t had an office assistant. Even at lunch, we have to overlap it so there’s not even a lunch time where we don’t have them. Office assistant’s there all the time and we have scripts for phone answering. I actually have a complete office assistant’s handbook for that, and it’s very, very helpful and I think it takes a lot of stress off of a service advisor because you don’t know what you’re going to get when you answer a phone. You just don’t. You have no idea,
Tom Dorsey (00:40:47):
Not really like that idea. I think that I see the value in it immediately, especially if it’s a person who’s really good at customer service and make deescalations and stuff like that so that by the time the rider gets on the phone with that person and solution oriented and not just wanting to rant for 15 minutes.
Bruce Nation (00:41:09):
That’s right. Well, plus it keeps, for example, I have an operations manager, operations manager, starts as a service advisor, have an operations manager and an assistant operations manager, and the operations manager position typically starts as an office assistant, works up into it, people move through. They don’t want to be an office assistant forever. They’re going to school, they’re doing whatever they do, and you need to be able to basically have a pipeline to these positions and it works quite well that way. It’s been good for me.
Neil Daly (00:41:47):
Yeah, I totally agree with that. Being a training position, a lot of people have used the concierge role to make it so that your advisor can control their schedule a little better, which again, relieve them from burning out. For sure. I’ve seen that takes a lot of training to put that that concierge is so basically in charge of how many customers are getting in the door. They’re the first person that a customer’s going to talk to.
Bruce Nation (00:42:19):
Yeah, the right person in that position can make everything better.
Neil Daly (00:42:23):
Yeah,
Bruce Nation (00:42:25):
They really can ask
Tom Dorsey (00:42:26):
Is, is that role also filling holes in the schedule? Somebody drops. We just didn’t have, we had some openings, never got ’em filled. Are they out there on the phone chasing business?
Bruce Nation (00:42:42):
Well, they do. As part of the overlap and schedule one’s have an assistant operations manager that’ll go in and break because they have to have breaks per California law and for what they need. So I’ll have an office assistant, I’ll have assistant operations manager go over, fill that position while they’re on break, and then we’ll extend to the break and they’ll do the phone calls. For example, they’ll do our exit scheduling phone calls, they’ll go through our emails. They’ll make sure when somebody is emailing in for anything, customer emails in for an appointment, they make sure that gets in front of us. AAA emails, a set of cars coming in on a hook. We get that in front of us. They’re the ones that are watching this all the time and it really helps. For example, tomorrow, a service advisor’s off and I have to step into a role over there and it’s not something I, I’ve done this a long, long time. I don’t want to give away my age, but I’ve done this for a long, long, long time and I’m not up for it. I’m just not up for running around and chasing everything all day long and like a service advisor does. And so without an office assistant, I would’ve a really hard time getting it done. I would just call everybody and say, come another day.
Tom Dorsey (00:44:07):
I love your honesty, Bruce.
Bruce Nation (00:44:09):
What can I say?
Tom Dorsey (00:44:11):
You said it all. Yeah, but that, go ahead. I’m sorry.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:44:19):
Neil, what do you think about the office assistant or you called it concierge? Should we, having a task manager, even a special role like that, all request appointments go there. Call campaigns are run by the concierge person, Bruce, for sure, YouTube, but you haven’t experienced the task manager yet, so that’s why I was asking Neil.
Neil Daly (00:44:45):
I don’t know if I’ve experienced the task manager either.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:44:48):
Oh, okay.
Neil Daly (00:44:50):
I love the role of the office assistant and that keeps, if you have a strong advisor in place, that makes them basically be able to stick around longer and get more done and be more effective just in the way that it worked here. That role didn’t work right off the bat. I’d see once we kind of fully optimize our production, we might be able to fit a concierge into the budget, but we just went a different way here instead. But that does work for a lot of people. It’s a good role.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:45:26):
And is there a simple rule for our audience to understand where’s exactly the line between where the concierge stops and where the service advisor stops? Can that be defined?
Bruce Nation (00:45:44):
The office assistant or concierge would never talk to somebody about their car. They would never discuss their car, and if they’re making an appointment, only a service advisor is allowed to make the appointment. The service advisor has to talk to the customer so that we properly schedule what service is needed. We don’t just arbitrarily, okay, they’re coming in on that day and next thing you know, I got 5 1 0 5 services with timing belts and valve adjustments that I can’t get done in one day
(00:46:14):
Along with the other stuff that’s coming in. Because like I said, the service advisor needs to approve all the appointments and customers continuously call and say, well, it’s time for an oil change. Well, if the office assistant made every single car an oil change, well then first they get to the counter and they’re expecting to be there for an hour, an hour and a half and pay 60 bucks. And when they get there, the service advisor then tells ’em it’s going to be 150 just to get started with a service. That’s going to include a full inspection, and that is going to take two hours or from hour and a half from the time we start, but to the time we get your inspection to you edited and you got to set the expectations, so only the service advisor’s allowed to do that. But as far as controlling the phone cashiering, for example, that’s done by the office assistant.
(00:47:15):
Imagine a service advisor’s busy. They got two, three phones, they’re trying to take care of everybody. Maybe they got a tech waiting on ’em, they got a part they got to order. There’s all this stuff is going on in their life, and the next thing you know, they got an issue with the credit card machine. Somebody’s got to get on the phone with the merchant services to try to straighten it out. Well, who’s going to do that? Who’s going to do it right then? Well, everything has to stop now. This guy’s to stop because he’s got a customer waiting to pay. Office assistant takes that whole roll over. Also, we have our own rentals slash loaners. Office assistants keep track of all of it.
(00:48:00):
We have car rental software that we use and they do all of it. Service advisor does not get involved with that at all. As a matter of fact, the service advisor wants a loaner to give to somebody. For example, he’s going to call somebody and sell a big job and he wants to have that loaner in his pocket to give him or he is running late. We got an estimate back at three in the afternoon. There’s no way we’re going to get it done. He wants to know, do we have a loaner for this person? He’ll look to the office assistant to ask. The office assistant has to know. I mean, they do a lot. Really a lot.
Tom Dorsey (00:48:35):
Sounds like somebody needs a raise real quick. I got a great input here from showroom who I think is my good friend, Carlos Contreras, our resident bolt-on user. He’s saying that what if you have your technicians separate repairs and services by using numeric numbers from one to three. One is required, two is suggested, three equals maintenance. This way the production manager would know how to separate the repair services by priority, and the service writer could prepare the presentation to properly advise the customer on what needs to be done now or the second or for the second or third visit, the PM could send the estimate to the A tech for review before selling the repair or service.
Neil Daly (00:49:28):
How is that different from green, yellow, red?
Tom Dorsey (00:49:32):
Yeah. And then add that. Well, and I guess you could do that as a secondary status or
Bruce Nation (00:49:40):
I think colors do it just fine.
Tom Dorsey (00:49:43):
Right?
Bruce Nation (00:49:44):
Yeah.
Neil Daly (00:49:46):
I like the thinking though. Basically he’s talking about more communication between the technician and the estimate creator, and anything you can add to achieve that is a win.
Bruce Nation (00:49:59):
Well, we use the numbers in severity of an oil leak, for example, something like that
Tom Dorsey (00:50:07):
In the Shop eye’s
Bruce Nation (00:50:08):
Only field. Yes.
Neil Daly (00:50:10):
That goes in customer view. For us, we explain the stages.
Bruce Nation (00:50:14):
There’s a dropdown that goes to the customer view. Yes.
Tom Dorsey (00:50:18):
Okay. Is that a can message with a video or do we just take the Shop eye’s notes and edit ’em and clean ’em up? Move ’em over,
Neil Daly (00:50:31):
Bruce or me?
Tom Dorsey (00:50:32):
Oh, either. How about you, Neil?
Neil Daly (00:50:36):
We used to have a video explaining how we recommend the stages, and I think people were actually watching it, which was cool. We took it off just for now, but they’re just, yeah, the buttons of the tech clicks, they know what’s a stage three versus a one, and then that automatically picks a color and everything.
Tom Dorsey (00:51:00):
Oh, yeah.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:51:03):
So we can summarize the red, yellow, green is the simplest and most effective way of communicating within the shop and to the customer. There’s no translation needed in between the numbers. Just give a more layer of detail.
Bruce Nation (00:51:23):
That’s correct.
Tom Dorsey (00:51:26):
Prioritization and also Carlos, once you guys switch over to AutoVitals to create new severities and colors, so you could have purple as your maintenance items, something like that, right, that you can note.
Bruce Nation (00:51:38):
We don’t separate maintenance at all. A maintenance item is just as important as anything else. If it’s maintenance item that’s needed, it goes into red. For example, transmission fluid, that’s really dark and needs to be flushed. That’s badly needed maintenance. It’ll stay with red, right? Along with worn out brake pads.
Neil Daly (00:52:00):
I think we’re talking about mileage based services though, so no matter what it looks like, if it’s due based on mileage, do you put it in the red?
Bruce Nation (00:52:08):
That would go to yellow unless it looks, if it looks good, but it’s due by mileage, that would go to yellow.
Neil Daly (00:52:14):
Cool.
Bruce Nation (00:52:18):
That’s one of the selling points to a customer on the inspection rather than the mileage based services. A lot of customers are afraid of mileage based services because they’ve been told that they’re overservicing the car, and when you sell a mileage service, you got to qualify it, and so you can either, A lot of times we sell things before it’s due by miles because of the inspection, but I always tell the customer, look, I’m not going to service your car just because the maintenance manual says that we have to. We’re going to look at it and make sure it really needs it first, and that builds a lot of trust.
Tom Dorsey (00:53:05):
We got a little input from John Long also, and I think in a nutshell, he’s describing and telling us exactly why tech shouldn’t be estimating is he said he missed the last 20 minutes of the show because he was on the phone trying to find an obscure hose for a Dodge Journey.
Bruce Nation (00:53:22):
What the hell is that?
Tom Dorsey (00:53:27):
That pulls a wagon in Texas. But he’s asking, would you expect your A tech, I think back when we were talking about having Adam’s input about having that A Tech running that team, would you be having your A tech do that or would you pass that off to a lower tech or have the service advisor, estimator production manager slash slash slash person do that and have your tech making more money?
Neil Daly (00:53:54):
Yeah. Finding parts isn’t on the tech’s duties at all.
Bruce Nation (00:53:58):
No, my techs do not have access to the point of sale, by the way. Not at all. I don’t want ’em in there at all. They’ll screw it up beyond belief. I’m sure
Neil Daly (00:54:11):
It’s benefited to have, we give the text access, they can order parts from our main vendors, and that’ll help too. If they really just realize, oh man, I forgot this O-ring or whatever. They know that they can order it to shortcut the process sometimes to keep things going. That requires another process with communication so that they can’t just add things to tickets, but I kind of like being able to open up everything and trusting within our text not to mess with things. Yeah.
Tom Dorsey (00:54:42):
That’s interesting. So in your case then that rear facing estimator would kind of oversee that, right? He would see these things coming in or notice that this part was on order and then kind of have some oversight in management of that so that it doesn’t just become the wild west, right?
Neil Daly (00:55:01):
Yeah, and they know there’s a dollar, and they actually usually will just in the group chat right after like, Hey, I had to order this part. It’s on the way, and then the team will figure it out from there. That’s just all part of it.
Tom Dorsey (00:55:18):
Adam’s over here firing shots in chat about John Long’s Dodge Journey. He says that his shop works on a lot of big boxes. I don’t know. You guys have to work that out on your own.
Bruce Nation (00:55:34):
When I don’t allow my technicians to order parts at all either, that has to go through a service advisor that way, I’m sure that if there’s an additional part, we make a decision on what the price is going to be for the customer and that the customer knows about it and that it gets charged on the ticket. I could foresee in my shop, if I let them mortar parts, I think I’d have at the end of the month, a larger parts bill and go, wait a minute, what happened here? Why didn’t I get paid for this stuff?
Tom Dorsey (00:56:08):
You have to buy some shelves. Your inventory.
Bruce Nation (00:56:13):
Yes, I’ve heard some stories.
Tom Dorsey (00:56:17):
Give ’em a credit card, give ’em a blank check. Look out.
(00:56:23):
Oh, shoot, we’re at the top of the hour. That was pretty amazing over here. Thank you. We weren’t even going to give me half an hour, but that’s what I said. You bring Neil and you bring Bruce in and then sit back because you guys are in here dropping knowledge. I hope everybody wrote that down. Don’t worry. We’re going to record it. We’ll send it out. We’ll post it up and make it available to you. If you didn’t get to watch the entire episode because you were chasing Dodge Journey parts, well then you can watch the recording. I want to give a real quick plug for our digital shop online summit that’s coming up October 15th. You can go to, I believe it’s the, yes, it is the digital shop summit.com to get registered to see who the speakers are, what the breakouts are going to look like there and get registered.
(00:57:15):
It’s our continuation of our last Digital Shop Summit, and unfortunately we were expecting to be kind of out of some of the restrictions and travel, and we’re hoping to do it more in person, but we’re going to go online again this October 15th, the digital shop summit.com, and I think Dustin just dropped that link there in the chat. If you want to go ahead and click that before the show ends so you can get that in your browser. Also, get registered, register for the show so you get the reminders. Register on the Facebook form if you’re not in there already, because we really want to carry these ideas because I think we still have a couple things hanging. I mean, I could say we’ve come to a conclusion that in a digital shop, your technician should not be writing estimates if they have access to the point of sale.
(00:58:02):
That’s under very controlled circumstances for a very specific reason, and it usually, it sounds like boils down to the one-off type stuff, the things that you’re not used to seeing and you’re going to need a little bit digging deeper, some tech data, looking at guides, making an observation that thing’s seized and rusted on. You’re adding the time, but that’s all things that have to come from that tech and through the digital tools and the digital communication tools, I think we’ve determined a very good way to make that happen, to be able to communicate that information moving forward so that everybody’s on the same page. We get it right the first time, and we’re not catching all those comebacks and working on stuff out of our own pocket. Bruce, I want to thank you. It looks like Neil just got dropped his internet revolted on him, but a huge thank you to Neil Daly, also for Oceanside Motorsports for coming on great information. Bruce Nation, can’t thank you enough for coming in today, buddy, and sharing some of that knowledge and giving people a peek under the hood on how you operate. I know that’s a huge value to folks.
Bruce Nation (00:59:12):
I hope it is. Thank you very much for having me.
Tom Dorsey (00:59:15):
Thank you, Bruce, always, and then of course to Adam and John, our invisible component of our expert panel of experts. Thanks as always. Hope the lunch is good today, Johnny, really good insight. Carlos Contreras, thank you very much. Folks, get in. Give us an idea on what you want to hear. We’re planning out kind of our next two or three months of shows. Send us in, email us in some topics, post it up on the Facebook forum, what challenges are you facing and what would you like us to discuss and hash out? And if you’d like to come on the show, we’ll let us know that too. We’ll reach out with an invite until then, tune in next Wednesday, 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern for the next edition of the Digital Shop Talk Radio. Until then, get out there and make some more money.