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The Teamwork Meter in SmartFlow

Good Teamwork is the main ingredient for high profitability and low attrition in your shop. Technicians, who can rely on service advisors to sell work for them based on inspections results are happy campers. Service advisors, who receive thorough inspections from Technicians with recommended actions  backed up by images of the problem areas,  will happily make the sale.

Vice versa, if a tech (who is unpaid for inspections like the majority of technicians today)  sees that only a fraction of their recommended actions are sold by the service advisor as jobs,  their motivation to uncover and recommend real vehicle problems goes out the window and  pencil whipping or over-recommending  and all of the consequences that come with doing so become a daily routine. In return the service advisor stops putting any recommendations on the estimate afraid that they might blow up in their face right in front of the customer, and eventually the only jobs that will be approved are the ones the customer came in for.  

Shop Owners, who continue looking for ways to turn their teams into well oiled machines with high performance techs and service advisors ask the question: “How can I measure and adjust teamwork for better performance?”

 

 

Since so much is dependent on mutual confidence and trust between technicians and service advisors, we developed the industry’s first  report assessing how well techs and service advisors work together. You can find the link to it on the Inspection Metrics Report page (see image above) called Shop Efficiency Reports Graph.

The first chart you will see is a bar graph including several groups of 4 bars showing pairings of tech and service advisor.  Each Tech/Service Advisor pairing has its own 4 bars grouped together. So if you have one service advisor and three techs you see 3 groups of bars, if you have 2 service advisors and 5 techs, you see 10. As notated in the graph the 4 bars represent the number of:

  • Technician recommended actions
  • Total jobs sold by service advisor
  • Recommended actions sold by the service advisor
  • Non-recommended actions sold by the service advisor

Lets check out what it all means:

 

*For privacy reasons the names of the techs and service advisors have been eliminated and for better readability the grid has been removed as well.

Lets focus on 4 of the 7 groups of bars. The bullet points below describe each numbered bar group on the image.

  1. This tech has produced app 20 recommended actions on the inspection results and the service advisor was able to sell 2/3 of those. What looks good at first sight, will make you wonder when you compare it with pairing 2. In the time period and with the same number of vehicles inspected the first tech/service advisor pairing reduced their teamwork to the necessary. In the inspection report you would see that only 2 recommended actions per vehicle have been made by this tech. Next Action: Work with the tech to find ways to increase the number to 4-8.
  2. This tech produced 56 recommended actions for vehicles he inspected. The service advisor sold 50% of those. That is a great ratio. Next Action: teach the tech to increase the quality of the recommended action and the service advisor to sell them.
  3. This tech created 0 recommended actions. Either pencil whipped or didn’t do the inspection at all. The service advisor subsequently sold only jobs he detected or were requested by the motorist anyway. Next Action: Check the technician’s inspection sheets and have a talk with them about why no inspections have been performed.
  4. What do you think the pairing in #4 produced? Give us your answer and join the discussion in the AutoVitals Partner Forum, sign up and join the collaboration amongst shop owners and service advisors.

 

How does SmartFlow know the pairing between Techs and Service Advisors?

Every Tech can use inspection sheets in SmartFlow, where the recommended actions are canned jobs. Once selected, SmartFlow knows which recommended canned job makes it to the estimate and invoice and since every vehicle is assigned to a service advisor, the mapping is pretty straightforward. Even if no canned jobs are used the graph is still very useful, the third bar would simply be obsolete (it would always be 0), but the ratio between recommended actions and sold jobs is still documented and an extremely valuable assessment of teamwork for the shop owner or manager. Note that in case the technician doing the inspection is not the tech performing the jobs the recommended actions sold are inaccurate in the graph.

 

Where can I find  the details from the graph on tech and service advisor performance?

Simply go back to the Inspection Metrics Report and hit the link “Export Details”. It will create a file, which you can upload to google sheets or open with Excel. Below is a typical result as screenshot.

 

 

 

You would simply sort the list (here’s how in: google sheets and excel) by service advisor(1) and/or by technician(2) and see

  • what recommendations have been made by the tech
  • whether they made it to the work order and whether they have been sold and performed.

It will allow you to immediately pinpoint the challenges each individual tech/service advisor faces alone or as a team and the overall quality of the teamwork in your shop.

Good teamwork can make or break a shop. Increasing trust and helping your technicians and service advisors to work better together will help your shop run more profitably, make your team members happier, and most importantly increase your customer’s satisfaction as the quality of recommendations rise. With good teamwork, everyone wins.

 

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