7 Reasons Why Diagnosis is costing you Time, Money and Customers
To say that cars today are not what they used to be is a huge understatement.
What once was a largely mechanical assembly with a few electrical circuits, is now a highly complex electronic network that controls all the mechanical functions including all the new and sensitive technology. This technology is awesome when it works but should something go wrong, finding the cause of the issue can be really perplexing.
The difficulty of diagnosing all this ‘fancy’ technology can very quickly be compounded if your dealership does any of the following. These 7 practices actually put up barriers that make what is already a demanding task almost impossible.
They almost guarantee diagnostic failure, costing you time and money, hurting your workshop capacity and almost certainly upsetting customers. And that doesn’t even count expensive rework.
We have found that each of these items will make diagnosis at least 15% harder, longer and more costly. Check out this list and see how you fare.
1. You’re not getting valid information from your customers.
It doesn’t matter how talented your technicians are, if they can’t find the fault, what do they fix? Perhaps the single most important element in diagnosing and rectifying a concern on today’s high technology vehicles is getting valid information from the customer. “Noise in car” isn’t even a worthy tweet never mind being valid information. And it’s lazy and insulting to the technician.
Valid information has three parts. The first element of valid information is that it is explicit and specific. If the information your technicians get from the service advisors is not explicit and specific, then it is not valid. “Noise in car” is pointless. ‘High pitch metallic rattling noise that seems to be coming from the rear of the car when accelerating uphill’ is explicit.
The second element of valid information is that it has been “tested”. That means that the service advisor has checked with the customer that what they think the customer meant is in fact what the customer actually meant. Steven Covey put it this way – “seek first to understand, and then be understood.” Not checking that you understand what they really meant is called guessing. Don’t guess. Test instead.
The third part of valid information is that the information is provable or actionable. This is the part of valid information that most often gets left out, ignored, or is simply wrong. Information that is provable or actionable carries with it the details of how to test or prove the information. ‘Noise from the rear when backing down the driveway, first thing in the morning’ is provable or actionable. ‘Noise in car’ is not.
Not getting valid information is a really effective way to ensure both diagnostic failure and an irate customer. An extra 5 minutes spent here will save you hours and hundreds, possibly even thousands of dollars, not to mention the priceless value of goodwill. Make the investment if you want to reap the rewards.
2. Your technicians are not using manufacturer’s service information.
Just because your staff can access the manufacturer’s service information that doesn’t mean that it is being used. We have an acronym for using the manufacturer’s service information. RTFM. Read The Friendly Manual. It is a friendly manual – it was written to help make you efficient. If your staff are not using the manufacturer’s service information regularly and correctly they are wasting time.
This is why. If your technicians are not 110% certain on how the system or component functions under the operating condition in which the fault occurs, how can they possibly know when the component or system is faulty? Short answer, they can’t. Not knowing isn’t the issue, no one can know everything about a car. Not using the service information to find, out is an issue. And an expensive one. So, RTFM.
3. Your technicians don’t interpret the information from the car correctly.
There is a huge misperception in the automotive industry about the technology in cars and challenges of working with it. Everyone acknowledges that cars are complex and hard to work on, but at the same time, people believe that you can plug in a scan tool and, hey presto, the car is diagnosed. If only!
One of the biggest issues I see in diagnosis today is with data on the vehicle. It is not that technicians can’t get the data from the car. They can. The issue is they don’t know how to interpret the data that they get.
I taught my 9-year-old daughter how to retrieve data on a highly complex vehicle with over 30 control modules. That part is not so hard. The hard bit, the really, really hard bit is actually knowing what all that data means. And what to do next. This is the equivalent of getting ‘information’ from a car and getting valid information from the car. Its chalk and cheese. Getting the data is nice. Correctly and accurately interpreting the data is what diagnoses problems with cars the first time.
4. You’re treating the diagnosis of a vehicle and the service or repair of a vehicle as if they are the same.
Can you imagine the world’s number 1 tennis player walking out into the middle of a cricket pitch to face the world’s best fast bowler with nothing other than their tennis racquet? Or the world’s best batsman padding up and standing on the baseline at Wimbledon ready to receive the first serve? Crazy right? Not to mention dangerous.
Sure, there are similarities between tennis and cricket. They both get played on grass. They both use a round ball. They both involve a hitting implement. There are white lines indicating the playing areas, etc. To say they’re the same is wrong. But to expect a tennis player to play on a pitch using cricket rules is insanity.
This is no different to treating diagnostic work as if it were service or repair work. Sure they have some similarities (both involve cars & technicians, both require tools, etc.) but to treat them the same – to expect service people to successfully diagnose cars, or to expect service outcomes or efficiency from people doing diagnosis is just as insane. They are two very different things. Treating them the same does a lot of harm, in time, money and technician motivation.
5. Your technicians aren’t proficient enough at diagnosis.
We find that a lot of service managers confuse experience, expertise and proficiency. While most thesauruses will suggest that you can use them interchangeably they are actually quite different. Experience is simply time on the job. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the person is any good at the job – though you would hope that they are – it just means that they have been doing it for a length of time.
Expertise is experience multiplied by skill. This is actually what most people mean by experience. Expertise includes the talent, knowledge and skill that the technician has accumulated in their years doing the job.
But even this isn’t enough. Attitude plays a critical role as well. Just because they have expertise doesn’t mean that they actually care about their work, or the customer, or even the business that employs them. How many technicians have you worked with who are really good at what they did, but only when they felt like it?
This leads us to technical proficiency. Technical Proficiency = Skill x Experience x Attitude. Just having one of these parts they are likely to be doing harm. Any two areas will see some success, but the only way to consistently diagnose modern technology on problem cars is to use proficient technicians. Just because they are proficient at service or mechanical diagnosis doesn’t mean they are good with electrical or electronic diagnosis. It all depends on the area of their expertise. So are your technicians proficient in diagnosis?
6. Your technicians are constantly interrupted.
Short of violating your company’s HR policy on inappropriate touching, interrupting technicians when they are diagnosing a complex problem on a high technology car for any reason (but especially to ask ‘how much longer’) is the worst thing you can do. And the most expensive.
Generally speaking, it takes teams of hundreds of engineers and thousands of other people to design and build a car. All of that know-how, experience and technology (and money) combines to create and assemble about 30,000 parts that make up the cars your customers drive.
When something goes wrong, a single technician must process a vast amount of information and data 100% accurately in order to assess, isolate and identify which part or parts are causing the concern. Do you think that diagnosis is a highly complex and difficult task? Damn straight it is!
So, when a technician is interrupted, all these fragile mental threads get torn from their attention in order for them to take on new information and make a subjective assessment to answer a question such as ‘how much longer?’ To be interrupted like this is called ‘context switching.’ Context switching is costly.
At best, studies have shown that this costs at least 10 – 15 minutes of time for the technician to get their brain back into all those threads, then follow them through to where they left off, and then find the best way to continue. And let’s hope they didn’t lose a thread or two.
If this is happening to your diagnostic people – whatever the interruption – then they will have more success pushing water uphill with a toothpick than they will have efficiently and accurately diagnosing complex issues on cars.
7. Your technicians are doing shopping trolley diagnosis.
Shopping trolley diagnosis is like walking through the parts department and trying a variety of parts on the car to see if they fix the problem. This is also known as throwing parts at a car. And it’s like a diagnostic version of roulette – sure you might get it lucky, but the odds are heavily against you.
Statistically, on modern cars, the fault is not in the components – the modules, the sensors, or the hardware but with the connectors, the loom, the software or the customer (that’s right, the customer can incorrectly use the vehicle and cause a fault!). Depending on the brand there is a 10% to 15% chance of completely resolving a fault on a car by replacing a component. This means that by not replacing a component, statistically, you have an 85% to 90% chance of finding the fault and rectifying it. Those are good odds.
We find that ‘shopping trolley diagnosis’ is usually done by three types of people – those that don’t understand what is happening with a particular fault, those who are looking for a shortcut, and those that are lazy. Whatever the reason, using shopping trolley diagnosis is actually the most expensive, least efficient way to diagnose. Even if you get lucky. Enough said.
So, how did you fare?
If you found you had two or more of these happening in your workshop then you are likely finding that diagnosis is really costing you time and money and your customers are probably at the end of their patience.
If you had four or more you are probably at the stage where staff loss is a real problem and customers just don’t come back. I don’t need to tell you how frustrating and draining this is or that letting this continue is just throwing good money after bad. Because you likely already know…
Need a Solution to these problems?
The Good news is that there is a fix, but the bad news is that there is no quick fix. Sorry, but its true. Resolving these takes time. These issues didn’t occur overnight, so resolving these will take time too.
The key point to understand about these 7 things is, they are all caused by friction in your service department. What is friction? Friction in your service department are all the elements that oppose effectiveness, efficiency and profitability. You can learn more about friction here – or you can get in contact with us here.
Don’t let friction frustrate your financial returns any longer – Get Friction-Less and fight back!
