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Dealership service advisors have the opportunity for upward mobility. With a high school diploma and some automotive education or experience, you can begin your career as a service advisor with a clear path for advancement. 

From there, becoming your dealership’s top service advisor will increase your salary and put you on the path to climbing the ladder. Whether your plan is to become the top service advisor—and maybe, eventually, a service manager, or even a general manager—it starts with excelling in your current role. 

In an ideal world, your dealership supports your advancement and offers continuing service advisor training to help you improve. If that’s not the case, there are things you can do to create your own success. 

Follow these dealership service department best practices to become the top service advisor in your store by 2023!

If your dealership only puts extra effort into the service and parts departments when sales are low, you need to get real. Fixed operations deserve the same love and attention as your variable operations departments! We have four proven methods to increase service customer leads, customer satisfaction, and increase revenue.

The service drive is the glue that's holding us all together. It would be the most highly coveted glue you can imagine if you imagined coveting glue. Service is the brand new glue stick in your pencil pouch on the first day of school—the purple one. If you want to make the other kids jealous, you've got to highly emphasize your supplies. If you're going to give the other dealerships a run for their money, spotlight your brand new purple glue stick (otherwise known as Randy from the Service Department). 

Cut the fluff. We might be shutting down again.

This time, rather than lamenting, we focus on preparation. In the end, if everything is able to stay open, we’re only that much more prepared to do business.

In recent years, the demand for certified technicians has ballooned as the number of quality workers in this field declines.  Experienced technicians are almost certainly guaranteed to find work. The technician knows it, and the dealership knows it. This creates an environment where the expert is looking for steady work to earn a good living, and the dealership is looking to provide steady work to talented people.

It would seem the flood of recall work for most brands over the last several years would fill this need. Yet recall work is redundant and, at times, not particularly challenging. Warranty work, which keeps many service bays busy, often falls in the same category. Couple these dynamics with the shortage of a talented workforce, and you’d have to ask yourself, why would anyone want to be a service manager these days?

"If you give a mouse a cookie" [1]. You may or may not be familiar with this popular children’s book series by author Laura Numeroff, each book opens with the main character receiving something, like a cookie. Then, in a playful circular and interrelated pattern they ask for more items until we arrive back to the beginning…when they ask for another cookie. There’s an interesting connection to this book and a dealerships Customer Lifetime Value.

When Carl Moyer of Karl Chevrolet decided to take on the tire store across the street, he and his team planned for success. But, they could have never predicted they would have made GM history by being the first dealership to sell $1million dollars’ worth of tires in one year. Their success continued in following years as they increased their tire sales from $1 million in 2009 to $3 million in 2011.  Not only does Karl Chevrolet present their customers with tire oprtions, but they also offer tire and wheel accessories.  The dealership displays about 50 ready to sell accessorized vehicles and uses Insignia’s accessories system for selling accessories.