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Capturing Your Share of the Service Market

Cover story Denise L. Rondini | Editor | drondini@rrpub.com Capturing The Service Market Knowing a ﬂeet’s pain points can help you design a service experience that will lead to more business in your shop. he Class 6 through 8 trucks and trailers on the road today represent a staggering 500,000 service labor hours worth of opportunity. That translates into $30 billion, according to Stu MacKay, president of MacKay & Company. And unfortunately dealers are only capturing a small percentage of it. Many ﬂeets still are choosing to perform their own maintenance and repairs in house, even though it makes poor economic sense, because they believe it takes too long to get vehicles in to your shops, too long for those vehicles to be repaired once they do get into a bay and the repairs are too costly. According to a recent study of ﬂeets conducted by C CJ, sister publication to Successful Dealer, even for vehicles still under warranty, two-thirds of all ﬂeets are doing their own preventive maintenance in house, more than half do their own brake work and a third handle steering and suspension work and electrical work in their own shops. The one place where dealers are seeing any signiﬁcant work is engines. Once the warranty has expired, those percentages climb even higher, with more than three-quarters of the ﬂeets surveyed doing their own PM work, nearly threequarters doing brake work and close to 70 percent doing steering and suspension and electrical work. And the engine work that was sent to dealers while the vehicle Your Share Of T was under warranty is once again taken back in house. Regardless of ﬂeet size, in surveys conducted by MacKay & Co., ﬂeets have repeatedly indicated that they would like to outsource more of their service work, but in fact have ended up doing more work in their own shops. The complexity of the repair is the most important factor in a ﬂeet’s decision to outsource, according to the survey results. This is followed by the length of time to complete the repair. What Fleets Want Fleets in the survey cited turnaround time as the most important reason—aside from the quality of the work— in choosing an outside service provider. Nearly twothirds said that the inability to get a vehicle into truck dealers’ shops for service in a timely manner was the No. 1 problem they had with outsourcing repairs. Fifty-nine percent had the same issue with independent service shops. Length of time to diagnose the repair was their second biggest complaint. Chas Voyles, service director, Truck Centers, Troy, Ill., says, “The single biggest concern is downtime that the ﬂeet incurs whenever it brings a truck in for service. Time is money to these people and we, as service providers, need to put an emphasis on that.” 18 | SUCCESSFUL DEALER | August 2010

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