What is the relationship between parts and service in your dealership? Are you ready for a throwdown every day or do you work together to create solutions??
I have worked in numerous dealerships. In most of them, the relationships between departments have been tenuous at best. There is always a feeling that the relationship is hanging by a rubber band that is stretched to its maximum length before it is going to break. One more added strain and snap!
Normally, I can understand some of the tension between sales and fixed operations. They naturally have different goals. Sales managers are trying to save money and fixed ops managers are trying to make it. And, admittedly, I have, in the past, added to that tension in many arenas of debate and conflict. I am an Aries after all and we love a good throwdown.
But why do things get so tense between departments that should be working together? Much of it, you will find, as I did, is in your own head.
When I came from my original little garage to the great world of “dealerships” I was suddenly out of control of many of the things I used to have sole control over. In my old garage, I used to source, price, and acquire all of my parts. So, I knew they were ordered and when they were going to show up. I could confidently say when things would be done.
It was at my first dealership I began to butt heads with the parts people. The relationships there were not flourishing when I got there and I was thrown in with little to no training. So, I had to ask a lot of questions to people that had little to no patience as it was. I did not react well to the short answers, the terse comments, and the lack of assistance. After all, I was learning, so they should have patience, shouldn't they?
I was so frustrated and It made no sense to me that we were all being paid by the sales and did not get paid until the sale was completed and paid for by the customer. To me, this meant that we needed each other like Siamese twins, we had to be joined at the hip, brothers, and sisters in arms, best buds, etc. I was shocked that this was not the case.
It seemed they enjoyed watching people struggle, which made it very difficult to get things done on behalf of the customer. Which in turn created several conflicts at the counter.
Because I sold the most parts out of all the advisors, I thought that would mean the parts people would want to help me efficiently. But I was in for a rude awakening there. Frustrated I started to memorize approximate pricing so I could quote the jobs myself on the fly. So, I could turn over the estimates for repair faster. I had little to no patience and definitely no empathy for the parts department and what they were going through daily. It felt like they were only trying to make my job harder, not easier as I assumed they would. After a few months, and at that time in my career, I did not care anymore either.
All I knew was, that my parts were wrong, not ordered, or delayed past what I was originally told. And when I am the face that the customer associated with the error, their disappointment with us was terrible for me.
I am the type of person that must make sure that things go as I say they are going to go. I started telling customers it would take longer to get parts than I was originally told. If the parts person said 2 days, I told the customer 2-7 days.
This lessened the overall stress of what I was facing at the service counter. This way if the parts did show up on time the job would be done sooner and the customer was happier. If the parts were late, wrong, or missing I had a couple of days extra to meet my deadlines. This worked great for me, but it did not address the actual issue.
But here is the key:
This tension was with me my entire career. I brought it to each dealer as well. My expectations were already defined when I got there. Because of my previous terrible experience at that dealership, I felt I understood the game. I already expected that the parts team and the service team will never get along, always blame each other for problems, and never work to find a solution.
That is until I had to work in the parts department myself when I was a Fixed-Ops manager. The perspective and perception it seems are a cure for many things you THINK you know.
Since doing that, I have come to understand how vital a good relationship is with your parts team. And if that relationship is solid and working together toward one goal, solutions are easier to find.
I have also come to understand the frustrations they deal with daily. Empathy clarifies a lot of things when you actually put yourself in other people’s shoes.
The parts and the service departments are intrinsic. These departments cannot survive without each other. Let’s look at why.
Parts sales come from a few different streams.
Wholesale, aftermarket shops that cannot find specific parts from local jobber stores, places like body shops, mom and pop stores, other automotive chains, etc.
Sales accessories that are going on newly purchased vehicles.
Over-the-counter sales to people that are buying accessories, DIY repairs, etc.
Over-the-counter sales to service.
Out of the list above, nothing is more lucrative for them than the service section. The sale of accessories and wholesale parts is automatically discounted which of course, lowers the gross profit. The majority of the parts sales going over the counter to the technician are not discounted very much. As well, the sheer volume of parts going over the counter is incredible.
Now let’s look at service. From an efficiency standpoint, there is no way that service could move an abundant amount of labor inventory in and out of the shop, without having that dedicated parts team working for them consistently and effectively.
If service advisors had to look up and source their parts for every estimate, AS WELL as take care of the customer’s demands, there would be a major cataclysmic event, not just daily, but hourly.
Case in point. When I took over a shop that had the advisors taking care of the parts as well as the customers, a few things were happening that did not lend to excellent customer service. This was not the fault of the people doing the jobs. They just didn’t have time to see a better way.
The things that I observed at first that needed immediate attention were the following:
First, the phone never got answered. How could they when they were looking up and sourcing parts for 15 jobs each? And, they were using ancient, inefficient technology to do it. There were sticky notes and missed call messages all over that I am sure did not get returned for several hours if ever. Again, not their fault, there is no way they could have done everything that was being thrown at them.
Second, the technicians stood around waiting for estimates to get approved creating a major lack of productivity.
Third, there was a huge backlog of jobs that were waiting for repair, these jobs were not all waiting because there was not enough shop time to do them, but some jobs still had no completed estimate and or, no parts ordered as of yet. If they were warranty repairs, in some cases the parts were sitting in the parts department waiting to go into the vehicle.
Fourth, because of all the parts waiting to go into vehicles, the parts inventory was massive for such a small store and the department had no space to even move around in. Because no one had time to care, the aged stock list was also incredibly large. Returns were not processed correctly and sat for a long time before getting sent back. In some cases, they were too old to send back by the time they needed to be sent and were now needing to be written down.
Fifth, customer service at the counter was met with understandably, short-tempered, at the end of their rope, advisors that were so stressed out they were already looking for new jobs when I got there.
The two guys that were working that counter in that fashion were paratroopers in my opinion. Dedicated people who were working under stressful conditions and were overtasked. They deserved gold metals for sure.
But was it a recipe for disaster? Yes!
It was here that I truly learned to appreciate the parts department and how I needed to work on improving my relationship with it. I needed to look for solutions with them and not square off with my gloves on ready to fight.
So I had to hang up my gloves! And these two showed me how.
To create an immediate solution, as there we no actual parts department, I asked them both where they preferred to work. One said the service counter because he hated looking up parts. The other said he preferred parts over taking care of people on the counter. Perfect! I made one of those advisors the parts manager. I then hired an additional parts helper.
What I watched was amazing. Because they had both done each other’s job, they were very patient with each other. It was so great to watch how they worked through issues. Not that everything was rosy, but when they ran into problems, they fixed them quickly with little to no help from me. I did not need to mediate or referee at all.
They also had each other’s backs when needed. One would help a customer if the other was busy. One would look up a part if the parts department were backed up.
Watching this all unfold gave me the courage to try and learn parts myself.
Never in my life would I have considered doing that. But these two inspired me. I started by receiving the morning order. Then sat on the counter and answered incoming calls in parts. The entire experience taught me patience and respect for the parts teams that I was to deal with in the future.
The keys to keeping relationships positive between the parts department and the service world are:
Respect
The people in parts and those in service must respect each other and the job they are doing for each other, with the end focus being on the customer.
I firmly believe this is best achieved by having each person spend some time in the other person’s role so they can better understand all the nuances, pressures, and expectations of each role. It is very difficult to do, but if we, as managers make the time for this it goes a long way in improving the level of respect one has for the other person’s responsibilities.
As I described above, I would never have been able to write this without having an appreciation that I did not have before working in the parts department as a parts person for a couple of months.
Not that a couple of months is doable, it could be a couple of weeks, days, or hours.
Patience
This is so important. But also not one of my strong suits, so I work on this daily to this day. Yes, there is a lot of temple rubbing involved. But we need to forge forward through conflict to solutions.
If you are an advisor, you must appreciate that at any given moment, the person working in parts that answers your call is usually dealing with 15 other things at least, just as you are dealing with several things at once. Each of those 15 things is tied to trying to satisfy a need of some customer in the end. So when you call, ask if they have a moment. If you are not in a hurry, send an email or text with what you need so they can deal with it when they can. The Subject of the email should be, “When you have a moment” or something to try and ease the stress of throwing another thing on their plate to do.
If you are the parts person, you must also understand that, just as you are dealing with multiple things, so are the advisors. And because advisors are customer-facing at all times, and those customers we deal with sometimes put an enormous amount of pressure on us as well, we are sometimes overly rushed and stressed out looking for immediate solutions also.
Those solutions must be accurate and timely because the customer can impact the advisor by way of the survey in a very negative way if the solutions are not to their liking. Imagine if your paycheck was directly linked to the click of a smiley face or a frowny face. Even after going to the ends of the earth and back for some.
Considerate Communication
Communication goes a long way in avoiding issues in the first place. It must start by being considerate. I used to race into the department, blurting out requests, before asking if someone was free. You know because everyone there in parts was just waiting for ME to get there so they finally had something to do.
I have to mentally and purposely slow down and put a cork in it so to speak. People need time to finish what they are doing before they help you. The hardest thing for me is not interrupting, especially if someone is having idle, non-work-related conversations.
Communication also needs to be clear. Sometimes, because we are all under pressure, we rush through things assuming the other person will just “understand” what we “mean”. Also guilty of this!
Especially when you are working with people for a long time. We get lazy with how we explain things which lead to wrongly ordered parts. Sometimes techs don’t give parts the best descriptions when asking for parts quotes as well. So that is an entire extra preverbal wrench being thrown into the mix of things that can go wrong.
Being Proactive
Managers need to keep a thumb on the pulse of their departments. If an issue is occurring over and over again that keeps affecting customer service, we need to fix a process or train the people performing those processes more effectively.
Staying ahead of issues helps us all succeed. Sometimes the processes we have in place in either department adversely affect the other. These must be altered for the greater good of the whole.
From both sides, we must try and understand what the others are dealing with and be patient with each other. Handling emergencies must be done calmly. We all must accept that they are going to happen before they happen. Period. Everyone is human and will make mistakes. Accepting and owning them is part of showing your coworkers that you are mature enough to admit when you have made errors and apologize accordingly.
If your departments are struggling to make it work and deliver outstanding customer service I would love to help.
Message me: adviseme@goldstandardservicetraining.com
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