Daily Performance Report Information a Service Advisor Needs to Know
By Ted Ings, Executive Director
Consider the multi-faceted role of a service advisor.
It involves customer service, selling, mediating between the customer and technician, mechanical understanding, and financial aptitude. It’s a huge undertaking to train for such a role! Of course, performing every action with the customer’s best interests in mind is crucial, however, there’s another major role that can’t be forgotten: the service department is a business.
WHO NEEDS TRAINING AT YOUR DEALERSHIP?
As a business, service advisors must understand their performance. It comes down to basic numbers, although they sound like a jumbled-up Scrabble game. ELR, RO Sales, RO Count, GP – these letters should mean something to your service advisors.
Daily Performance Reports are Important to Service Advisor Training
All of these numbers are found in a daily performance report. For CDK customers, it’s the RAP report, but every DMS has something similar:
ELR, or effective labor rate, is how much each hour of labor is actually earned by the advisor. It considers loss-leaders, discounts, and full-rate service labor sales. Higher ELR rates mean the service department is earning more per hour of labor, obviously.
RO Sales is the total amount of combined labor and parts per repair order. Because most service departments share in the parts profits when parts are sold on a repair order, total RO sales is an important number to track.
RO Count is just that – the number or work orders written that day. Junior service advisors should write up to 10 repair orders per day to make sure they are handling each one well. Senior service advisors might write double that or more!
GP, or gross profit, is also critical information. As a percentage, it gives a very good idea if a service advisor has been writing low-priced routine maintenance or selling full-rate repairs as well. Low gross profit is an indicator that an advisor is discounting too.
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Why Is It Important?
Providing your service advisors with the daily performance report does two things: it lets the service advisor know their performance is being monitored, and it allows them to see where there’s room for improvement.
WHO IS TED INGS?
But while daily performance reports are important, the most important statistic that shouldn’t be overlooked is customer satisfaction. CSI scores trump sales numbers every time. Before making higher sales a target, service advisors should always strive to achieve the best CSI scores possible – typically, sales follow suit.