Solutions in Your Service Department in the New Year
Businesses have been dealing with a lot during the last few months of 2021, and its important to get the new year off to a good start.
With staffing shortages, and supply chain issues, this may seem difficult, but there are some things you can do to ensure the revenue keeps flowing in 2022.
Find the big issues.
The first thing you need to do is identify some of the key issues you are facing right now. This can be anything from staffing issues to slow service departments.
Ask your staff about the problems they are facing, and what can be improved.
Open the lines of communication between your staff and management. Sometimes this gap is larger than owners even known. Its not to say you are doing anything wrong, but simply to say communication is key to running a smooth operation and keep the money coming in.
One of the other big issues to identify is burnout. More than half of the workforce in the U.S. say they have experienced burnout over the past 12 months. This can be due to staffing issues, but it can also be from low inventory, and staff having to work harder to make up for the lost revenue.
Make a plan.
Once you have identified the issues you need to fix, now is the time to make a plan.
First, set expectations about communication with employees and customers. Make sure your staff feels they can voice their concerns, and that you are clear with customers about what they can expect from your staff so there is no confusion.
Next, try to develop solutions and make a standard for workloads. You don’t want your employees to burnout, so make sure you create a set of standards you expect of them, and what they can expect from you if they need help.
Last, and probably the biggest point, make sure to automate certain tasks where possible.
Solutions.
Now that you have a plan in place, figure out some systems you can put in place to keep things flowing.
Make sure you are automating certain aspects of your business to help cut down on employee hours, and keep things moving in your service department.
Something as simple as a texting platform can help save you time and money. Kenect is biased when it comes to this because we have seen it work for thousands of dealers throughout North America.
With this platform, you can automate texts, cutting down on the time staff needs to be on the phone, and creating a streamline system to help bring in business. If you send texts to everyone who may have bought from you in the last three years, then you can ensure business keeps flowing. Just send them a service reminder, and they can text back without having to play phone tag.
Also, text-to-pay is gaining popularity, and is becoming a go-to solution for many dealerships. In our data, we are seeing some dealerships using text to pay for 80% of their service and sales transactions.
Through a texting platform like Kenect, you can send people a message with an invoice, and they can respond with their credit card info, paying you in minutes, rather than days.
This also cuts down on the amount of time your staff needs to be on the phone, reminding customers about paying. You can just send automated reminders that take seconds to set up.
Not every solution will be best for every dealership, so its important to look at your workflow and figure out what will work as you head into 2022.
We do know that staffing and supply shortages are not going away, at least for the first quarter of the new year, so make sure you are staying transparent with customers and workers about what’s going on, and what you are planning to do to keep staff happy and revenue flowing.