Aaron Zimmerman vividly recalls the aha moment when he realized service advisers at the dealership group where he worked several years ago knew nothing about the very metrics used to rate their performance — and determine their pay.
“I was in a meeting with a general manager who was getting on his advisers pretty hard about a decline in their key performance indicators, like hours per repair order and effective labor rate,” said Zimmerman, a corporate fixed ops director at the time. “And I saw a lot of blank faces.”
Nobody knew what an effective labor rate was, said Zimmerman, a 2023 Automotive News 40 Under 40 honoree and now corporate fixed ops director at Len Stoler Automotive Group. The group owns 10 stores in Maryland and New York.
“We wanted to hold advisers accountable to certain KPIs, but it’s hard for them to do that if they haven’t been taught what they are,” he said. “You can’t change or improve on what you don’t know.”
That realization sparked the creation of a training program that significantly improved advisers’ key metrics as well as their customer service index scores, Zimmerman said.
The program also moved the needle in other areas, including better customer service and reduced turnover, he said.
“Employees who don’t get support and training from the companies they work for tend to look elsewhere,” Zimmerman told Automotive News. “And from my experience, service adviser turnover is very high.”
Advisers’ pay also increased, which in turn bolstered employee retention. Service revenue also rose, he said.
“Service advisers usually are on performance pay plans,” Zimmerman said. “And if they make more money for themselves, it means the dealership makes more money, too.”
There’s another less tangible but equally important benefit: Well-trained advisers are more confident in their abilities and are more open to asking their supervisors for guidance, he noted.
Zimmerman has implemented the same kind of training program for the approximately 80 advisers in the Stoler group, which he joined in September 2022. The training sessions occur about once every three months.
The sessions run from 9 a.m. to about 3:30 p.m. and are held at a central location to minimize travel. (The Stoler group has six stores in Maryland and four in New York.) It’s beneficial to divide advisers into groups according to their experience and skill levels.
In one recent session, none of the five advisers had been on the job for more than a year and one was on just his second day, Zimmerman noted.
“We want the youngest and less-experienced advisers to feel comfortable asking questions without being embarrassed,” he said. “There’s an intimidation factor when you lump veterans in with younger advisers.”
Furthermore, he said advisers learn more if the topics covered correlate closely with their experience and skill levels. Doing otherwise runs the risk of boring veteran advisers while covering simpler concepts that newbies need, or overwhelming less-experienced advisers when higher-level concepts are discussed.
“You need to talk at different levels for experienced advisers and younger advisers,” he said.
Zimmerman also suggested training the less-experienced advisers first because they represent the proverbial low-hanging fruit. He asks advisers’ managers ahead of time to point out their weaknesses so he can address them.
“It’ll take us about a year to go through the whole training cycle,” he said. “But if you start with the weakest links and improve their skill sets, they should start generating improved results in about a month or so.”
Because the training at Len Stoler is still in its early stages, Zimmerman has mostly anecdotal proof of its success. He hopes to have real numbers soon to verify his suspicions that the training is having a positive impact.
Akeem Harris, a service adviser at Len Stoler Hyundai in Owings Mills, Md., for nearly three years, said a training session last August taught him valuable new approaches that benefit him, his customers and the dealership.
“It definitely was time well-invested,” Harris told Automotive News. “It gave me a lot of new perspectives about how to do my day-to-day job as a service adviser.”
Before the training session, Harris said his mindset centered on getting service customers in and out of the shop as quickly as possible.
“My objective was to keep the train going,” he said.
But now, Harris said, he understands how offering customers certain other services can benefit him through increased sales and subsequently higher commissions; benefit clients who appreciate a more thorough and customercentric process; and benefit the dealership through better customer retention.
“I realized I need to take more time to be more thorough and use a more organized thought process, as opposed to doing things one-dimensionally,” Harris said.
The training also helped Harris see he’s more than just a small cog in an organization.
“The most valuable thing I learned is how I’m part of a bigger schematic and how I bring value to our organization,” he said. “I now see my job as more than just writing up customers for oil changes. We’re the lifeblood of the operation.”
Zimmerman developed the curriculum through what he calls “trial and error” and based on his own experiences during 20 years in the industry, including multiple stints as an adviser and service director.
The first session focuses on explaining the most important KPIs because they provide the foundation upon which the rest of the sessions are built. It’s the biggest hurdle for everyone, he said, but vital to show advisers can make more money on their pay plan. Zimmerman said it’s a great way “to get buy-in.”
“One of the biggest things to touch on early is the ‘what’s-in-it-for-me’ angle,” Zimmerman emphasized. “That’s the third slide in my presentation. They need to understand that by learning about KPIs they’re going to make more money, reduce their stress, enjoy work more and see ways they can move up in this industry.
“If you don’t address what’s in it for them, they think they’re there only because their boss made them go.”
From there, the curriculum branches off into areas such as how to manage a day and contend with customer issues. Zimmerman gives them real-world situations and asks the advisers how they would handle them. He then explains how he would resolve them.
“There are a million things that can go wrong every day for a service adviser so it’s important to teach them how to manage their day and defuse certain situations — and still deliver a good experience for clients,” he said. “If they can learn to do these things well, it’ll make their service managers’ lives easier, too.”
Veteran advisers are taught higher-level topics, such as warranty documentation and how to build a client base, he said.
“None of what I teach is what I would call earth-shattering,” Zimmerman noted. “But the fundamentals do matter.”
Sometimes Zimmerman also invites parts vendors to come in to talk about their products. Too often advisers don’t know any details about the products they recommend; knowing more helps them make better presentations to customers and close more sales.
The program is in its infancy; as a result, it’s too early to pinpoint specific results. But Zimmerman said it has positively impacted effective labor rates and customer service index scores.
Adviser training is a much-overlooked issue in the retail auto industry, Zimmerman said.
“I know that my training as an adviser basically was, ‘Go figure it out,’ ” he said. “As an industry, we do an awful job with in-store training for advisers and technicians.”
As such, it’s important to be firm and resist pushback from senior advisers who think they don’t need training or service managers who say there’s no time for their advisers to attend sessions, Zimmerman said.
“Sometimes we get pushback from veteran advisers, but I welcome that,” he said. “That’s one reason why we put seniors together; they challenge me and each other.”
As for service managers or fixed ops directors who think it’s not worth it for advisers to miss a day of work for training, Zimmerman encourages them to look at the bigger picture, especially in regard to customer and employee retention.
“If advisers keep making the same mistakes over and over again, I’d rather pull them out for a day — or even two days — of training,” he said. “Managers may not always be thrilled with it, but eventually they see the value.
“If training makes things better for advisers, dealerships and customers, then it’s well worth a one-day investment.”