Another priority is employee retention, which he said helps build and improve customer relationships.
“I know customers love our service advisors because they always bring home-cooked food,” Housley said.
To keep the six service advisors at Subaru of Winchester engaged, two of them work four 10-hour days a week and two more work conventional eight-hour shifts five days a week. Two express lane advisors work four 10-hour days a week.
“That creates a good work environment because they get to spend more time with their family and see that we’re invested in them, that it’s not just a one-way street,” Housley said.
Another priority for advisers is to constantly strengthen the services offered by the dealership, such as lending vehicles or picking up cars at a customer’s home for service.
“They need to be reminded that we’re a dealership that goes above and beyond, that we’re the ones that care and that’s where they want to be,” Housley said. “We also need to keep talking to customers and ask what’s most important to them.”
Ralph Dykes, service manager for Honda, Hyundai and Volkswagen stores in Capitol Heights, Md., which is part of the 21-store Pohanka Automotive Group, said he is very concerned about the scenario Harkins predicts.
“This is just the beginning of a tidal wave because the new cars that we’re not selling won’t come in for warranty or non-warranty work,” Dykes said. “Two of the biggest parts of our revenue pie, the warranty work and the in-house work on used cars, are almost gone, so we have to do our best with that piece of the pie that’s left: the payment work of the customer
“We need to rethink how we deliver service; make sure we go above and beyond customer expectations,” he added.
Dykes said one way to do that is through a car repair financing program that the three shops started in January. Conversations with numerous customers had revealed that many were declining repairs not because they didn’t want to do business with the stores, but because they simply couldn’t afford the work, he said.
“A LendingTree survey showed that 28 percent of Americans can’t pay for a $500 car repair without going into debt,” Dykes said. “So we partnered with a financing company called Sunbit.”
Customers can split car repair bills into three interest-free payments over 90 days or select longer payment terms. Now, they can afford to pay for the repairs with less financial strain, Dykes said.
In the first 16 days of the program’s implementation, the Hyundai store saw 46 loan requests that resulted in 33 repairs that added $28,939 in revenue, for an average ticket of about $877. The average term of the loans was eight months, Dykes said.
“At this rate, you’re getting into the range of over half a million dollars a year in additional revenue that we might otherwise have lost,” he said.
