This is one of the biggest challenges any dealership operation seems to have. How often have we heard a sales department say to a customer: “Those darn service people, they never deliver on time and they can’t fix anything”. How often have we heard the service department say to a customer: “Those darn salespeople they always over commit and blame all their problems on us”.
What impression does this leave on the customer? In most cases the customer moves on to another shop where they work as a team to solve their problems.
This always seems to be a tough problem to fix but it’s not that hard given the right culture and a few guiding principles, and here are a few:
1. Can the department managers articulate the vision and culture the business is trying to build?
2. Do the department mangers really understand that they need a shared success and are mutually important to that success?
3. Does the Service Manager really understand the challenges and responsibility the Sales Manager has?
4. Does the Sales Manager really understand the challenges and responsibility the Service Manager has?
5. Does your Service, Sales and Parts Managers meet each morning to discuss each other’s priorities for the day and make commitments to each other?
Having a leadership team that is committed to building a culture of mutual success will go a long way to solving this problem and winning customer every day! This takes work but with the right plan, approach, communications and shared rewards the Sales and Service Teams can become highly valued assets rather than a liability.
For more information on KPIs and how they can be used to optimize your business, get in touch with the author of this article, John Higgins. John is CEO at The SCP Group and can be reached at jhiggins@scpg.ca