When dealerships struggle with CSI, follow-up, or customer complaints, leaders often point to one issue: communication. Advisors aren’t calling customers back. Updates are inconsistent. Expectations are unclear.
But in reality, SERVICE ADVISOR communication is rarely the root problem. It’s a symptom.
In Service Drive Revolution #342, the discussion explores why communication failures almost always stem from poor systems, weak scheduling, and unclear standards. These insights apply directly to SERVICE ADVISORS, SERVICE MANAGERS, and FIXED OPS LEADERS who want fewer surprises and better customer experiences.
Communication Is the Outcome, Not the Cause
Many dealerships respond to CSI issues by sending advisors to “communication training.” Unfortunately, that treats the symptom, not the cause.
In most stores:
- SERVICE ADVISORS write too many repair orders per day
- Appointment spacing is unrealistic
- Waiter volume is uncontrolled
- Follow-up time is never protected
Under those conditions, even great advisors will struggle to communicate well.
Strong SERVICE ADVISOR communication happens naturally when the system supports it.
Scheduling Determines Communication Success
One of the biggest drivers of poor communication is how the SERVICE ADVISOR’s day is structured.
When appointments are booked every 10 minutes:
- Advisors rush greetings
- Walk-arounds get skipped
- Follow-up calls fall behind
- Customers feel ignored
Spacing appointments to 20-minute intervals, limiting waiters, and blocking time for callbacks changes everything.SERVICE ADVISORS gain the time they need to:
- Build rapport
- Call customers proactively
- Communicate with technicians
- Set realistic expectations
This is not a people problem. It’s a scheduling problem.
Systems First, People Second
High-performing Fixed Ops departments don’t rely on memory or motivation. They rely on systems.
Simple tools make a major difference:
- Call-back log books
- Written promises with time commitments
- Planned follow-up windows
- Clear customer expectations
These systems reduce chaos and make communication predictable.
For a deeper look at how weak systems quietly hurt profitability, read
Unapplied Labor in Fixed Ops: What Service Managers Must Fix Now.
Why Walk-Arounds Become “Optional”
When leaders ask, “How do I get my SERVICE ADVISORS to do walk-arounds?” The real issue is usually standards.
If walk-arounds are optional, ADVISORS will skip them when busy. If they are non-negotiable, behavior changes.
Strong SERVICE MANAGERS:
- Define what “good” looks like
- Enforce standards consistently
- Remove discretion from critical steps
When expectations are clear, advisors stop freelancing and start performing consistently.
Setting Expectations Eliminates Surprises
Customers don’t expect perfection. They expect honesty.
Effective SERVICE ADVISOR communication includes:
- Explaining when the vehicle will be diagnosed
- Setting a clear callback time
- Being upfront if the car may not get in
- Creating a plan the customer can work around
Even bad news is better when it comes early. Surprises destroy trust. Clear expectations build it.
Leadership Sets the Tone
Every communication issue reflects leadership tolerance.
If leaders allow:
- Missed callbacks
- Skipped walk-arounds
- Chaotic scheduling
- Inconsistent follow-up
Then that becomes the culture.
Strong leaders don’t manage symptoms. They design systems that prevent problems from happening in the first place.
For more insight on building leadership discipline through structure, read
Intentional Goal Setting for Service Managers in Fixed Ops.
Final Thoughts: Fix the System, Fix the Communication
The core lesson from SDR #342 is simple:
If you fix the system, communication fixes itself.
SERVICE ADVISOR communication improves when:
- Schedules are realistic
- Standards are clear
- Systems support follow-up
- Leaders enforce consistency
Stop chasing training as the solution. Start designing better systems.
When you do, CSI rises, stress drops, and customers feel taken care of—without advisors burning out.
FULL VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to Service Drive Revolution
Welcome everybody to the big show. Today we’re going to talk about effective communication and a lot of other stuff. It’s going to be really fun. We’ll have a good time together. Adam is here. Hogi’s here. I’m here. And that and much more coming up on this edition of Service Drive Evolution. I’m going to apologize in advance if these two seem goofy and delusional today, but you guys have been from one side of the country to the other in four days. It has been a week. It’s funny that I’ve done weeks like this before, but very rarely. It happened again, though; when you book airline tickets to go too many places at once, it sends you a warning message like, “Hey, did you do this on purpose?” When I booked my flights this week, I was like, “Are you okay?” From Carolina to here, Oklahoma City to Carolina to here, and then back to OKC.
The Los Angeles Boot Camp
We’re doing this after a new client boot camp that is a day and a half and super fun. It was a good group from all over. I start off in the intro making a joke because people come here to Los Angeles and they are wondering why. You get that vibe. They’re like, “Why are we in Los Angeles?” I always make the joke that I hike taxes and nothing is working, like crime and all that. Yesterday after I made that joke, two hours later, two cops show up making friends. They wanted our camera footage from an incident that had happened a month ago. It’s so funny. I was bitching at the cops about the fact that they never come when I call. Who knows? Do you think they were really cops? Adam said they were taking pictures of stuff, which made me nervous. They were taking pictures of the display cases and everything.
Unusual Police Questions
At one point the guy goes, “What’s the most expensive book in here?” That’s not a question a cop asks. We didn’t ask them for their badge. They had a card, but you could make that card anyway. We were talking to Jasmine earlier; they just said, “Hi, we’re here to do this,” and they busted right in. Did you see Jazz out there arguing with the meter cop? They gave me a parking ticket. One of the things that we do to new employees is we make them watch my car to not get parking tickets. Jazz is the newest one, and she does a good job. For a guy that used to park on the sidewalk, I’m doing pretty good with parking tickets. I get them, but not that much. He was writing a parking ticket, and this has happened before. There’s an app that you can pay for.
The Parking Ticket Disconnect
The thing was flashing red even though she had paid on the app. She’s showing him on the app that she had paid, and he goes, “Oh, yeah. Those don’t sync up. You can take a screenshot of that and contest the ticket.” He has no connection whatsoever with the monetary system that they’re charging us. That is somebody else’s problem. The disconnect is nuts. Thank you, California. Please raise our taxes. We want to pay more for less. He was just looking at the flashing red light. When I left yesterday, the light was flashing. She says it’s on the app, and I’m like, “Are you sure that works?” Ends up it doesn’t work. There was a bystander that jumped in and started arguing with the cop on her behalf. I wanted to just go out there and be like, “Jazz, it’s okay. We’ll pay the ticket. We don’t need this.”
Birthday Celebrations and Tequila
The guy was a supervisor, too. Nothing works anymore. I had a great birthday. Everybody got me some pretty cool gifts. This crazy bottle of tequila was pretty good. Adam is smirking because everybody pitched in but him. Hogi’s birthday was Sunday, the 11th, and mine was Tuesday. Mine is in a few months. When you’re this close to Christmas, it all blends together. I’ve been sending everybody this video on YouTube about people that don’t care about their birthday, which I fall into. When I was a kid, I would get a real gift for Christmas and then get a practical thing for my birthday because we were poor. I would get a pair of pants or something. Your expectations were lowered for your birthday and then you just carry that into adulthood. I don’t really care. But it was a cool bottle of tequila. We shared it with the boot camp last night.
Communication as a Symptom
They did some damage. We asked them for subjects that they would like to see on SDR, and they came up with some good ones. The one we’re going to talk about today is communication. Often what happens is somebody will call and say they need advisor training, followed with needing to teach them communication with customers. You are treating the symptom, not the cause. The problem is not communication most of the time. That is the outcome. Kind of like time management or self-help topics, what people actually teach is how to address the symptom, not fix the cause. We’re going to talk about what the cause is and how you can have an environment where communication is effective and consistent. Once you understand this, communication won’t be the subject anymore. It’s just a byproduct. If they’re talking about communication, they’re almost always talking about CSI.
Treating Causes, Not Symptoms
If you ask people what their main problem with CSI is, a lot of times they will say communication. If an advisor is not calling people back, there are tools you can use to help set them up for success that are just a standard of your process. Sometimes people look at us like we have two heads when we suggest using a good old-fashioned log book. Just having a log book to write down the time you’re promising to call a customer as a basic part of your system is amazing. We talk about wanting advisors to be more proactive and not as reactive, but then we’re not implementing anything as part of our systems that set them up for success. Most of the time when somebody says they want help with communication, you dig in and find advisors writing 25 to 30 tickets a day. Everything is chaotic.
Setting Advisors Up for Success
The percentage of waiters they’re writing, the intervals between appointments, and how appointments are made—none of it is to set the advisors up for success. It is all just an afterthought left to chance. The outcome is that we perceive we have poor communication, but we’re not intentionally setting them up for success. If you’re making appointments every 10 minutes, it’s virtually impossible for an advisor to pet the dog, make friends with the customer, and address their concerns. They need to make the customer feel comfortable and then follow up on other customers in between. The first thing in the system is to have at least a 20-minute interval in between. If you do four appointments in an hour and three of those are waiters, you’re diminishing the advisor’s chances of communication because waiters take more time. You don’t have time to follow up on the waiters.
The Importance of Intervals
Think about how much quicker it is if you call a customer to recommend something versus going and getting the customer from the waiting room. It takes twice as long. How many waiters they’re writing an hour needs to be controlled and intentional. You have to black out an appointment every couple of hours so they have time to call. That also improves communication with the technicians because they have time to go check with the techs. All of your efficiencies improve, but intentionally setting up a system for how their day is structured is the first part. That system starts with how we make appointments and schedule their day. If we talk about advisors in a quick lube, good luck with communication. It’s just one after another. In truck dealerships, not a lot of the clients are sitting there as waiters. We call it controlling the narrative.
Controlling the Narrative
Intentionally having a system in place that you can control the narrative by contacting or calling clients is key. It is not a situation where all of a sudden you drop a huge bill. Having those systems in place is important because we don’t have a lot of waiters in truck service. What blew us away in truck dealerships was how drivers would come in and wait. Some of those waiting rooms were disgusting, with showers that may or may not work. On the car side, having showers in the waiting room would be interesting. There is so much demand; people don’t know there are seven loads sitting for every one truck on the road. If a driver is stuck waiting for their truck to be fixed, they might go and get another job. They would go look for the driver in the waiting room and they would be gone.
Managing Customer Expectations
They took another job. Can you imagine if a customer in a car dealership just bought another car because they didn’t want to wait? Truck drivers just go somewhere else. The stories the advisors have on the truck side are better because of the things they find in trucks. It is nuts. Again, controlling that narrative and having those plans and systems in place to communicate with customers is biggest so there are no surprises. In truck service, the system we taught was to diagnose whatever the issue was within an hour and triage it. Let the driver know what to expect because the customers are the fleets and we want them to keep their drivers. If the driver knows within an hour, they’ll wait, but they won’t wait four hours. If they know within an hour what is going on, they can make other plans.
Setting Expectations Early
On the car side, I would tell the customer, “Hey, this is when I’m going to call you by.” I would qualify where they are going to be and create a plan to set an expectation. Even to the point where if I knew the car wasn’t going to see the shop, I would tell them then. I would explain we had a lot of cars left over from yesterday. They might say they made an appointment two weeks ago, and I would be upfront to help them plan their day. It was way better to tell them that in the morning than to call them at 3:00 after they’ve waited all day. Knowing is more than half the battle so they can plan. It is about turning unplanned scenarios into a predictable outcome. When we’re working with somebody, we’re not training just to train. We expect outcomes and for the situation to change.
Training and Real-World Outcomes
A lot of that involves concepts. It’s easy to listen to someone speaking and think it sounds like an idealized version of things. For example, when we talk about teaching advisors how to overcome objections, if I got an objection when I was an advisor, I had lost the battle. The customer never liked or trusted me early on. At the point where they say no, I’ve already lost. I remember a famous advisor trainer saying, “Ask five times.” I knew right away this guy’s never written service. If you think you’re going to meet somebody at the cashier and ask them again to do an alignment five times, you’ve never written service a day in your life. You offer an alignment up front and they say no; maybe you could softly mention it again when you call with the inspection. Beyond that, they’re never coming back.
The Long Game in Service Sales
We’re trying to help you figure out getting the outcome you want, not the idealized version. In service, it is a different kind of sale. You’re not selling a car or a suit where you can ask five times. They need brakes and they’re saying no. It isn’t like you don’t need a new suit or cowboy hat. Hogi has a beautiful cowboy hat on. It is very intimidating going into a service department as a customer. You think, “How can they shake my hand and steal my wallet with the other hand?” We need to pet the dog and build that trust. There are certain things we should take care of now and certain things we can schedule later. Especially within the truck side with fault codes and telematics, we really can turn unplanned repair events into planned events. That is leveraging technology to communicate better.
Building Trust with Customers
Effectively communicating shares that outcome. We don’t need to geek out on high-level technical terms like viscosity or hygroscopic brake fluid. Their eyes roll in the back of their heads; that’s the epitome of bad training. There’s a row of dealerships I drive past; at 7:00 in the morning, the cars are lined out to the street. I just feel the tension. The local thing is if you’re going to that store, you go in super early and you might have a chance of your car getting done. That’s the tactic they use. If I talk to that service manager and say we can set up a schedule to get rid of the chaos, they’ll say I don’t understand. They’ll say it’s different here in Oklahoma, but it’s not that different. If you’re a truck store or car dealership thinking this won’t work, you can list a bunch of reasons.
Breaking the Cycle of Chaos
We call our process for scheduling “Service Drive Judo.” They’ll say they have a bunch of waiters because their customers don’t go by appointments, so they can’t set it up on 20-minute intervals. I’ll ask to go in and listen to the BDC for a little bit. They say they don’t make appointments because we don’t make it easy. I’ve literally had this happen where they schedule someone for 10:40 AM and the customer asks if it’s okay to drop it off at 7:00. The BDC says no problem, but no—7:00 is the appointment. Go listen to some phone calls or go out front at 7:00 in the morning to get a different perspective. If you’re convinced your situation is different, you’ll be right, but communication issues are a symptom, not the problem. We want to put the customers on a track like a train.
Putting Customers on a Track
We set the expectations, but we’re also doing that to ourselves. When we log it and write it down, we’re putting them on a track. We’re clearly setting expectations and asking for feedback because our expectations are only as good as their ability to function inside of them. Dave Anderson used to say if your people suck, then you suck. Our job is to coach you to be better. When you ask how to get advisors to do walkarounds, when did that become negotiable? When we’ve done our job setting up a system where people can function, we still sometimes allow people to freelance. If you’re asking how to get advisors to call customers, you’re allowing that to happen. It isn’t happening in a vacuum. Your goals are your identity and your identity are your goals.
Standards and Identity
If you want to create an incredible customer experience and mentor future leaders, then we’re going to have a higher standard of what is acceptable. It’s more work; you can’t just sit in your office and ignore everything. You have to be out there, proactive, and listening. Our high-performing clients expect themselves to perform at a high level. They don’t tolerate underperformance. If you don’t care about customers, you can’t be here. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person; it just means you don’t fit. If an advisor doesn’t like people, put them in the warranty department. Their job is customers. It’s like training to win an Olympic gold in swimming but you can’t swim. When you ask how to get people to communicate, you’re confessing you’re not holding people to a standard. Your identity is just to get through the day.
Excellence vs. Maintenance
You’re not striving for anything bigger; you’re just maintaining something and trying to stay out of trouble. The managers that get in the most trouble are the ones just trying to survive and maintain. They’re closed off and not asking questions. They just want to get back to being left alone. Your identity is your goal and your goal is your identity. You’re either somebody who performs or you’re somebody who is a steward of responsibility. Our coaches have a track record of being given responsibility and making more of it than average. They became teachers and mentors because that was their identity. You’ll never meet a happy irresponsible person. When you’re given responsibility and do a good job, it’s fulfilling. Decide to be the person that is the solution and makes things better.
Becoming the Solution
I just tried to do the best I could with what was in front of me and then my opportunities got bigger. If the line is out the door, go ask one question in the BDC. In five minutes, you’ll figure out what is wrong. You’ll find one person in there and the phone’s ringing off the hook. They’re not loading the shop; there’s no intention to it. Effective communication starts with having a system, putting customers on a track, and knowing what you allow. It’s your identity. Think about the system first, not the symptoms. You will get lost in the symptoms. We control this; it is up to us to build a system that serves the customers. Great stuff. Thanks everybody. We’ll see you next time on Service Drive Evolution.
Final Outro
Thanks so much for watching this episode of Service Drive Revolution. We’re uploading new stuff every day, so make sure you subscribe and click the bell icon so you don’t miss out. If you have a question you’d like us to answer on the show, call 833-ASK-SDR, and we’ll answer your question on the show. That’s 833-ASK-SDR. For special deals on our books and training, head over to offers.chriscollinsinc.com. I’m Chris Collins, and I’ll see you in the next video.
🔗 Related Resources
- Intentional Goal Setting for Service Managers in Fixed Ops
- Unapplied Labor in Fixed Ops: What SERVICE MANAGERS Must Fix Now
- How Service Managers Can Set Goals That Actually Stick in 2026
Feel free to explore the linked articles above for deeper insights into each strategy. If you have any further questions or need additional resources, don’t hesitate to ask!
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