In an age when digital technology dominates so many of our interactions, service advisors play a critical, humanizing role in the service department. They are the liaison, bridging the gap between customer, technician, manager, shop foreman, parts personnel, and more.
At different points in the vehicle maintenance process, they serve as the voice of the customer and of the dealership, and it’s their responsibility to build a rapport that will keep customers coming back.
In other words, the role of the service advisor is not one that can be easily automated. It requires dynamic communication and listening skills, the ability to adapt and change course quickly, and a proactive, self-starting attitude.
These are all traits that humans have in abundance. Machines? Not so much.
Now, let’s stop to consider a typical service advisor’s daily workflow. While a lot of what they do relies on the traits mentioned previously – dynamic, customer-facing work that a machine can’t easily replicate – it’s also true they’re saddled with many administrative, low-impact tasks.
These are the “housekeeping” tasks of the vehicle maintenance process – things like record-keeping, checking in, and so on. They are things that have to be done, but which don’t directly create profit.
In fact, depending on how streamlined the workflows in your service department are (and whether your DMS is a single system keeping the whole dealership in sync), these tasks might actually be a net negative for your bottom line if they’re creating redundant, time-consuming work.
Inefficiency is the enemy of profit in a dealership, especially in the service department, where speed equals increased revenue opportunities.
Self-service kiosks are both revenue drivers and profit creators – that’s no longer up for debate. The quickly exploding industry is expected to grow by nearly $3 billion over the next few years.1
The question, of course, is how? There are several different ways, but we’ll focus on three: increased efficiency that reduces costs, a forced process to increase revenue opportunities, and altered customer behavior that encourages additional spending.
The first of these ties into an area we’ve already explored: the inefficiency inherent to the service advisor role. Imagine decreasing the check-in time at your dealership from 15 minutes to 2 minutes, without your service advisors lifting a finger. Kiosks achieve exactly that with a self-guided customer check-in process, either with a mobile device or at the kiosk itself.
Or, imagine an automated system handling recall notifications, service recommendations, or trade-in requests. You’ll speed up and smooth out customer interactions while still providing your advisors with all the info they need to do their jobs.
By automating various administrative tasks in a convenient, transparent, and expedient interface, kiosks can simultaneously ease your advisors’ labor burden and improve the overall customer experience.
We’ve established that self-service kiosks reduce costs by eliminating inefficiency, but what may not be as obvious is how this technology drives revenue.
We mentioned previously how excessive, time-consuming, low-impact tasks de-incentivize your service advisors to upsell service or talk to customers about declined service.
As it turns out, kiosks can handle these tasks as well, standardizing the upsell and recommending appropriate additional service to every customer. This eliminates missed revenue opportunities and brings your advisor’s role more in line with that of a consultant, someone customers can go to with additional questions or for insight into what they may or may not really need. The all-important human touch, in other words.
At McDonald’s, a company that’s been experimenting with kiosks for nearly 20 years, one early-adopting store found that its average check size was a dollar higher after implementing kiosks – a 30 percent increase at the time.2
They also found that 20 percent of customers who didn’t initially order a drink would buy one when it was offered3 – the standardized upsell in action.
More to the point, dealerships who have implemented our kiosk solution see customers select an upsell opportunity 20 percent of the time.
The same applies with trade-in appraisals, as kiosks can offer appraisal requests at every check-in. This leads to more trade-ins overall for the dealership, maximizing used car profitability through service-to-sales opportunities.
Finally, a critical factor in understanding the value of self-service kiosks is how they actually alter customer behavior. There are two instructive examples of this concept:
Now that we’ve established the pressures your service advisors face on a daily basis as well as the value of self-service kiosks, ask yourself:
How can your service department benefit from this technology?
This solution isn’t replacing service advisors for the robot revolution – it’s freeing your advisors to be the best version of themselves. It’s freeing them to focus on high-impact, customer-facing, profit-oriented work. The kind of creative, dynamic work that makes their jobs more rewarding and more valuable to the business.
And, it’s cutting costs, driving revenue, and creating brand-new profit. That’s what makes the combination of service advisors and self-service kiosks the ultimate duo – and that’s what GoMoto delivers.
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