Transforming Your Front Counter from Nightmare to Dream

Equipping your front counter staff with key training and knowledge will ensure a smoothly operating shop.

I remember my first job as a service adviser in a dealership before shop management software systems existed. The training was quick but intensive: “Here’s your clipboard, there’s your work area. The doors open at 7 a.m.” It was “lightning-bolt training” at its finest.

The customers were lined up before we opened, and they poured into the service department in an overwhelming, steady stream until 9 a.m. It was two hours of the most stressful work I could imagine. We did take appointments, but we only used the appointment system (a big piece of paper taped to the wall) to fill up the day … and fill it up we did! We were sold out of time when we opened and that’s how it worked. Cars were routinely held over or rescheduled for more work. It was a zoo, but that was how it was done. Too often, that’s how it’s still done.

Before we can train our front counter staff, we have to have good systems in place for them to learn and use. Good systems and procedures should be designed to make it harder to mess up the job than to do it right.

For example, job codes in the computer system should be intuitive. All things having to do with brakes, for example, should start with a “B.” Well, duh! If you don’t know what the correct operation is for front brake pad replacement, hit “B” and search the drop-down menu to find “BPF” or “Brake Pads, Front.” If your system shows “Front Brake Pads” instead, then you may need to organize your system better.

Job kits should be the same way – easy to find in a few seconds. This is the fastest way to have a novice producing accurate, complete estimates in a short amount of time.

Your shop management software should make it easy for users to know the “hours available to sell” and “hours sold.”

A shop’s front office should be set up in such a way as to enable the shop to hire someone who knows nothing about cars and have them functioning comfortably as a service adviser within two weeks. It may sound far-fetched, but it’s not.

In fact, failure to do this results in training the front counter staff for months, just to get things to flow right. In reality, this makes the job difficult and stressful. There are too many things to remember and too many little things to forget. There’s no reason to be the kid who had training wheels on their bike for years.

In the book, “Good to Great,” by Jim Collins, it was said the most successful CEOs had “all the right people on the bus, all the wrong people off the bus and all the people in the right seats…”

To have all the right people in the right seats, we have to determine what skills are the most important for each job.

I disagree with the idea that you must put a technician at the front counter. I want a service adviser who loves working with people all day long, and I don’t care if they know much about cars or not. I want them to enjoy building relationships with customers and helping them solve their transportation problems. I want that customer to ask for them by name the next time they call.

It’s been my experience that the techs will do a better job of writing out what the car needs and why, if you have a good salesperson on the front counter who doesn’t have good technical skills. My techs have flat out told me that they go out of their way to give the service adviser a good sales presentation. They know that if they do, the work will get sold.

My customers have commented on “how knowledgeable our front counter staff is” about cars. The reality is, they’re reading the tech’s story right off the repair order. It’s very seldom that any customer has technical questions that need an in-depth technical explanation. When that happens, we get the tech to explain the job to the customer.

What this boils down to is simple: If the service adviser establishes credibility with the customer and sells the customer on the idea that he or she will be their ally and will work on their side, very little selling is actually necessary. The service adviser simply explains what all is found on the car, prioritizes it for the customer and asks what they’d like to do about it. It’s all about trust. The customer trusts the service adviser, who in turn trusts the technicians.

In the beginning, training the service adviser consists of learning how the shop’s systems and procedures work and that shouldn’t take long with the support of other workers.

The next part takes longer and involves more skills. I developed a service adviser class and the book covers 36 pages of basic skills, from handling the price-shopper phone call to people who want to bring their own parts and everything in between. There are many classes like this offered. The trick isn’t just to sit through it once.

Mastery of the material starts with that, but then continues with taking a page or two a week and working on mastering those things and then going on to more material until every last thing in the book has been mastered. This may take months and the speed varies with the employee. This is probably where most front counter training begins to break down, as I don’t believe most shops carry training out this far in this much detail.

OK, so now we have a completely trained front counter person, right? Uh, no.

One of the most important jobs of the front counter is to properly load the shop daily and I think that takes another separate class to really understand how to do it. So, now we put them through a class on “Workflow, Scheduling,” following the same training regimen. This should go much faster, because there are fewer things to master, and they’re generally easier to do. Now, we’re trained, right? Not yet.

If the front counter staff doesn’t really understand the value of a technician’s time, they can’t do a good job of supporting the techs and getting them the parts and approvals they need in timely fashion, so production and sales will suffer. Therefore, they next need to take training on “Technician Time Management.”

Where I’m going here is simpler than you might believe. To really function as a front counter staff should, they all need to have management training in many different areas. Their performance is directly related to how well they understand the overall workings of the shop. The better they understand the underlying management theories behind all those little things they are called upon to do, the better job they can do for the shop.

In short, they need to earn the Automotive Management Institute’s (AMI) specialized degree of “Automotive Manager, Service Adviser” for mechanical shops and “Collision Manager, Estimator” for collision shops.

The AMI board recognized years ago that for a shop to really function well, every job in the shop needed some management training. The board spent more than two years detailing which courses were needed by every position in both mechanical and collision shops and went further to determine the exact minimum content of each course.

The result is the new specialized degree program, which you can view in more detail on the AMI Web site: www.amionline.org.

I guarantee you that when your staff all earns their respective designations, your shop will be as close to “cruise control” as it can be.

Here are the courses for the Service Adviser:

• Effective Communication
• Customer Service Skills
• Safety/Government Regulations
• Ethics
• Critical Thinking
• Workflow/Scheduling
• Technician Time Management/Efficiency
• Information Resources / Electronic Service Information
• Conflict Management
• Negotiation as Part of Everyday Business
• Service Adviser Course
• Marketing/Advertising
• Sales
• Production/Job Costing
• Wage/Hour
• Elective

I think you’ll agree that’s the real training a super staff needs. Even better news is that AMI is working toward offering all those classes in home-study formats. All your problems, solved.

Editor's Note: This article is one of several management articles that will be contributed to AutoInc. this year by Automotive Management Institute (AMI) instructors. A full lineup of AMI instructors will be sharing their knowledge throughout the year on a variety of topics including training and equipping your staff, goal setting, cross promoting, increasing car count during slow times and much more. To learn more about AMI, its courses and instructors, visit www.AMIonline.org. George Witt, AAM, is owner of George Witt Service Inc. in Lincoln, Neb. He is an Automotive Management Institute (AMI) instructor and is serving his second term as chairman of AMI's board of trustees. He can be reached at donuts@georgewitt.com.