Hey! Hello everybody, Chris Cotton again here, AutoFix Auto Shop Coaching. I wanted to spend a little bit of time and talk about phone call recordings. Are you listening to them on a weekly basis? Are you listening to them at all? Do you know what your employees sound like on the phone? This is a great training opportunity that I don’t think we use very often. We spend thousands of dollars every month to make the phone ring, and a lot of us are screwing it up when we answer the phone. And it’s because there’s no follow-up, there’s no process. So, what are we listening for, or what do we do? This is not a super-long involved video or anything talking about that; I’m just going to take you really quick through a process. A client of mine is having issues on the phone and with the closing ratio. He sent me a recording real quick and said, “Hey, Chris what do I do with this?” And so I listened to it, and I’m going to share with you my feedback. So, this whole interchange took less than 15 minutes, email back and forth, me listening to it, and then sending him my first thoughts. Since then, I’ve had some more thoughts, but we’ll see and maybe talk about them here a little bit. So, the first thing we’re going to do is just listen to the audio. Thank you for choosing Shorre Auto Repair. My name is Jeremy, how can I help you?

– Hey Jeremy, it’s Kenny. I think may have missed a call from you guys.

– Kenny, hey, the Honda Fit?

– Yeah!

– So, have you got a few minutes here to go over the inspection report?

– Yeah, absolutely.

– Okay. So, after doing some diagnostic last night and this morning here, he’s found a few faulty items with the vehicle. Couple of different things. The valves are making some pretty bad noise on the top side of the engine, so he’s recommending doing a valve clearance adjustment; something you do periodically on the Hondas, especially when the valve train’s making noise. And that could also allow more or less air into the actual engine. One of the spark plugs… Well, actually two of the spark plugs are starting to foul out. They’re getting too much fuel on them. The spark plugs around the tip are actually just turning charcoal black, which is a sign of too much fuel on a couple of the cylinders. So, what he’s recommending, because it looks like the fuel injectors may be sticking open on #3 and #4 cylinder, which have actually fouled out the spark plugs, so he’s recommending fuel injectors and a spark plug replacement. So, those are kind of the three items: the fuel injectors, the spark plugs, and then a valve clearance adjustment. Plus, basically, we’ll be doing a full-out tune up on this thing and then a fuel injection service. But that’s kind of where I’ve got to start off with. There is some codes in here for the catalytic converter too, as far as the computer system. It said, “Catalyst system below threshold.” So, basically, it tells me there’s something, or the CAT’s picking up some misreadings from the exhaust. But we’d have to start with clearing up these rich codes because it’s just throwing more fuel into the engine than what it should have. So, there may or may not be any issues with the catalytic converter but I’ve got to cross these few bridges first before we cancel the catalytic converter out of the situation.

– Yeah.

– That’s kind of where we’re at but this is kind of, I guess, a common issue with these Honda Fits.

– Yeah. Well, yeah! So, just addressing the primary issue for now, what would we be looking at for that?

– Let’s see here. So, the spark plugs, the valve clearance adjustment, putting all four fuel injectors and then servicing the fuel system, you’d be at $2,882.98. So, $2,882.98, yeah.

– Wow, all right! All right! Well, I guess… I guess I didn’t want that damn car anyway, anymore. So, I don’t have $2,800 to throw at that car. So, all right.

– It’s a good little car here. These Fits usually can go 200,000+ miles without anything severe.

– Yeah, yeah. But then again, you know, with me working from home for the next year or so… They’re not opening up our buildings. So, I didn’t even know… S**t. Yeah, that’s damn near a transmission almost. Yeah, I wasn’t expecting that. So, all right! Well, I’m going to… We’re going to have to pass for now. So, I’ll talk to my wife and see what our plan is going to be, ultimately, though.

– Sounds good, Kenny. I’m going to get it wrapped up here and get everything put back together. If you have any questions, give me a call and I’ll give you a little message here when he gets everything wrapped up and it’s ready to go. Do you need a ride to come back and pick it up?

– No. No, I’m good. Well, yeah, we’ll figure this situation out.

– Sounds good, sir. Give me a little bit of time in here to put everything back together and then I’ll have a little list here for you when you come pick it up, but I will call you when he’s got it all ready for you.

– Okay, sounds good. Thank you so much.

– All right. Thank you, sir.

So, wow, okay! So, there’s a lot of stuff going on there. I think there’s a lot of opportunity.

Overall, it wasn’t terrible, but what could we have done better?

So, first of all, one of the things I want to say is, a lot of times, if you have a service adviser, just play it back for them and first thing you ask them is, “What do you think?” And a lot of times, they’re going to be like, “Oh man! I would’ve done this different.” And they can probably give you a list of 10 things that they could have done differently.

But what I’m going to share for you now is what’s here on the screen so that you can see what my initial reaction was.

So, first, I would have asked them… Listen to this and tell me what you would have done. So, first off, my question was, is this a first-time customer or not? What’s the background on the car? How much do we know? What do we know? There’s lot we should know. Do we know the style/type of customer that this is? Is it a person that…

Obviously, he doesn’t need it everyday for work because he’s working from home. So, is it their weekend car? Do they take kids to soccer practice? What is it? What do they do with this car? And what’s their plan for the car?

If we would have found out some of that information in the beginning, I think we would have been better off, okay? Do we know if the vehicle is paid for? Do they still owe money on it? What’s going on with that? In the beginning, I think we lost a huge opportunity. There was some confusion.

We should know that the Honda Fit belongs to Kenny because we’ve been waiting for him to call us about the Honda Fit, right?

At the very end, the service adviser tried to pick up some of this and be like, “Oh, but it’s a good car. Blah, blah, blah. It should go 200,000 miles.” We should have done that in the beginning. “Hey, we sent you a digital vehicle inspection. There’s a lot of stuff that’s good about this car but, unfortunately, we just have this fuel issue, this fuel supply issue.”

Build the value on the front side of it, not on the back side of it.

Maybe there’s a little bit too much information. I mean, it almost sounded like, “Ooh, here’s all of this!” And then this person’s trying to digest it, right?

Don’t ever say maybe, we’re the experts and we should know if what we’re recommending is going to fix it or not. There’s no maybe in it. “Yes, this will fix your vehicle.” No financing options were given. I don’t know if the situation, if the cashflow, he just said, “I don’t have that much money.” No fall-back offer was made. Are there less expensive injectors we could have used? Could we have offered to do the valve adjustments, spark plugs, and fuel induction service first and then see how the injectors performed?

Again, I’m outside of this so I don’t know the exact situation but these are all questions that I had.

If you don’t need the car would you be interested in selling it? Maybe this is an opportunity for the shop. I know a lot of shop owners that buy and sell cars. If the customer doesn’t want it, they don’t need it, and we can fix it on our end, then maybe we should be buying that car.

And then, last, the customer was like, “Well, I can buy a transmission for that car probably cheaper.” I don’t know that you can get a Honda Fit transmission for $2800. Maybe you can. I don’t know. I’ve never priced one. But I would have maybe stopped him right there and been like, “Well, the transmission is in great shape. We just need to fix this fuel issue.” Or, “The transmission for that could be as much as $6,000-7,000.” You don’t want to alarm the person or scare them.

So, the first thing that’s going to happen is this guy really… This guy wants the car, he’s going to keep it, and the wife’s going to tell him, “Say, yes, we want this car.”

So the first thing he’s going to do, because we didn’t build the value and he wasn’t comfortable with us, is he’s going to start calling around and getting quotes from every other shop in town to do the same work. And guess what? He’s going to find it cheaper somewhere else because the first liar – don’t get upset with that terminology – but the first liar doesn’t have any chance, right?

So, the first person that gives a quote, once that starts going out for bid in the community, you’re never getting it back. Again, so did we send him videos of injectors failing, pictures of worn-out plugs, before we talked to them on the phone? Did we set the stage? What did we do with that? How well did we set ourselves up for success? All right, guys. So, that’s just a really quick rundown.

You guys should be doing this on all of your service writers, outgoing calls, incoming calls. What can we do better? How can we do our job better? How can we service the customer better, right?

So, again, you have to make time for it and then you have to do it and then you have to follow up with them, train them. Ask them, what do you think you could have done in this situation?

Whenever you have a customer or a client that you’re trying to sell to, they’re setting up roadblocks and they’re putting obstacles in your way.

And how you handle those obstacles and roadblocks really determines the success, okay?

Again my name is Chris Cotton, AutoFix Auto Shop Coaching. Have a great day, everybody. Hope to see you soon!