Four Tips to Reduce Staff Turnover at Your Dealership

In new-car dealerships, employee morale and retention are crucial challenges. In addition to hurting business performance, high turnover has a major financial cost. Dealership owners and managers must take measures to maintain their teams’ engagement, motivation, and satisfaction in order to lessen these issues.

You can construct a stronger, more profitable firm that employees will want to stay with by utilizing technology, placing an emphasis on perks, and developing a fun workplace environment.

In a prior article, we talked about how to keep your workforce motivated and happy, and we described how dealerships boost morale:

providing training and onboarding for certain platforms

teaching soft skills to employees

holding internal workshops that team members lead

constructing a certification scheme to gamify staff training

granting access to online educational resources

With that as a starting point, let’s look at what else you can do to keep employees, especially given the staff shortages that are currently affecting dealerships.

Utilize technology to support and engage employees

Making labor less monotonous contributes to employee satisfaction. Every step counts, whether it’s increasing the capacity or effectiveness of the service lanes or streamlining the administrative processes.

Modern technology provides ever-more-useful ways to support and engage workers. For instance, digital assistants can help reduce workloads and enhance customer experiences, which will make staff happier and more motivated.

Digital assistants free up employees to concentrate on tasks that are more focused on serving customers by handling duties like scheduling service appointments and answering questions about store hours. Busy work is a common cause of employee burnout.

By offering more assistance, the use of digital assistants also improves the working environment and job satisfaction. Since digital assistants can serve as a safety net, employees no longer have to be concerned about things like missing inbound calls while making outgoing calls.

Similarly to this, giving sales professionals a digital retailing option can help them spend less time on each sale they make and less time on clients who aren’t genuinely ready to buy.

You may make your dealership’s operations more interesting, encouraging, and productive by integrating technology. However, having fantastic benefits and a fun work atmosphere definitely helps set the stage for high levels of happiness.

Give the benefits that employees care about the top priority

The retention and engagement of employees are greatly aided by a robust benefits package. Offering complete benefits like dependable health insurance, retirement plans, flexible work schedules, and ongoing training can significantly impact how happy your employees are overall.

Traditional performance-based pay systems are less appealing to millennials in particular (who make up over 60% of dealership recruits) than a tolerable work-life balance and competitive compensation. In light of the current labor shortage, failing to present a compelling offer here runs the danger of losing mechanics to rival dealers and businesses.

Of course, sometimes your budget won’t allow for everything, so consider what advantages you can give your staff to make your dealership stand out from the competition. The largest rewards aren’t necessarily monetary, so you might want to talk this over with your workers to find out what would matter most to them.

You can show your dedication to the well-being of your staff by adjusting to the times and providing flexibility, simple schedule modifications, and even telecommuting (at least for select roles, such as BDC employees).

Establish a pleasant work environment

Employee engagement is greatly influenced by compassionate leadership and an inclusive culture. Although there are endless options, these are some good places to start:

Create a culture of open and honest communication by enforcing an open-door policy, conducting frequent meetings where workers may voice their issues, and soliciting feedback from employees (whether or not it is anonymous). This strategy cultivates teamwork and trust while enhancing employee appreciation. Make sure to swiftly address any workplace problems and provide workers with a sense of support.

Celebrate your victories and acknowledge them: A little appreciation for effort or a job well done can go a long way. Recognize and honor individual and group accomplishments with accolades, prizes, or modest gifts of thanks. Celebrating wins can inspire your team and foster feelings of pride and unity.

Give a clear direction for moving forward; nobody wants to feel stuck. Employee satisfaction depends on offering free training and detailing professional advancement paths. You may improve the work environment and increase retention rates by assisting technicians and advisers in their development.

Retention bonuses can be a major benefit, whether someone doesn’t have much higher they can climb or you just want to retain high-performing personnel. Offer better incentives to those who stay longer. Sometimes this is a one-time incentive that increases with each passing year, or you might want to think about setting up predetermined wage increases that employees can anticipate as they work for the company longer. These kinds of incentives should be made apparent from the beginning so that participants have something to strive for.

However, it’s not always easy to create a pleasant workplace.

Boost client satisfaction

Which dealership would you want to work for: one with a positive reputation where clients frequently enter with accusatory overtones and the impression that you’re out to swindle them?

It’s obvious that the second work environment sounds stressful and unwelcoming; it’s not somewhere you’d look forward to going to every day.

Dealerships struggle to dispel persistent myths about their reliability, from the service department to the sales personnel. We’ve written a lot about increasing customer satisfaction at dealerships because of this. Take into account some of these suggestions to improve the customer experience your staff has:

Be proactive in resolving typical service issues.

Use customer feedback loops and roadmaps for improving customer satisfaction to deal with typical problems.

Enhance consumer communication channels to boost transparency and enhance the experience after the sale or service.

Provide prepaid maintenance plans in the service lane so that consumers may save money and the staff can spot issues before they become costly.

Most dealerships are unaware of this final point about providing prepaid maintenance in the service lane, therefore, we developed a checklist for creating and promoting one of these programs at your dealership.