AutoVitals is joined by Shane Edwards, General Manager of I-70 Auto Service in Kansas City, and Scott Phillips, AutoVitals product expert, to share their top tips for increasing shop efficiency. Watch the recording to learn:
- Proven strategies to improve shop efficiency
- Key performance indicators to track to improve efficiency
- How technology can help save you time every day
- and more!
Episode Transcript
*This transcript was generated with Artificial Intelligence. Errors may occur. If you identify an error, please contact us at [email protected]
Lauren Thunen (00:00):
Time. Thank you everyone for joining the Digital Shop Talk Radio. Today we’re going to be talking about best practices, tips to improve shop efficiency. My name is Lauren Thunen and I have the pleasure of hosting the Digital Shop Talk Radio today. And I’m also our manager of marketing, so I’ve get to work with a lot of our clients as well as prospects to introduce them to AutoVitals. And just a few notes before I introduce our panelists who will spend the bulk of the time talking and sharing tips. Just a few housekeeping items. You all should have a q and a section at the bottom of your Zoom screen. This is going to be the best way to communicate with us, so if you have a question, feel free to put it in the q and a. We’ll save some time at the end to go through those or we might just answer them as we go through the flow of conversation. And without further ado, Shane, could you introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about you and I 70 Auto Service?
Shane Edwards (00:58):
Absolutely. My name’s Shane Edwards. I have I 70 Auto Service in Kansas City, Missouri, home of the world champion, Kansas City Chiefs. We always make sure we let everybody know that. If you don’t remember, we’ve been in business since 1976, been around a long time. I’ve been at the shop for six years and I’m actually the owner now or in the process of doing that here quite soon. We’re going to be closing on that. So that’s a little bit about me and we’ve been around, like I said, a long time. We have a very heavy fleet business here, so that’s about 50% of our business probably is Fleet.
Lauren Thunen (01:43):
Awesome. And congratulations on taking over I 70. I’m sure you’re very happy about that.
Shane Edwards (01:49):
Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Very excited. Very excited.
Lauren Thunen (01:53):
Awesome. And then Scott, could you introduce yourself?
Scott Phillips (01:56):
Yeah, my name is Scott, one of the trainers and success advisors here at AutoVitals. My role is to work with all of the new shops that come on board, help them establish their best practices, and I work with their teams and provide ongoing training. I’m located over here in California just south of San Francisco, home of the five time Super Bowl champion, 49 ERs and happy to be here as well. And just looking forward to getting to know Shane as well and have a nice chat with everybody here on their call.
Lauren Thunen (02:25):
Awesome. And then before coming to the AutoVitals team, Scott, can you remind me what you did before AutoVitals too, just to give some of your background before you became vitals experts?
Scott Phillips (02:34):
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve been in the automotive industry for probably about 14, 15 years now. And just before coming to AutoVitals, I actually took over as a service advisor, service manager for a multi-location here in California. They were a hundred percent paper-based. One of the things that I was happy to be a part of was actually finding AutoVitals and bringing them into our place of business and going through that implementation process as well. So had time in both sides of the seat if you’ll
Lauren Thunen (02:59):
Nice. Awesome. Yeah, great to have both of you on. And just Scott, you’re a great testimonial to how well-versed our customer success team is over here at AutoVitals. Not only just our product but in what everyone on this call is actually living. So thank you for sharing some of that background. Okay, Shane, I’m going to ask you the first question today. So you’ve been with I 70 for six years over those past six years. What are some of the common biggest challenges you see in your shop when looking to manage it efficiently? So what’s causing your day-to-Day inefficiencies?
Shane Edwards (03:34):
Yeah, I would say the biggest thing, and most shops I would say would surely agree with this, keeping things flowing from job to job, that’s always the biggest challenge, whether that be parts issues or not getting an estimate done in a timely fashion or the technician not knowing what is next job is or next job is. That’s probably our biggest challenge I would say.
Lauren Thunen (04:03):
Makes sense. And then Scott, from your side in the shop and also just training our clients up, what do you see most of our clients when they first come to us struggling the most with?
Scott Phillips (04:15):
I’d probably have to echo Shane there with just the overall, I think it comes down to communication. Communication is between team members but also with clients not only being able to just communicate effectively and efficiently, but all those things that go in between, like Shane mentioned, ordering parts, what’s next? Being able to really establish a good flow. And I think the other thing that has really impacted efficiency is just maybe the lack of being able to track and monitor things. We all know that it’s very important to have technician efficiency or shop operational efficiency, but do we have the right tools to be able to actually observe that and know that we’re actually putting together and moving in the right direction as far as being efficient?
Lauren Thunen (04:54):
Makes a ton of sense. Yeah, I’m glad you guys brought up the communication point. I was looking at some statistics from just general industry. So outside of the automotive, inside the automotive and UCI did a study on productivity of workers and they found that on average the average workers interrupted three times every hour. And that it typically takes someone if they’re focusing on a high level task, which as you guys know most automotive technicians are, it takes the average person to refocus about 23 minutes. So to refocus fully. So if you do the math of being interrupted every hour and it taking you or three times every hour and taking you about 30 minutes to refocus, if you’re getting interrupted a lot, if there’s delays in communication, your team is probably unfocused the vast majority of the day. So Shane, from your perspective, how have you guys optimized your communication? Let’s start with just between the service advisors and technicians to make sure that everyone knows what’s next on their plate from the day so you can kind of move from like you said, job to job quicker and more efficiently.
Shane Edwards (06:05):
Yeah, I mean in general as far as for better communication between the service advisor and the technician, we make sure that we have great notes after a diagnostic is completed from our technician to our service advisor. That way the service advisor will know what’s going on and they’ll know how to estimate that job out, making sure that on bigger jobs or maybe more difficult jobs where the technician knows specialty parts are going to be needed, silly gaskets that we don’t think of because when you’re in a service advisor position, a lot of times you don’t think about all those little things that you’re going to have to take apart or you’re early in your career in service advisor so you don’t understand what’s going on there. So it’s important that the technician is able to relay that along with his or her notes to the service advisor so they can have that all very clear and in front of ’em.
(07:02):
And also after the service advisor has completed an estimate on a larger job or a questionable job that they may struggle with that they get with their technician for just a couple of minutes and say, Hey, here’s what I’ve got. Will you take a quick look at this for me? And that helps before we contact our client to make sure that we’re in order as much as possible to save on that later on a missing part or whatever we have to order on the fly that slows everything down. But I would say using the notes and making sure that those are clear and concise to the service advisor is one of the bigger things we can do.
Lauren Thunen (07:41):
Awesome. Great suggestion. And how do you get, so I’m sure everyone on the call is like, yeah, absolutely. We should have our technicians take better notes for the service advisors. How do you actually get your team to do that consistently on every job? So again, you actually follow the processes that you have in place.
Shane Edwards (07:58):
Yeah, obviously you need to get buy-in from your technicians and the way we do that is explain to them the process and the reason for the process, not just here’s how we’re going to do things and we make sure they understand that this is going to help them in the long run and a lot of shops pay based on bonuses or maybe they’re still on flat rate, so if that technician understands if he takes just a little bit of time upfront, it’s going to save him possible hours on that job on the backside of that. So just making sure they understand why we do it, not just that we do it, is huge.
Lauren Thunen (08:34):
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense and I think that if you’ve watched any episodes of the digital Shop Talk radio before anyone who’s on that echoes throughout every single episode is to make sure you’re reminding your staff not only what they should be doing but why they should be doing it because we’re all humans and if we don’t have a good reason for doing something, we’re probably not going to do it. We’re just going to take the easiest way out unless there’s a reason to go the hard way. Scott, any tips that you have for folks that, let’s start again with the communication between the technician and the service advisor inside of AutoVitals that folks can use to improve that? Yeah,
Scott Phillips (09:12):
I think we have a lot of really great tools. I can want to, again kind of echo Shane myself, working in the industry didn’t come from a technical background, so I’ve never been a technician, but kind of filling in as a service writer, service manager, one of the most important things for me to learn the industry was those notes from those really intelligent technicians that we were working with. Culture obviously a huge one as well for some of the tools in our system. I think one of the most effective ones are smart markers. The ability to leave these icons and indicators of if there’s a customer waiting, if this vehicle’s getting a certain type of job and it’s mapped to a canned job that you’ve, let’s have those smart markers populate for us when parts are going to be here, maybe where the parts have been ordered.
(09:51):
One of my favorite ones is, Hey, there’s a core part on this particular work order. Make sure that that starter doesn’t live under your toolbox for the next couple of weeks. It needs to go back to wherever that established process is. The technician chat. You talked a little bit earlier about the lack of focus or locks of focus when we’re going in between activities. I always think about, well if I’m a technician and I’m taking off my gloves, I’m putting down my scan tool, I’m walking all the way to the office, I’m then looking at Shane and waiting for him to get off the phone to then ask, well what should I be working on next? That lack of efficiency as opposed to staying at the vehicle, sending Shane a message and then waiting for him to get back to me. If we can focus on the internal team chat, I think those are a huge efficiency booster to affect communication as well.
Lauren Thunen (10:34):
Awesome. Yeah, I personally love the smart markers that are on our repair order tiles. You’re using auto vials and not using those, definitely reach out to your customer success advisor. They’re completely customizable. I’ve seen everything from loaner car one to a angry face right on the vehicle tile showing that this is a customer that might be disgruntled for whatever reason. So make sure you don’t send them a review request after or what have you and make sure that you meet their promise time. So they are very helpful to just see everything that’s going on in your shop and with your customers at a glance. Now Shane, you talked about again too, in addition to notes, but that chat that you have auditing the inspection between the service advisor and the technician now, are you having the technician walk up to the front of the shop to do that chat or are they meeting the back of the shop? How does that chat take place? Is it virtually in person? Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Shane Edwards (11:30):
Yeah, I mean obviously AutoVitals and a lot of other inspection platforms have chat available on them, but I prefer to get my service advisor and technician face-to-face on the bigger jobs. I’m not saying every job because obviously we want to try and avoid that, keep things rolling. But on big jobs where you’re going to have a lot of parts involved, I prefer to have them face to face and that can go one of two ways. Sometimes I may have the technician come up front, but a lot of times the service advisor will print off a job ticket and take it back and meet the technician where he or she is at, so we don’t interrupt their job flow quite as much. As you said, it takes a long time to get back in the groove once we’ve interrupted that. So we’ll take that back there and just say, Hey, can you take a quick look at this for me? And we may even have ’em say, when you get to a stopping point where you have a moment, we’ll lay it over on their toolbox or their table and when they have a moment they can take a look at that and then make contact back with the service advisor.
Lauren Thunen (12:30):
Nice. Great. Thanks for giving a little bit more insight to that. Yeah, I like that you have the service advisor walk back to meet the technician too. It prevents the service advisor from getting interrupted while they’re talking to a customer as well or just feeling rushed because you have someone standing behind you patiently waiting to ask you a question. Awesome. And then Scott, you mentioned when you did your intro just kind of about how important key performance indicators are and being able to track the efficiency gains in your shop when you’re working with a new shop, what are you suggesting that they take a look at in terms of those key performance indicators?
Scott Phillips (13:08):
Sure. One of the biggest focuses comes down to just best practices with the technicians and their tablets with proper tablet usage, we have a fantastic report called tee times and tee times allow us to break down technician efficiency, product productivity and really be able to identify if there’s other opportunities that are being missed or that we can generate based off of maybe time that we’re not working on vehicles. So I can flag if I’m on a tool truck, I can flag if I need work, I can flag other activities that allow us to find, again, more opportunities to create better processes. When it comes to some of our KPIs and some of our metrics, of course, technician efficiency and productivity are really key metrics, but one of the new ones that we have for instance would be like average inspection duration. It’s one thing to have a DVI process, but you also want to establish with your technicians what kind of the relative amount of time that we’re expecting to take on these inspections so that we have kind of a baseline and we’re not spending too long being inefficient, knowing there’s going to be a variance between the different types of vehicles and conditions that we’re looking at, but we want to make sure that we have a good idea of how long these inspections will take.
(14:13):
So it’s nice to be able to see that. We talked a little bit earlier about having a workflow process and really establishing the smoothness of a vehicle going through the visit. So one of the other ones I like to look at just to make sure that things are going accordingly is we have what’s called average workflow moves per ro. Are my advisors moving a vehicle through these processes? If everything’s staying and waiting for inspect, again, we know that we’re going to be losing it in efficiency. So being able to track and make sure that things are moving through the process I think is a really great KPI to be able to quickly check on and to make sure that we’re doing and establishing those best practices with the team.
Lauren Thunen (14:47):
Awesome. Thanks for sharing, Scott. Yeah, I love our tee times report. I peek in there quite a bit just because the amount of information that you can get on your team is quite crazy if you’re going from having no information on that to being able to see productivity, efficiency, average build hours by broken out by each of your team members. If you’re a data nerd, you can really geek out inside of that report. Are you using Shane? Do you use the CD Times report inside of AutoVitals and you guys are using the business control panel?
Shane Edwards (15:22):
Absolutely. It’s a fantastic tool. I can quickly see, and of course going back to what Scott said is you have to make sure that your technicians are using the tool properly too or garbage in, garbage out. So you have to make sure along with all the other things we talked about, they get buy in there and why you do that and explain it to ’em and have a lengthy conversation is what I did and explain to ’em what our goals are and what their goals are and how we know if they’re on track or not is them making sure they use the tool properly, clocking in and out of the jobs, each line item and each job properly so we know where they’re at and where they might need help at. So yes, it’s fantastic.
Lauren Thunen (16:05):
Fantastic. Yeah. Awesome. And yeah, just like you mentioned, again the training is indispensable because if you just buy the tablets, they’re going to be really expensive paperweights in your shop, so making sure that you’ve set expectations with your team that we would love to say you can just pick up a piece of software and it’s going to work right out of the box, but I think for every single product in our space that is not the case. You really have to make sure that your team is using the product to the best of their ability and you will get the most out of it. So again, something to chat with if you have no idea what the tee times report is or technician efficiency reporting, make sure you get with your customer success advisor when you’re really going to see the massive gains is when you’re able to take advantage of every tool in your arsenal.
Scott Phillips (16:55):
And Shane, you talked a little bit about, oh, I’m sorry. I was going to say you talked a little bit about the buy-in with your team and kind of that culture that you’re presenting. One of the things I would always recommend too is I’m surprised by how many, maybe technicians haven’t seen what a completed inspection looks like. It’s really great for them to go through and take all these photos and they’re providing all this information, take one of those inspections and send it to their phone, let them take pride in their work and see what they’re putting out in front of the client and help drive that buy-in because again, we’re presenting this today, but we also have things like our future service reminders campaigns that we can send out and it’s all based on that inspection information they’re putting together. So I think just making sure that they’re part of that entire process and being able to see the end result can be really important as well.
Lauren Thunen (17:35):
Yeah, awesome. And then Shane, when I know right now every shop I’ve talked to are struggling potentially or just managing a much higher car count than they’ve seen in past years, it seems like right now there’s more cars on the vehicle or more cars on the road than any shop could want to see. So how have you worked with your team on those weeks where you just know you’re going to be absolutely slammed to get through your day’s workload and what does that process look like with your team when you know you’re going to have a really high car count
Shane Edwards (18:12):
And honestly a lot of this, I’m not a huge car count pusher to be honest with you. I’m more about the average repair order, right? Less cars, more money on each repair order is what we’re about. So I don’t push high car count and honestly we have a very, and this may be off point of your question, but I’m just giving my opinion on it, we don’t push high car count if we have that obviously we’re going to schedule out, we have a set limit per technician per day of what we want to see cars and obviously dependent upon what the car’s coming in for, we’ll kind of dictate that if we have one we know is going to be a real trouble car, an electrical issue, maybe that’s going to take some hours. We’re going to schedule that technician lighter that day and also based on what work we’ve already sold and all that good stuff.
(19:03):
Scheduling and most people I think would agree is one of the harder things we do probably, if not the hardest thing we do, because you can’t always count on people to show up for their appointments. So you may have a perfect day scheduled and it looks great and you’ve got everything planned out and then half your cars don’t show up. So then what do we do? There’s no real planning for some of that, but I think the important thing to remember is don’t overschedule yourself unless you have the staff to handle it, but don’t overschedule yourself is the simple of it. Don’t put yourself in a bad situation with a client where you have to call them at the end of the day and say, I didn’t get to your car today even though I told you I was going to. Those things happen. Don’t get me wrong.
(19:50):
Communication is the number one thing we can do if we do over-schedule ourself accidentally or things didn’t go our way. Getting on that phone earlier in the day, sooner rather than later is very important to making sure your client understands what happened and being honest with them, tell ’em what happened and see if they need to reschedule or if they’re okay leaving their car. If you have loaner cars, obviously we want to get those in play or if they need a shuttle somewhere, we are going to make adjustments if we did not follow through with what we said we were going to do. First off, we’re going to give ’em the reason why and we’re going to try and help ’em out if we need to. And most people are super understanding and my experience, as long as you’re honest with ’em and you communicate with ’em, if you don’t tell ’em what’s up and they call you at five o’clock and you haven’t started on their car, that’s not going to be a pleasant conversation. So just my thought is obviously don’t over-schedule yourself and take what you can take. Don’t try and do something you can’t do because it’s just going to cause you problems.
Lauren Thunen (20:59):
Yeah, no, that is excellent advice and I know there’s a lot of shops out there, maybe not on this call that are looking, they’re always thinking higher car count is going to equal more money in the bank, but the formula is not as simple as that because if you’re just turning lost leaders on a ton of cars, you’re actually not going to make any more money. So shifting your perspective to how can I get the most out of every single car is going to be what increases your revenue the fastest rather than just trying to get through cars and get through. If you’re doing 10 cars, try to get through 12 and once you get through 12 cars, try to get to 15. It’s not going to be as lucrative as maybe dialing it back down to seven or eight, but doing really good inspections, making sure you budget enough time to do the upsold work right then and there. Scott, do you have anything to add to what Shane was saying?
Scott Phillips (21:52):
Just reminiscing of calling customers at the shop and over communicating with them, making sure that they are up to date with whatever progress of that vehicle it may be, even if there’s maybe not a pull update to give them, just checking in, telling them where we’re at with things, what the current status is. I also talk with some shops where maybe they are seeing some ebbs and flows from week to week. We have a really slow week, then we have a really fast week or a couple of weeks down a couple of weeks really up. Some of the things that I would utilize would be, again, kind of going back to using the right tools, make sure your service and maintenance reminders are set up correctly. Make sure that we’re reminding people to come in at the right time so that at the first of the week I’m not getting all of my people, all of my clients coming in when I could have maybe spread them out with more accurate service and maintenance reminders. Take a look at your KPI metrics as far as retention rate. The clients that are coming back, are they existing customers? Are we getting a lot of new clients in the door and what does that indicate as far as the amount of car count or the volume of work that we either have or maybe don’t have at certain times throughout the year?
Lauren Thunen (22:53):
Yeah, definitely. And just reiterating what Shane said, if you have bad news but you tell it early, it can actually be good news. But if you have bad news and you wait to tell it till the very end of the day, it’s always going to be bad news. So that’s a great, great tip of if something goes wrong rather than trying to rush and cover it up as quickly as possible. Usually just letting the customer know right away is the best thing to do. Awesome. Shane, you also mentioned that scheduling is probably the hardest part of any shops day and you mentioned you guys have set limit of cars per technician. How did you get to your current scheduling flow and what are some best practices that you guys use to make sure that you never overbook?
Shane Edwards (23:39):
Yeah, and it’s not an exact science, but it’s about as good as I’ve been able to figure out. So you need to know your technician, what their capabilities are and what you believe they can handle for the day. So most of my technicians, I typically am going to schedule, say a normal diagnostic, I’m going to try and schedule three cars per technician per day for diagnostic work. And the way we approach our system is we do our diagnostic work in the mornings and then when they’re completed with that, they move into either work from the previous days or work on those vehicles. So it seems to work the best and I didn’t reinvent the wheel, listen, I learned this stuff from people way smarter than me who tried it way before I did, and these things seem to work, but you may have a technician that can only handle one to two diagnostics a day for now, and maybe you grow them eventually, but it’s always knowing where you’re at with your people, with your team and what they’re capable of and knowing what a vehicle possibly could cause you issues.
(24:45):
And that’s why it’s important for your service advisors to do great job on the phone with gathering information when they set the appointments, not just you need breaks. Okay, that’s it. Well now what they didn’t tell you is they’re having all these other issues. It isn’t just brakes. We have a BS modules and things of this nature, so we’re going to have longer diagnostic time involved with those vehicles. So it is a whole team effort here making sure that when we set those appointments, we’re getting as much information as we can and plan detective is what I tell my service advisors. You have to ask the questions because clients don’t know what they don’t know. So we’re going to ask those pointed questions and get that information that way we can say this car could be a challenge to us, I think. So we’re only going to schedule one diagnostic for technician A today and that’s going to be his car. So that’s how we practice it. It seems to work about as good as anything I’ve ever tried.
Lauren Thunen (25:43):
Yeah, it makes sense. Makes sense. And yes, I like what you said about plane detective because most folks when they schedule an appointment online or call a shop, all they know is that something doesn’t smell right, something doesn’t feel right or their car is flashing lights at them. So really making sure you take the extra time because folks aren’t going to feel like they’re being interrogated. I know some shops just want to get the appointment as quickly as possible and then address all that once they’re actually in the shop, but taking the opportunity to show them you are the expert in the space and you really want to make sure that their vehicle is taken care of as best as possible from the moment they call in to the kiss goodbye when you hand ’em the keys. So don’t be afraid of taking a little bit extra time with customers when they’re calling you on the shop, schedule an appointment and if you don’t have a drop off script, an appointment setting scripts, all of that, make sure you have clear delineated processes that are written down. So again, when you’re training a new service advisor, it’s easy and they have something to reference when they’re on their first day. Scott, anything to add there?
Scott Phillips (26:51):
I think that having the scripts and being able to plug in a new advisor and having them feel very comfortable is really important, especially if I’m brand new to the industry and somebody’s coming in with their breaks. Shane, I’d be curious what percentage of your vehicles or clients are coming in as far as drop-offs versus maybe waiters and do you guys have a way of addressing that with your clients or your advising team?
Shane Edwards (27:12):
Yeah, any of our diagnostics are drop-offs. We don’t do waiting diagnostics. It’s not fair to us. It’s not fair to our clients because listen, we can gather all the information in the world, but it’s still an unknown until we get onto that vehicle. We don’t know if it’s going to take 30 minutes. We don’t know if it’s going to take six hours until we get into it. We don’t do any type of diagnostic waiter appointments. We’ll do a couple of waiter appointments a day for state inspection or an oil service, but we even try to not do those as waiter appointments because we want to be able to spend as much time with that vehicle as possible and not feel pressured. Our technicians feel pressured or our service advisors, if we have a customer or a client setting in our lobby waiting for their vehicle back during an oil change, well guess what? Yeah, we’re going to do our inspection, we’re going to estimate everything out, but we might miss something or we might not take as much time as we normally would have. So we discourage waiters and I know that doesn’t work for everybody, but we really try and make sure that we just don’t take diagnostic as waiters because it just don’t work. It is just not something that we can do.
Lauren Thunen (28:27):
How do you have that conversation with your customers? Yeah, like you said, it doesn’t work for every shop, so I imagine you guys are pretty skilled at having that conversation. Can you take us through a little bit of how you let a customer know, hey, you’re not going to be waiting at the shop?
Shane Edwards (28:40):
Yeah, absolutely. So when we set the appointment, we advise ’em that we need you to drop your vehicle off between such and such time. And usually I would say most of our calls not too much pushback on that, but if somebody does have a challenge, say they don’t have a ride or say they live a little ways out and they don’t want to go back and forth. So if you have loaner cars, that’s where those come in. Great. We do utilize those and being where we’re at, we have a lot of availability with Uber. We use Uber a lot to shuttle our clients back home or to work or whatever. So if you can help with that, that’s going to take a lot of that away. But making them understand or trying to explain to them why you want to spend time with their vehicle and why it doesn’t behoove them to set in the lobby and wait for that is very important.
(29:33):
And just be honest with ’em, just like everything else we do, we want to be honest with our clients and just help ’em understand what we are doing and that we are the professionals and in order for us to do a complete and thorough inspection and investigation of what’s going on with their vehicle, we need time with it. And really we don’t run into it a whole lot objection wise because we have other avenues obviously put in place and rural shops maybe you’re not going to have that, but most shops around an urban environment are going to be able to get a shuttle for ’em or have a shuttle driver even. I know plenty of shops that have somebody that does nothing but shuttle driving slash maybe cleaning up around the shop. So that could be something that works for you too.
Lauren Thunen (30:21):
Awesome. That makes a ton of sense. And you’ll make the money back on paying for the Ubers or the shuttle driver if you’re able to fully go through the vehicle and identify everything that needs to be fixed. It obviously it sounds like if you’re not doing it now, it sounds like a huge increase of costs, but you will make it back up by being able to take the time that you need on the vehicle and not rushing through it additionally. Oh man, I just lost my train of thought. I had one more thing to say about that, but you know what Shane, I’ll leave it at that because you killed it. Oh, I was going to say I remember is just being assumptive as well. I like what you said of you set the expectation you’re going to need to drop off your car versus I know a lot of shops, it’s a small language change of are you going to drop off or will you be waiting?
(31:08):
Because then if you give them the option to say, oh, I think I was planning on waiting, then you have to go through the objection handling. So just making it very clear like great, you’ll drop off your vehicle at eight and then wait for them to say something else. But like you said, probably a lot of folks will be like, oh, okay, yeah, I’ll just drop off my car. That’s what they think is best and it’s a big efficiency increase if you don’t have folks calling or going up to the front counter and bugging your service advisor all day as well. So in addition to you guys not feeling rushed, it’s also going to save your service advisor a lot of time if they’re not being bothered every hour of where the vehicle is at.
(31:51):
Okay. We are getting somewhat close to our time here, so I just wanted to make sure if anyone in the chat has any questions about what we have covered so far, please throw them in the q and a so we have plenty of time to answer them if not all Good. Scott, I wanted to ask you while we’re waiting to see if any questions trickle in, are there any quick wins outside of, we talked a lot about implementing technology and making sure that you’re tracking your KPIs, all of those things, they take a little bit of time to realize. Are there any quick wins that you recommend to your shops that are struggling with efficiency that they can do go back into their shop and do relatively quickly?
Scott Phillips (32:36):
I think it probably comes down to what we’ve talked about a lot. This call is just the communication. I think developing the best pathways of communication both internally and externally with your clients, studying good processes around that, whether that’s, again, the advisors walking out to the technician to have a more in-depth conversation group channels. We have our internal chat, but to put the entire team in a chat can be really effective so we can ping messages across each other throughout the afternoon, workflow status updates, let’s reduce the amount of time we’re picking up the phone to call and update our client. Let’s have some automated messages be sent to the client based on the workflow status the vehicle is in. And that’s not always going to communicate if something is maybe gone astray or we’re going to need the vehicle a little bit longer. But that comes down to, hey, we’re going to make sure that every customer has been called by 2:00 PM or 1230. Making sure that you have those proactive and good processes in place. And I think communication would be the most important thing to focus on to really drive your efficiency.
Lauren Thunen (33:31):
Awesome. Great. And of course if you’re using AutoVitals, we have the internal chat built in. If you’re not using us, there’s tons of free apps. I know Google Gmail has a chat built in. I think you can use Slack for free if you have a relatively small team. So again, it doesn’t have to be any added cost to get a group chat going with your team. It’s super effective. Shane, what about you on your side outside of all of the technology in the weeds that you guys do? Is there anything that you’re just like, if you’re not doing this in your shop, you should start if you want to increase your efficiency?
Shane Edwards (34:05):
Yeah, one big thing we implemented over the last couple of years is morning huddles or morning meetings, letting everybody know kind of the plan for the day. Whereas used to, we’d all come in, we’d they’d go to the toolboxes, service advisor would be doing their thing, but now we get together and it don’t take five minutes guys. So we do that and here’s the way it looks. I’ve got this many diagnostic coming in, I’ve got two waiter oil changes, DA give a quick rundown. I’ve got this vehicle I need finished today, technician A, I’m going to need you to do this. And it gives ’em a good idea of what they’re going to do for the day. Now obviously we may have to jo and drive and make changes, but it gives ’em an idea of what the plan for the day is. That’s been really good for us and other shops that I know have done it, that has helped increase their productivity because people have a mindset when they go to their workstation, what’s going to happen.
Lauren Thunen (35:03):
Love it. Having a game plan for the day is very important. And again, if you were on our last call with Fred guess Wiki in Canton, Ohio, he does the exact same thing with his team, very similar results. So again, don’t reinvent the wheel. It’s tried, tried and true. Jeff did have a question he asked Shane, I know you have a lot of relatively new employees. Can you speak to the learning curve and how you obtained buy-in from the technicians, but also the workload of the service advisor required for reviewing the inspection process?
Shane Edwards (35:32):
Yeah, great question Jeff. How you doing? By the way? I know Jeff. Yes, we do have a lot of new employees or younger staff and as I spoke to you earlier about getting buy-in, you want to make sure you explain why you’re doing it. Service advisors and technicians, right? We want to make sure everybody understands what our goals are and it’s important to let ’em know all goals, financial goals, shop goals, and know their goals as individuals because that all comes into play, right? If we’re not being productive and we explain why this is going to help us be more productive and why it’s going to help us have a higher average repair order, which is ultimately what we’re looking for. When they understand that and they understand I’m not going to be as busy, right? We’re not moving from car to car to car to car all day long.
(36:25):
I have no opportunity to get in a groove as a technician, as we spoke about earlier, when we have to interrupt what we’re doing, say we’ve scheduled a bunch of cars and they’re oil changes and we’re not doing dvs and we’re just hammering cars in and out all day. Whereas, and now, so my technician, he started work on a job and we’ve done a poor job of scheduling. So we have an oil change that shows up at one 30 and they come in and now we have to pull the technician on whatever he was doing and then now it’s going to take us what, 23 minutes to get back in the groove once we get back on that. So we just explained to them why we do it, which is to hit the ultimate goals, which if we hit our shop goals, then you’re going to be able to hit your financial goals because we’re making more money.
(37:16):
Well, guess what? We’re going to pass that down and make sure you make more money also. And if your staff’s on a bonus type program, well that’s easy to explain, right? We are more productive. You’re going to make more of a bonus. So you just got to know what your people’s goals are and it’s huge. Most people want to make more money. So we explain to ’em how this is going to help them do that. And not only do we explain it to ’em, but we’ve got proof now because we’ve been doing it for years. I can show you what this looks like versus what this looks like as far as your average repair order. If you’re not doing these things and you start doing them well, we can see that increase almost immediately. Did that answer all of Jeff’s question?
Lauren Thunen (37:59):
I think so. I think the only last bit that he asked was what the workload is for the service advisors for reviewing the inspection after the technician’s done it, how long that’s taking approximately.
Shane Edwards (38:11):
Yeah, another good question, and it’s something we haven’t really talked about. We have a system in place where as soon as we take in the cars in the morning, we assign those to the technicians. Well then the service advisors are kind of ready to go. So those cars start coming through and they’ll start getting pictures and they’ll start working through those inspections immediately making their edits to pictures and things of that nature. So by the time that diagnostic comes in, they’ve probably already worked through the DVI or the courtesy side of things where they’ve got that ready estimate’s probably close to done, then the diagnostic comes through. Now we can do that and we’re ready to send that DVI off to our client. So we have a process and it seems to work well. So as far as downtime or added stress on the service advisor, as long as you’re doing it the right way, there’s really no extra work if this is the only thing you do. We’ve done this for years and years and years, so this is just how we do it. You may have a service advisor that comes from a shop that doesn’t do it, so you’re going to have to explain the process to ’em probably, and you’re going to have a little bit of a learning curve there, but as long as your process is solid and you explain things to ’em, there’s really no extra workload as long as they’re using their time efficiently.
Lauren Thunen (39:32):
Anything to add there, Scott, in terms of the workload on a service advisor for new folks or Shane pretty much covered it.
Scott Phillips (39:38):
I think you hit the nail on the head really well spoken. I would agree wholeheartedly with everything you had to say there. There’s some benefits of maybe adding canned jobs into your inspection to be able to more quickly create your estimates, which can help the process but expedite it. But again, I don’t think that anything that we’re doing currently is taking more time than it would have using a different system or being paper-based. It should be even more effective.
Lauren Thunen (40:03):
Awesome. Great. And yeah, just reiterating, setting up the can jobs, things like that. It will take some time on the initial setup and it might seem, say it takes an hour or so, it might seem at that point like, oh man, I have to spend an hour on this, but it’ll save you so much time, week over week, month over month. So making sure as well, part of efficiency is taking the time to do things right the first time when you’re getting the processes and systems set up because it’ll save you a lot of time down the road and just being able to have that foresight when you’re getting new folks trained up or when you’re implementing a new system. And then Shane, I also really liked what you said about the difference between a lot of folks think when you talk about being more efficient, that folks are going to be more busy, but showing your staff of, Hey, if we do this process properly, actually it’s going to result in you feeling less busy day to day because everything is going to be operating smoothly. If you’re struggling with technician retention, that’s a great thing to show them of, Hey, your day-to-day work environment is going to be better if we are using our processes properly because you’re going to work on better, more lucrative jobs and you’re not going to feel like you’re a chicken running around with their head cut off in the back of the shop. So again, if you’re looking to hire technicians or keep your existing ones on board, showing them the benefits of that is really important.
(41:28):
Any other questions? Great question, Jeff. Throw them in the chat if you have them. We have about three more minutes left here. Are there any last thoughts, Shane or Scott that you’d like to share on the topic? It can be about efficiency, general best practices, anything that you think is fit for the conversation.
Shane Edwards (41:47):
Yeah, the last thing I would like to say is if you’re not doing dvs, do them. Obviously this is about AutoVitals here and that’s what we’ve used for years. But if you’re not doing them, that’s the number one thing you need to be doing in your shop to improve everything. Efficiency, productivity, average ro, I can preach it all day long, but I can prove it all day long too. If you’re not doing dvs and there’s multiple reasons why you do DVI, you want to cover your six, right? Make sure you’re taking pictures and videos of any damage of vehicle coming in. So that helps cover any of those questions that a client might have. But also we want to make sure that our clients are fully educated on their vehicle before they make a purchase decision. I don’t want a client buying an engine when they’ve got $7,000 of other work they need to do that are vehicle to make it safe. That’s not doing them any justice and it’s not how we want to do business. We want to make sure they have a full picture and understanding of their vehicle before they make a purchase decision.
Lauren Thunen (42:53):
Awesome. Couldn’t have said it better myself. And yes, of course we’re here with AutoVitals. That’s our top choice if you use us, but really use any DVI provider, just get it going. I think everyone in the industry will say that that works for any of the providers in the space of just start. And then from there you can refine. But getting started, a lot of times I talk to shops and they make it out to be a much bigger process in their head than it really turns out to be. In reality of just reminding you the path has been well traveled, it’s usually much easier of a transition than you might be thinking in your head. And same goes for all the other tools. If you’re thinking about starting to use technician time tracking, if you’re thinking about getting an RM, so that appointment reminders are going out at the right time and you can send an email and text blast. Again, don’t make it out to be bigger than it is in your head. Most of the providers in the space are very good and will make it as easy as possible to get it going for your shop.
(43:54):
Scott, any last words on the topic of efficiency?
Scott Phillips (43:59):
Just I would say the technology is obviously here to stay. I would think we would all agree. And I think developing those good properties are also allowing maybe new people that wouldn’t come into this industry to be efficient and effective as well. Shane, you talked about bringing in some high school students to your shop. I see a lot of service advisors that maybe don’t come from a technical background these days and they’re able to use these tools really well. So when you get your profits in place, I think it opens up a lot of doors moving forward also.
Lauren Thunen (44:28):
Yeah, no, that is a great point. Everyone on this call knows how hard it is to find the right qualified good help in your shop, whether that’s on the service advisor front or the technician front. So if you have really great training and processes, it expands the pool of folks that you can recruit from, which long-term is going to make it a lot more effective. And you’re not only pulling from a small group of folks that already know how to do everything, start to finish. Awesome. Well that is full time, 45 minutes. Thank you Shane and Scott for joining us. Everyone that’s on this call, we will send out a recording of the webinar. And Shannon, I just wanted to say again, congratulations for taking over I 70 as the owner and congratulations on leading the team through a couple of record breaking years and months as you stated. So it’s really so nice to have you on this call. And thank you for sharing your knowledge with the AutoVitals community and shops. We really appreciate it. I know it’s taken you years and years to get to where you’re at, so thank you for letting in the other shops in on your best practices and secrets of the trade.
Shane Edwards (45:38):
Thank you. And thank you for having me.
Lauren Thunen (45:41):
Of course. And thank you, Scott. Thank you for supporting us in the Digital Shop Talk radio and making sure that we had the product knowledge and the industry insight from you. So I really appreciate you jumping on with me.
Scott Phillips (45:52):
Yeah, thank you both. Thanks Lauren for putting all this together as well.
Lauren Thunen (45:55):
Yeah, of course. If you have any questions that you think of when you get off the call, anyone that’s attending, feel free to shoot them. We actually have a website chat bot up, so feel free to shoot ’em through there or join the Digital Shop Talk Facebook forum and we can answer them live there as well. Alright, thanks guys. Thanks Scott. Thanks Shane. Thank you. Bye everybody. Bye.
