Gather ideas from employees. Listen to your employees and get them incentives to come to you with their ideas rather than have them be scared of either being ridiculed for that idea or scared to bring it up for fear of it being rejected.
You’d be absolutely shocked at what great ideas employees can bring to the table if you just ask them. The auto industry has been impacted probably more than other industries, other than homebuilding, in the United States. We had to come up with some real creative ways of reducing expenses and increasing profits to be able to survive the environment.
For example, we have about 75 employees, and I would probably venture to say we have about 30 computers in the dealership. None of those computers turned off at night. It’s a simple program that you can install or activate on the computer for everything to turn off after a certain hour. That can save us thousands of dollars a year, but believe it or not, it took an employee to come up with that idea. There’s little things that can add up.
Get employee reaction and come up with an incentive based program where they don’t just shoot from the hip, and they put some serious thought into what the dealership or what they can do or what the department can do to increase revenue or decrease expenses.
For example, it might be a cost-saving idea that somebody comes up with, and we have a bonus that whatever that saves us, we’ll give the employee 50 percent of the savings for the first month. For example, if they come up with an idea that can save us $1,000 a month, that employee would get $500 that month as an incentive for coming up with the idea.
Improve customer service. Take the time to hire somebody to do a quick phone survey to get the customer’s perspective on how the experience went and then to track that. You can’t expect what you don’t inspect. We get the surveys, we track the surveys, and when we see something below the standards we feel a customer deserves, then we drill into it.
You can hire somebody for probably $8, $9 an hour to make phone calls, and you’ll get enough people to respond to your survey that you get an idea of what’s going on. Then just have meetings and identify problems and make procedures to correct the problem.
Let’s say, for example, the customer picks up their car in service. Was it picked up on time? Did they have to wait five minutes? 10 minutes? We track that, so if we get one per month, more than likely that was an individual problem, but if it’s more like two or three, that’s a procedural problem and we try to drill into that right away.
How to reach: Willett Honda South, (778) 968-1500 or www.willetthondasouth.com