As a dealership increases service revenue and the number of technicians, they will reach a point where investing in a call center makes financial sense. The question that everyone struggles with is when. Why Have a Call Center? Your first thought may be “Why would a dealership Read More

Too many times companies fail to consider the impact of customer service decisions. It seems that many believe that doing what is expedient, rather than taking care of their customers, is the best choice. We have had numerous examples of that in the airline industry lately. Have Read More

Early on in my career as a district service manager visiting dealers, I made a scheduled visit to see a service manager. When I walked in to the dealership, the service manager told me that he did not have time to meet—he had to go run service calls. I have seen this misuse of Read More

In our last two articles, we discussed the value of a technician and steps you can take to improve the success of your new hires. For this discussion, we are going to assume that you have a new hire coming into your department today. What are you going to have this new hire do? Read More

In the last article, we discussed the cost of replacing technicians. Part of the cost we included was the cost of “bad hires.” The term bad hire would apply to any technicians that leave the company for any reason before they have generated enough profit to pay for the cost of Read More

At one time or another, every service manager has to deal with a technician wanting more money. The service manager is faced with a difficult situation when senior management resists. When I was a service manager in California, the dealer I worked for would let a technician leave Read More

An old curse says, “May you live in interesting times.” The idea being that boring times were times of security and peace and interesting times more associated with trouble and danger. In our industry, I am concerned that interesting times lie in our near future. Portents of the Read More

Every service manager I know is tasked with more work than they can ever complete. One of the challenges they face is dealing with constant flow of information from their vendors. I know when I was a service manager that I had a box on a table in my office where I put the printed Read More

One of the biggest challenges that service managers face is that of territory management. This task is challenging because there is no standard pattern that will fit every dealer. The service manager has to balance a variety of factors to achieve optimum results. Territory Read More

One of the most important factors in the success of a copier dealership is the commitment to training. In my time working with dealers, one common factor in each of the most successful dealers is their investment in training. The successful dealers make sure that each technician Read More

One issue in this industry is the lack of recognition of the accomplishments in the service department. When I worked for one manufacturer, they would occasionally invite the service group in for a joint meeting with the sales group. There would always be an awards dinner. During Read More

In many dealerships, the technicians are hourly employees without any formal bonus incentive structure offered. I have heard the view expressed that “We pay technicians by the hour to do their job, so why should they get a bonus?” While I can understand that argument, I am Read More

In the last article, we discussed parts as related to the technician and service calls. In this article, we will focus on areas where we can reduce parts expense without impacting FCE. We will consider three separate areas where opportunities exist to improve profitability. Read More

The MCBC (Mean Copies between Calls) is affected by parts in a couple of ways. The most damaging is the concept of parts cost per call.  If technicians believe that they are being evaluated on their parts usage, they will start scrimping on parts. The second is parts availability Read More

In our previous articles, we discussed the reasons why Mean Copies between Calls (MCBC) is the most important metric, and we looked at some of the issues that impact that value. In this article, we want to start trying to find ways to address the issues in the service department. Read More