5 Ways to Be a Better F&I Manager
Being a finance and insurance (F&I) manager means that you must build a strong performance record in your field. Here are 5 ways for a F&I manager to increase your sales while also decreasing perceived pressure.
Regular Training is Essential
Target audiences tend to change over time, so having consistent professional training can help boost your skills and experience to match your customer’s needs. Moreover, great training can equip you with high-level selling techniques and strategies, which results in better sales performance.
Having a well-designed F&I manager training program can prepare you for a highly competitive and demanding position.
Increase Focus on Compliance
Being an F&I manager requires you to adhere to complex regulations, where it is integral to avoid any compliance setback.
Having the right information, ensuring security, and being efficient in handling paperwork ensures top-notch customer service. This allows you to sell more products while reducing perceived pressures.
Have Visual Aid and Sales Tools
Customers are better able to understand the benefits of your products when you use visual tools (iTapMenu). Being able to present graphs, pictures, and other comprehensible reports can add value to your products.
Furthermore, you should also use customer testimonials and other independent research which fits the interest of your customer. This assures that you have a competitive advantage as a F&I manager as you can effectively communicate how you can help your customer.
Use Menus for Consistency
As a F&I manager you can successfully sell more products through menus. This makes sure that you communicate clearly with your customers, while also providing them options and increasing their awareness of your other products.
A menu also tracks your performance as a F&I manager, therefore making it a very important compliance tool.
If your customers are well informed of their choices, you will be able to maximize your opportunity to gain more income. It also ensures that you reduce any perceived pressures since a menu also guarantees compliance with laws and regulations that apply.
Be Efficient with Time
The best way to boost customer satisfaction is to not take up too much of your customer’s time. F&I managers are expected to be efficient, especially since time slows down in the perspective of the customer when entering the dealership.
Use a variety of tools that allow you to communicate information properly in a small amount of time. This makes you effective in sales, reduces your opportunity cost, and allows you to engage with more customers.
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Important Skills Of The Service Department
1. Interact with People in a Friendly Manner (People Skills)
Your Service Writer deals with people on a regular basis – from taking customer bookings and providing them with estimates to interacting with suppliers. Someone who is unable to be friendly and polite during those proceedings situations can easily drive customers away.
In addition, a Service Writer may also have to handle customer complaints, which requires a certain level of diplomacy. Given how delicate such situations can be, you don’t want someone who’s either too irritable or shy to be involved in them.
For best results, try to find someone who enjoys talking to people and solving problems. This will make all the difference to your dealership’s customer experience.
2. Communicate Effectively
One of the key responsibilities of a Service Writer/Service Advisor is to effectively communicate customer needs to service technicians. First and foremost, they must be able to clearly explain to your customers what repairs should be performed and why – without confusing them.
Secondly, they must also be able to relay customers’ requests to your service technicians (using tools like Service Manager Pro), without confusing them either, while managing their repair schedules.
So, it’s not enough for a Service Writer to just be friendly – they must also be able to clearly convey vital information to everyone involved.
3. Correctly Interpret Customer Service Requests & Tech Recommendations
To ensure your techs know what to do and to meet your customers’ service expectations, your Service Writer must be very good at understanding everything they say.
Often, customers don’t know exactly what kind of repairs they may need. It’s the Service Writer’s job to “decipher” what they want and then write it all down. This relates directly to having great communication skills, since the process involves asking a lot of questions, many of which cannot be scripted, to ensure clarity.
But customers are only half the equation. Your techs have recommendations of their own, so being able to understand what they mean and then communicate it all to the customer is equally important.
If your Service Writer is unable to understand what is needed, they can end up miscommunicating that information and reflect negatively on the dealership.
4. Understand the Technology
Being great at understanding people will do your Service Writer no good if they don’t understand the technology they’re servicing. Whether they are interacting with your techs, ordering parts, or looking at complex tech documents, they need to know how your products work if they want to truly be helpful. Otherwise, how can they ensure that your techs know what to do?
5. Make Accurate Notes & Calculations
Service Writers have to do a lot of writing and math, so if they’re not good at forming legible sentences or making correct calculations, they can cause blunders and slow down your dealership’s services. After all, a Service Writer is not just responsible for talking to customers and service technicians, but also for ordering parts, sending out invoices, and taking inventory. As you probably already know, making mistakes in those areas can be costly.
6. Think on Their Feet
There are a lot of different variables involved in servicing equipment – from meeting customer expectations to ordering the right parts – which means that there are plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong. Parts may arrive late, techs may run behind schedule, or your customers may simply change their minds.
When something inevitably doesn’t go according to plan, your Service Writer must be able to quickly resolve the problem. They have to be able to analyze it and then come up with a solution that makes the customer happy and doesn’t strain your bottom line.
Great Service Managers and Advisors are essential to any successful service department, especially given all the changes our industry has faced over the last decade. An exceptionally good service manager/advisor achieves a hard working, productive and effective workforce that punches above its weight in its performance.
Responsibilities:
- Meeting with customers to discuss their needs
- Creating price estimates and time needed for repairs
- Requesting parts needed
- Scheduling service to specific jobs
- Communicating the needs of customers to your service technicians
- Entering Work Order details into your dealership’s management system
- Communicating information regarding parts, Work Orders, costs, warranties, time, etc.
- Communicating Work Order statuses to customers and relaying any additional work needed and associated costs
- Tracking repairs and problem causes
- Tracking and processing customer warranties and insurance
As the industry progresses and new trends emerge, it’s important that your service team stays sharp. Enrolling your Service Department in training courses like those offered through Rider's Advantage will ensure your team brushes up on industry best practices.