Annual forecasts in the service drive are mostly guessing games. As Joe Sassin, from BCJS Enterprises, says, there is nothing “fixed” about Fixed Ops.
But when car sales slow down, your service lane is the only safety net you have. The difference between a dealership with 75% fixed absorption and 100% fixed absorption is huge.
One is surviving and the other is generating serious profit.
If you want to increase absorption and profit to make your Fixed Ops into the most profitable department of your dealership, you need to change your strategies. Here is the playbook.
Your showroom sales team sees 2 or 3 leads a day and gets daily training. Your service advisors see 15 to 25 customers a day and probably get almost zero training.
You haven’t teach them how to sell, so they sell from their own pocket. If they are afraid to tell a customer they need $3,000 worth of work because they wouldn’t want to spend $3,000, there’s something that need to change.
Remember that the service drive is also a sales floor, so treat it like it.
Invest in training and give your advisors the tools to sell without selling. Automated text follow-ups, digital estimates and video inspections remove the fear of rejection. They just present the facts, and the customer decides.
Advisors chase Hours per RO, but that’s a vanity metric. You need gross profit. The biggest objection from techs on digital MPIs with video is:
“I don’t have time to take pictures.”
Ask them this:
“When was the last time you bought something online that didn’t have a picture?”
Never. Your customers are the same. They won’t buy a $1,200 control arm repair based on a phone call description.
Make video non-negotiable.
When a customer sees the leak on their phone, they buy. Average RO value on video-backed MPIs jump 162%. You get the high-gross approval instantly.
Telling every technicians “I need 50 hours this week” is a waste of your time.
A Corvette specialist claims 30 hours of high-skill work, while a quick-lube technician claims 40. However, if you set the same target for both, you’ll end up breaking them both.
It the “Hot Dog vs. Steak” model. One focused on low-cost, high-volume sales (the hot dog model) and the other focused on high-value, premium services (the steak model)
Look at the 90-day average for each individual tech.
If they average 35 hours, the goal is 37.
Most dealers treat parts managers like librarians, but they’re actually the gatekeepers to a valuable asset, your cash worth over $500,000.
When you run a marketing campaign for a recall without checking inventory, you aren’t just wasting money and time you are freezing cash flow and angering customers.
Be a sniper, not a shotgun. Match your outreach to your shelf inventory.
With a tool like Kimoby, you can filter by VIN for a campaign. If you have 12 airbags in stock, invite exactly 12 customers. You turn the part (cash) instantly and fill the bay.
If the customer calls you for an update, you have already failed.
Your advisors should touch every open RO every single day. Even if the update is “I have no update,” you send it. Silence breeds anxiety, and anxiety kills CSI.
Stop making manual phone calls.
Send a message to your “waiting on parts” customers: “Checking on your part, still in transit. Will update you tomorrow.”
It takes 10 seconds, stops the phone from ringing, and keeps the customer calm.
The last thing a customer wants to do is wait 15 minutes in a cashier line to pay you $800. It kills the experience.
Move the payment upstream.
ext the invoice while they are still at work. With Kimoby they can pay via Apple Pay/Google Pay, credit card or even finance it directly from their phone.
When they arrive, they grab their keys and leave. It’s efficient, it’s secure, and it prevents the “sticker shock” scene at the counter.
You don’t need a complex new strategy to make your fixed operations a profitable department of your car dealership. You need to train your team and remove the friction.
Train advisors to sell.
Manage parts like cash.
Automate the communication.
The tools are there. You just have to use them.
Want to see how Kimoby automate this?