Is automotive ready for a solution? “A solution to what?,” you might find yourself asking...
Well, let’s start with some questions...
- As an industry, are we willing to take a cold, hard look into why our employees keep turning over? Are you willing to ask yourself why you can get your salespeople, service advisors, and service techs to the one-year point but can’t get them to 3, 4, or 5 years? Are you ready to deal with what you learn?
- Why as an industry are we OK with the fact that 40% of our staff are going to turnover every year (up to 60-100% for some dealerships!)?
- Why in this environment is it so easy for us to just ‘plug the leak' and not deal with the root cause issue(s)?
I’d like to give you an analogy: Let's say you have a leaky rowboat with more than 20 holes...you can’t possibly fill them with all your fingers, you simply don’t have enough! As an industry, what we collectively keep doing is just temporarily plug the holes (by hiring a new person). If we don’t decide to momentarily bring our boat ashore and say, “oh, I used the wrong kind of wood and that’s why I'm getting holes,” “the wood is splintering and now I’m taking on water,” etc., we’ll keep trudging along in the same place as we always have. As an industry, we’ve become really good at plugging leaks; we don’t let the boat sink. We know that these dealerships leaders want to be more effective but can’t be because they're busy just plugging leaks.
The conversation needs to be about why people keep leaving in the first place.
Ask yourself, is it time for a holistic solution? What Quantum5 strives to do is to be that holistic solution, and we believe that solution starts with the idea that we should first listen to our team about their employee experience. That knowledge will inform us on how to fix the leaky boat before we put it in the water to go serve our customers with. In the absence of that, any training company would be forced to put the still-leaky boat in the water and the root cause of the issues would not have been addressed in the first place. Just adding training to that boat isn’t going to solve anything. At Quantum5, we have wonderful training classes – want to fix your service advisors? We have a product for that. Need phone help? We have this great solution to coach your phone team. These small wins aren’t going to help your dealership in the long run (help your employees stay, keep customers longer, etc.), because just training alone is not a holistic solution to addressing the root cause issues, you’ll have to fix the boat every day still.
Now, we are not alone here. There are plenty of other training companies out there who are offering different training solutions/programs. Why does the industry still need us so much? Until you address the issues and ask “what would be a methodology to attack the problem" from a “how do I get a holistic solution" perspective, you’ll still be in the same boat. It’s helpful to learn what other great dealers who don’t have these problems are doing. For example, a 40-store dealership who uses our ESi-Q survey solution and who is always in the top 100 best dealerships to work for, has a mentality of "I can’t have employees unhappy, or they’ll never say, ‘my pleasure’ at their dealership and actually mean it.” They realized that they needed to create a great experience for their employees first, so they are happy to work there, they deliver great customer service, and they don’t lose people to competing dealerships.
Our Methodology
We believe that our methodology of starting with the data is where you should begin. Want to fix employee satisfaction? You have to start with the data. You can’t just do these employee surveys (or not do them) and assume that people just want more money and want to complain. It's not always about money. The ESi-Q data we’ve collected shows us that employees want better communication, they want career plans, transparency, good benefits, etc. The generation in our dealerships now doesn’t define communications the way that previous generations did. Maybe email only isn’t sufficient anymore and it’s Slack or another messaging tool that would benefit your team where you can send a video, a photo, etc. to anyone you want at the dealership. The point is, you must first understand what employees want and then look at solutions to help you get there.
Start with EX
You need to start with the simple things that employees want (employee experience, or EX) if you want to solve the issues of losing staff, customers not coming back, losing sales, and losing gross profit when customers aren’t satisfied with their sales experience.
Then address CX
Once you have happy employees, you can figure out what a good customer experience (CX) looks like. If you’re going to fix CX, you need to start with a team who are happy, love people, and are going to be part of the solution to make them happy. We unfortunately have an industry mentality that’s caught up in the models from the 1930s that causes dealers to not be able to see that EX will lead you to CX. When you create CX, you’ll be able to change how people want to stay at your business.
In the car business, what we know is that customers who are having a great experience stop caring about the $100-200 differential. Gross profits increase when customers have the kind of experience they receive from happy, well-trained, engaged, and loyal employees.
Think about an experience in your own life where you are loyal to a certain place, and ask yourself “why?” Was it because the people treated you well? In a lot of cases, probably yes!
Because this seems to be elusive, and so many dealers get greedy and calloused, managers are incentivized to think only about their individual comp plan (which is month-to-month), they lose the long-term vision. Comp plans are a part of the problem. Managers suffer no financial ramification if they have a high turnover of employees. Maybe if they did, this problem would be fixed faster?
If you’re ready for a solution or at least to start the conversation, we’d love to chat with you. Contact us here to get started.
