It’s common in dealerships to shape service advisor behavior with a pay plan. If there is a gap in performance, managers will often adjust a comp plan or pay a spiff. 

This may be an effective way to get the results you want, but you can’t pay on everything. If you aren’t careful, you could end up with a comp structure that only a CPA could decipher. What is the alternative? How can you get your service advisors to focus on important KPIs without making it part of their pay plan?

I recently worked with a dealership that implemented a scorecard for their service advisor. The advisor is scored once a month on important service KPIs. They are given an opportunity to account for their performance and offer suggestions on how they can improve. This has led to some huge performance improvements.

I spoke with one of the service advisors at this dealership about these metrics. One of the KPIs the service advisor was held accountable for was ASR%: the percentage of additional service revenue generated that was recommended from the MPVI.

This service advisor started telling me all of the activities he had completed to try and improve his ASR%. He had spoken with the technicians on the importance of recommending additional service. He’d posted the ASR% for each technician so they could see how they were performing in relation to their peers.

I asked him what his ASR% was before these recent activities, and his answer really surprised me. It made me think about the other KPIs we could use to measure employee performance without making pay plan changes.

His answer? He told me he had no idea what his ASR% was before this scorecard implementation because he didn’t know what that metric was.

And he’d been working service for 8 years.

This scorecard and monthly review process can be extremely effective in helping service advisors to increase the items that may be in their pay plan: hours per RO and selling gross. By focusing on some of the metrics you can measure that you know will help them sell additional service, you can really help the advisors develop and grow.

Consider implementing a scorecard and monthly review process. It can help you manage your service advisors and give you some great insight on how you can help them improve their performance.