Technicians are hard to find, and once you do, most aren’t satisfied with their jobs. In fact, 79% of technicians have considered leaving the industry. While many dealerships are trying to find technicians to hire, they’re also evaluating what makes their job challenging and how to make it better.

If you provide an outlet for technicians to work smarter, you can acknowledge their struggles, and help your dealership run more efficiently. This means more money in your pocket and in theirs. To figure out how to do this, let’s take a look at three of the biggest challenges technicians face and how you can help overcome them.

1. Wasted Effort

Nothing is more demoralizing to a technician than performing a thorough inspection and the advisor doesn’t present recommendations to the customer. This can really feel like a waste of time and effort on the technician’s part and potentially lead to not working as hard in the future.

Advisors should have a standard process that ensures they’re able to easily present the technician’s findings to the customer 100% of the time. To take it a step further, if the customer declines the work but returns later to have it done, it needs to be dispatched to the technician that found it.

Technicians and advisors need a concrete process that ensures the dealership’s expectations are met. When it comes to the inspection and presenting the findings, it can be tempting to cut corners when they’re short on time. With technology that forces these processes, technicians feel valued, customers are impressed, and advisors are upselling.

2. Inefficient Dispatching

Your technicians rely on your dispatcher to get work to them quickly, but is your dispatcher or dispatching tool also giving them the work efficiently? Technicians need to have a qualified RO in their hands as fast as possible to keep getting cars out the door, and your dispatching process can’t leave them on unnecessary standby.

Technicians should be able to stay in their bays and have the next RO assigned to them automatically in the system once their previous job is complete. This helps them maximize the hours they are able to book and alleviates headaches for both your technicians and your dispatchers.

3. Too Much Walking

Technicians are frequently walking away from their bays. Whether it be to get parts from the parts counter or walking to ask the advisor a question, this back and forth is wasted time and money.

When technicians have to leave their bays, they are not working on vehicles. Technicians want better, more streamlined communication with advisors and the parts department. Give them accurate parts pricing and availability at their fingertips. Allow them to type notes on the RO for advisors to see instantly. Provide them a way to message with parts to ask questions. When you keep techs in their bays, you cut down on time-consuming walking.

Turning Challenge into Opportunity

By understanding these challenges, you can implement a few small changes that will lead to  better processes and more opportunity for your technicians and your dealership as a whole. This technician shortage is not going away any time soon. Moving forward with the right technology, dealerships can improve the job so that more people want to enter the industry and less people want to leave.

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