Hiring Race Horses

I believe the automotive industry needs to evolve towards encompassing total customer care and customer satisfaction! In my opinion there are a lot of service facilities in business who have the wrong people working for them. You read about it every day, if you work in the industry you are exposed to it every day. Etiquette is gone in today’s society, it is more the exception then the rule. Being polite to people is reserved for a few members of a dying breed. People are more interested in what THEY can get out of others when they should be focused on serving the people, (customers and clients) that frequent their businesses. All it generally takes is a thank you or a may I help you to make a difference in a customer’s day. I would like to stress that the customers that have left your facility feeling like your business didn’t care about them, or their needs, probably won’t come back. These customers are your bread and butter! We all need to eat, so why poison the food supply.


If you are hiring to replace people within your facility it needs to be your priority to hire the right people to keep the customers you currently have, and win-back some of the ones you have lost. I cannot stress enough that we as an industry need to focus more attention on attracting talented people who can make a difference. Making a difference means different things to different people, my definition is this; hire a person for their attitude, develop them into a trained core member of your team so they can think on their feet. If more service advisors had the right attitude, they would be able to sell more servicing items to their customers because they had built a sustainable honest relationship built upon trust and mutually admiration! There are just too many people working in this industry that are lazy, irresponsible, rude, non committal, unreliable and they simply do not care about your customers, they are only showing up to work to make a paycheck. Have you ever thought what your own paycheck might be if you had exceptional people working for you? Hire race horses with good attitudes and you will always finish the race a leader in your field.

Good hiring practices mean you are hiring for specifics. Some specific items to look for in future potential employees are:

- Attitude
- Integrity
- Commitment
- Dedication
- Caring
- Reliability
- Responsiveness
- Assurance of action
- Empathy

Once you have these nine quotients filled you can target the intangibles. Good customer service is exactly an intangible that directly quantifies your businesses bottom line. You can always teach someone product knowledge however you cannot teach anyone any of the attributes listed above. Either people have these qualities or they don’t.

Employee training must be ongoing. The three main areas of training you should be concerned with are:

- Customer service training
- Computer training – on the programs your dealership uses every day for business
- Product knowledge training – requirements = all staff

Training cannot be stressed enough. All front line staff such as advisors requires customer service training, some form of dispute resolution training, product training and computer systems training. I would even stress that the BDC and porters take some form of product knowledge training. A customer should be able to ask a straight forward product knowledge question of any staff member and receive an intelligent answer in return. If you do not provide your most important asset with ongoing training they will eventually become obsolete and turn into your biggest liability.
David