Sean Kelley MOPAR Case Study #2 Customer Retention & Employee Retention are Interrelated

For your service department to have high retention is they also have high employee retention. That’s all the Car motivator dealers, we coach, that’s what we’re finding. And of all the car motivator dealers, we coach, we only have one that still needs to hire techs at this point. And we’ve only been working with them for about 90 days. So I blame him for that. But we’re getting there. But most of our clients are fine, they retain their people, these guys are no different. They haven’t lost a service manager or service advisor or anyone in a long time. But if you want to build a culture of retention, you have to be very intentional about it, it does not happen by accident. 

We’re going to talk about how to build a culture of retention intentionally. First, you got to meet Steve, Steve, the service advisor, you’re gonna love Steve. He’s also taller than me, for the record. So when we started working with Steve, we were given him observational coaching, that’s where you walk someone playing the game, and you try to help them improve  they play. Steve was at that point the lowest earner dollar per row wise. Let’s see. We’ve said before, we saw that he is actually now earning $418 per RO, which is great. 

So Steve, actually, he was checking in a customer. And it was a lady. She had been there two years. He said, See, I’ve been here two years. Thanks for coming back. And wherever you’ve been going, he said, we’re going to Jiffy Lube by my house. He’s like, Oh, okay, cool. Well, welcome back. And he kind of walks off to get a VIN number and the coach working with him is like, hey, so he asked the customer, hey, what do you let them get in the way we come back here? And she said, Well, can I be totally honest?” He’s like, no, please do. And she said, every time I was coming in here, after I bought the car, there was a different advisor. And it’s really hard to have a relationship with someone you trust. So it is kind of like a 30 minute drive, there’s a Jiffy Lube by my house. So it’s more convenient, I get it done faster, and it’s cheaper, 

Not the brand we want to establish and as a whole, right? So she, she, she shared that with us. And that reinforces the fact that if we can retain our employees, and they can establish relationships with people that they’re more likely to trust us and come back to us and stay with us. And in any engagement, whether it’s with your customers, or whether it’s with one of your employees, you’re either building, you’re building them up, making things better, or you’re destroying. There’s this mindset that we’ve got with services, fix ops leaders, okay, there is no gray area, there’s no in between, you’re either building or destroying. 

Case in point when she came in two years ago, three years ago, whatever it was, and she had an under trained service advisor, and I’m dealing with an under trained technician. What was the experience like for her, someone she didn’t know or trust or whatever, what happened she ended up going to Jiffy Lube. We destroy it in that engagement. We destroyed the relationship and she chose to go elsewhere. 

How many guys have direct reports to you? How many of you have employees that report to you directly or your manager at some point? Raise your hand please. Okay, well, a lot of managers – and you’re no different with their employees my friends, in every engagement we have rebuilding or eroding.  Have you ever left the conversation with one of your employees just feeling drained and exhausted? Like you just pushed a broken down train and up the hill and you’re like, oh, that didn’t go well. Think about what happened building or destroying they’re destroying the site. So what I want for you guys, I want for you to have the best engagements with both your customers and your employees so you can build them and build them get to the point where we love coming to work every day and we can’t stop the success and I’m gonna show you guys how to do that. So check it out.