customers for needs/wants, demonstrating the prod- plaint department just due to the nature of a service uct to fill the needs, negotiating, and closing the sale. department. We are often suffering from a lack of We had our floor time. We did our own dealer swaps qualified people in the service department. In addition and our own deliveries. We had to do marketing cold to enrollment in the tech schools being down 30% in Service Advisor the last ten years, qualified manag- Training should cover lenge to find. In many places where five subject areas it appears that much of it could be calls and follow up on recent deliveries. We even answered the in-coming calls and had " phone ups " . Those calls were customer business. Why would we not answer them? ers and advisors can also be a chalemployee turn-over is out of control, due to poor hiring procedures, little Now the sales department has two to four sales man- or no basic orientation, and/or insufficient on-going agers on the floor. There is a BDC department on the training. The following are some thoughts to consider phones and runners to do swaps. There is an on-line for improvement. and instructor led training for salespeople because they sell cars and have down time to do it. It seems as though the Service Advisor Training has not made comparable advances. Consider that an advisor sees 10-17 customers daily and how their relationship possibly influences future car sales. There is often only one service manager trying to get it all done. Many of the advisors are going 90mph all day with little down time. Some days it is like an emergency room or com- NOVEMBER DECEMBER 2020 || FIXED OPS MAGAZINE SERVICE ADVISOR TRAINING SHOULD COVER FIVE SUBJECT AREAS: 1. product knowledge 2. in-house d.m.s. systems and other automated systems for multi-point inspections and factory web sites 3. paper flow procedures 35