Fast Lane: How to Accelerate Service Loyalty and Unlock Its Profit-Making Potential

By Jim Roche

Fast Lane: How to Accelerate Service Loyalty and Unlock Its Profit-Making Potential shares facts, figures and insights about customer satisfaction and retention that will help you shape your future automotive service operations. Upgrading the customer experience and improving loyalty are key objectives for retail automotive executives and managers, and Fast Lane uses real-world examples to provide direction for addressing the challenges of today and tomorrow.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543935820

Book preview

© 2018 by Cox Automotive, Inc.

Published by

Cox Automotive, Inc., 3205 Peachtree Dunwoody Rd., Atlanta, GA, 30328.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial

International License 4.0.

bit.ly/CC-BYNC4

ISBN: 978-1-5439358-2-0

Dedication

For Kayleigh, who leaches me somelhing new every day, and for Cheryl, who reminds me to always be curious.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my parents, siblings and my entire clan—we are family. My friends (far and near), many that have known me since grade school, I continue to appreciate the times.

I’d like to acknowledge and thank the team who also contributed directly to this book. It could not have happened without Lance Helgeson prying the thoughts out of me and then building on them by adding his automotive experience and insights. Thanks to Stacy Hannay for getting the ball rolling, and Kevin Filan for encouraging the book and the nudging and contributions along the way. Gregg Manson, Chris Ice, Joe George, Stephanie Dang, Karuna Koy…thank you.

I’ve been extremely fortunate to have worked with some of the most talented people in automotive:

My thanks to Sandy Schwartz, a great leader who always reminds us to stay focused on the customer; Mark O’Neill for making the investments to continually improve; Dale Pollak for his vision and showing the way and to Keith Jezek, for keeping us chopping wood. Paul Whitworth—thank you for 17 years across multiple companies. And thank you to Lori Wittman, John Kovac and everyone at Cox Automotive, as well as Corey Roberts, John Grace, David Foutz, Matt Bateman and Jill Tyson for LOTS of support. Xtime Marketing and all of Team Xtime, Neal East, Warren Webermin…thank you.

Cox Automotive is a multi-generation, family-owned company (sounds a lot like a dealership, doesn’t it?) and has thrived for 120 years because it has the right values.

Thank you to Les Silver and the Silver family; Dave Wood; Marco Thompson; Boomer; Mike Romano; Scott Weitzman; Russ Bartlett; the team at FARM (Face, Bryan, Matt, Steve and Rich); Mark Daly (RIP); John & Dick Corsini; the Auto Point and SRS teams (that’s the original Auto Point!), especially George Westwater; John McBride; Robin Melvin; John Davis, Sue Asher, Mike Smith; Adam Mateljan; Todd Harding; Randy Kobat; Jen Ness; Joe Hilger; Bob Pringle; Dave Boyle and Howard Blumstein.

The dealers who generously shared their time and ideas for this book (directly and indirectly): Chuck Gile, Trevor Gile and the Motorcars team; Shaun Del Grande, Jeremy Beaver and Tully Williams from Team DGDG; Ed Witt and the Witt family at Witt Lincoln; Kris Truman, TJ Samhouri, JP Paynter and the team at Hoehn Auto Group; Patton Fritze at Red River Chevrolet and Bill Mercado at Potamkin. Thank you to all the incredibly smart retailers I’ve known, notably KV Dahl, Vinje Dahl, Randy Oler, Danny Wich and the group at Dahl Ford, Fred Beans, Julian Dragos and the Fred Beans team, Tom Vann, Kip Killmon, Paul Ruben, Jim Shelton and the Fusz team (going way back!), Gus Briones, Joe Beuckman, Larry Perez and the team at Beuckman Ford, Brett Pate, Scott Berdelman, Art Boenninghausen, Todd Ruprecht, Ramzy Handal, Terry Trickett and many, many others.

Thank you to Dave Bradley, Lynn McNeill and the great folks at PBS, Allan Bird, Brian Ramphal, the Simkin Family, Chris Blumhagen, Cliff Banks, Stu Levin, Hugh Adams, John Bottone, Wayne Hawkins, Cliff Cope, Steve Cottrell, Ed Shapero, David Brondstetter, Richard Counihan, Sal Cusomato, Scot Eisenfelder, Dan Fuhrman, Andrea Sorrenti, Marvin Grimm, Jason Patz, Sandi Jerome, Russ Kalchik, Paul Kreutz, Stan Megerdichian, T.O., Chuck Parker, Mike Roscoe, John Holt, David Potts, Chick Ramsay, Dan Seat, Kim Campassi, Wade Carson, Steve Shaw, Ward!

If I’ve left anyone off the list my apologies. It’s not because I don’t appreciate you!

Table of Contents

Preface: Does Anyone Read Books About Automotive Service?

Prologue: How Customer Experience Drives Reinvention

Chapter 1: Fixed Operations as Savior

Chapter 2: Why the Experience Matters

Chapter 3: Rethinking Service Loyalty and Satisfaction

Chapter 4: Five Essential Elements to Build a Better Service Experience

Chapter 5: How Dealers Provide a Technology-Enhanced Service Experience

Chapter 6: Rethinking Retention to Drive Long-Term Profitability

Chapter 7: From Silos to a Two-Way Street

Chapter 8: Publish Your Service Pricing, Or Else…

Chapter 9: Out of Alignment: Your People and Your Purpose

Chapter 10: Rethinking the Scope and Purpose of Service Marketing

Chapter 11: Avoiding the Common Service Technology Traps

Chapter 12: Untapped Potential: Turning Appointments into Your Advantage

Chapter 13: Applying Measurement and Metrics to Your Service Experience

Chapter 14: Turning Recall Pain into Profit

Chapter 15: To Recon or Not to Recon?

Chapter 16: Minding Your Moments of Truth

Chapter 17: The Road Ahead

Preface: Does Anyone Read Books About Automotive Service?

My journey into the automotive world began when I started working with dealers in 1984. I had just finished school, had a computer technology certificate in hand, and as luck would have it, was contacted by a company that installed micro-computers to run dealership service departments, specifically to manage shop dispatching and loading. This was in the days before the internet and a couple of years before the first personal computer.

With St. Louis, Missouri, as my base, I would fly out every week to a different dealer and spend the week observing the service lane, shop loading processes and dispatching operations. Then we’d install the system, train everybody and transfer all the shop information over to new system. By the end of the week, we’d have the entire service department running on computers. After a couple years I moved up to providing consulting and process improvement for dealers using the same system so I’d visit several dealers per week. I did this for a decade and then worked with companies that were revolutionizing service department marketing, after which I began my foray into the automotive technology startup sector. I joined Xtime in 2014 and we’re now a part of Cox Automotive.

While I’ve always enjoyed technology, first and foremost I’m an automotive guy. I’m an entrepreneur and I’ve had the good fortune of founding several companies in the automotive tech space, I’ve always stayed close to the automotive industry and its people. With that came the opportunity to be in the trenches, to really understand what the needs of dealers were and try and solve real problems for real people and businesses. I’ve developed websites, CRMs and dealer service marketing tools that melded traditional and online advertising. I’ve nurtured professional relationships with dealers and dealer managers to try and understand what they were trying to solve for their customers.

While I’ve never drawn a paycheck from a dealer, I’ve worked with well over 2,000 of them, having been able to observe the best operations around the country, take part in implementing many new processes and technologies that produced great results (and a few that didn’t) and count many dealers and dealer personnel as friends.

Which brings me back to the point of this book. There aren’t a lot of books about automotive service, so one would assume that no one writes them because no one reads them. If viewed through that lens, then I suppose this book may be a waste of time. But I believe otherwise. It wasn’t so long ago that our industry underwent a crisis that’s still fresh in our memories, and I believe we are facing significant challenges in the coming years. These challenges will require a substantial re-thinking of decades-old assumptions about how to transform what truly is the backbone of dealer operations: the service department.

In Fast Lane, I ask you to re-think every aspect of the business, from your philosophy of retention to service lane management to how you price to who you hire and what you have them do, to ultimately recognizing that consumers want and expect a superior, technology-enhanced experience from you because they get those types of experiences from every other company that they interact with every day. You’ll have to take a hard