WASHINGTON, D.C, March 16, 2022 — The Marine Retailers Association of the Americas and 44 other members of the Hunt Fish 30×30 Coalition submitted formal comments to the Federal Register regarding the American Conservation and Stewardship Atlas, a key component of the Biden Administration’s “America the Beautiful” Initiative, also referred to as “Thirty by Thirty.” The recommendations urge the Administration to identify the lands and waters considered to be “conserved” based on conservation outcomes rather than arbitrary criteria. The groups also highlight the importance of working with entities such as state fish and wildlife management agencies, regional fish and wildlife management authorities, tribes, conservation-focused NGOs and private landowners who are most knowledgeable and best equipped to advance pragmatic and successful conservation efforts throughout the U.S.
“Thirty by Thirty” is a global initiative started by the environmental community that seeks to protect the Earth’s biodiversity and address climate change by protecting 30 percent of the planet’s lands and waters by the year 2030. “Thirty by Thirty” proposals were originally linked to global land and water protected area targets established by the United Nation’s Convention on Biological Diversity.
“We are honored to endorse the recommendations made by the Hunt Fish 30×30 Coalition, as this group ensures that conservation is done in a way that preserves access for boater, anglers, hunter and all other types of outdoor enthusiasts,” said Chad Tokowicz, Government Relations Manager for the MRAA. “Users of these resources are the best conservationists and it is imperative the we develop a 30×30 plan that includes those who have been lifelong stewards of the very resources it seeks to benefit.”
The Hunt Fish 30×30 Coalition’s recommendations reflect the priorities first outlined in the “Hunting and Fishing Community Statement on the 30×30 Initiative” that was developed in response to “Thirty by Thirty” legislation introduced at the state level in 2020. In the statement signed by 66 sporting-conservation organizations, the Coalition highlights the important role sportsmen and sportswomen have played and continue to play in the conservation of fish, wildlife and natural ecosystems in the United States.
Recognizing this history of conservation successes, the current recommendations present an opportunity to advance pragmatic, effective conservation efforts while identifying several existing measures that should be included in the Atlas. The updated recommendations focus on empowering the entities best equipped to identify and advance effective conservation solutions by strongly encouraging the Administration to partner with these organizations during the development of the Atlas. Furthermore, the recommendations provide critical details on what the sporting-conservation community believes should and, often more importantly, should not be included as criteria for inclusion in the Atlas.
The organizations believe that for America the Beautiful to be successful, the following fundamental elements must be included in any “Thirty by Thirty” policy: •Clearly defining “conservation” to support the active management and sustainable use of our nation’s public trust fish and wildlife resources. •Collaborating closely with entities devoted to achieving measurable biodiversity conservation objectives, including: oState fish and wildlife management agencies oRegional fish and wildlife management bodies oMembers of the sporting-conservation community oThe more than 500 federally recognized Native American tribes oPrivate landowners (through voluntary, incentive-based opportunities) •Recognizing and including all efforts directly contributing to biodiversity conservation in the forthcoming American Conservation and Stewardship Atlas, including those on lands managed for multiple uses. If you would like to learn more about the America the Beautiful initiative and opportunities for you to get involved reach out to Chad Tokowicz, Government Relations Manager for the MRAA, at Chad@mraa.com, or 978-569-5127.
About the Marine Retailers Association of the Americas At the Marine Retailers Association of the Americas, we believe that for the marine industry to thrive, the retail organizations that interact with the boaters in their community must thrive. With that in mind, MRAA works to create a strong and healthy boating industry by uniting those retailers, providing them with opportunities for improvement and growth, and representing them with a powerful voice. For more information, visit MRAA.com or contact us at 763-315-8043.
How this simple task closes the gap between dealership expectations and dealership results
As a dealership manager, you know how you expect your employees to operate. You know the steps they should take when a boat arrives for service, as each boat goes through maintenance or repairs, and as each boat gets returned to its owner after the repair order is closed.
In most dealerships however, there remains a significant gap between the process that you believe exists, the individual and unique processes that actually exist with each different employee, and the processes that should exist to help you achieve your business goals.
The frustration that bubbles up in dealerships as problems occur and reoccur aren’t the fault of your individual employees. Those team members simply execute tasks the way they have been trained or told or the way they have seen others do it. What they need in those cases — to prevent problems from occurring in the first place, to identify and correct problems as they take place, to create consistencies across your business and to move your dealership from reactive mode to proactive mode — are documented processes, or process maps.
Let start with the basics: What is a process map?
A process map offers a visual aid for picturing the inputs, activities, outputs, people, and resources involved in specific functions within your dealership. Process maps are created to document every step your business takes in delivering a product or service, and they are used to train employees and set the expectation for the steps to be followed by all employees, 100 percent of the time to ensure consistency across your business. Ultimately, they act as tangible blueprints to set the expectation for exactly how your customer is being served.
Documented processes are essential for well-run dealerships because, as you will find if you look closely enough, there are variants in the way specific tasks are being conducted by your employees. In today’s fast-paced environment where consumers’ expectations become higher and higher by the day, process maps are also critical to delivering higher quality services faster than ever before.
Another huge benefit of employing process maps in your dealership is that it frees up management to manage the big-picture part of the business while providing clarity and structure so the employees know what’s expected of them. Without such tools, managers field too many questions and stay bogged down in the day-to-day operations, unable to focus on strategic direction and oversight. And if you don’t believe me, just watch how many of your dealership principal colleagues are fielding phone calls and stepping out of the room during important dealer meeting presentations.
Creating a process map
With the heightened pressure on your service department and the related focus the industry has placed on reducing repair event cycle times, or the amount of time it’s taking for us to get customers back on the water, I’m going to focus on service department operations. If you want to learn more about sales department process maps, Certified Dealers can access a Guide to Improving Your Sales Process Maps in the Continuous Certification Course Fill the Gaps in Your Dealership’s Sales Process.
A service process map should start with an action or a trigger that puts the service process in motion. That trigger should, in some way, originate with the customer, usually through some form of a service inquiry. Many dealers think the service process begins at the write-up or check-in phase, but everything leading up to the check-in is a huge part of the experience and key to generating work for the department.
At famed customer service company Ritz Carlton, Founder Horst Schultze suggests that the first three touch points for a stay at one of their hotels sets the stage for the entire visit. If all goes well with reservations, the front door, and reception, the rest of the stay goes perfectly. However, if the ball is dropped in any of those first touch points, it will likely result in the guest looking and finding trouble later in their stay.
Note: I’m featuring several steps for building a great process map below. If you would like to access best practices for these steps, please visit here.
STEPS 1 and 2: Initial Inquiry and Scheduling
The same could be said for your service department. If you would like a customer’s experience in your service department to be more like a stay at the Ritz, shoring up those first touch points is crucial. Therefore, your process map should document how you want that initial inquiry and the scheduling of service to transpire, whether those communications take place over the phone, via email or texting or in person. No matter what method the customer uses, you should consider using an automated method of confirming and following-up with the customer.
STEP 3: Drop Off
The next step you should illustrate in your service process map, still before the check-in or write-up, is the drop-off. This step should focus on being welcoming and should not be challenging for the customer — with obstacles or tight spaces that make it difficult to maneuver a trailer. The beauty of maintaining a process map is that it allows you to examine all these transition points and either change, update or fill any gaps in your standard operating procedures that might leave the customer unfulfilled with the service experience.
STEP 4: Write-Up
The Check-In or Write-Up is the final touchpoint in the first impression a customer will have with your shop. The Service Writer or Advisor typically greets customers, listens to the problems they’re having, communicates to the technicians what that problem is, and then acts as the liaison between the dealership and the customer every step of the way. I like to tell dealers to ensure your process map covers the three Cs: Complaint, Cause and Correction.
Start by identifying or confirming the Complaint. That’s the mission of the Check-In or Write-Up, and the details of this phase should be outlined in the process map’s accompanying Standard Operating Procedures, including at a minimum the condition of the boat, promised ready date, upselling opportunities and offers, pre-approvals and payment.
STEP 5: Dispatch
Once the boat gets checked-in and the customer is certain their complain is heard with as much detail as possible documented, it’s time to Dispatch the service to the best technician, which could mean next available, or the technician with the skills or certifications that best match the need for resolving the complaint.
STEP 6: Repair
Completing Job or the Repair step in the process is typically represented by the same size square as others on the process map, but in reality, it’s the biggest part of the process and risks becoming bottlenecked when techs are pulled for emergencies or other non-tech work. The most important advice I can offer in this step is that your process map should document that your techs need to focus on work that only they can perform. Your technicians represent your only opportunity to generate revenue in service, and therefore, they should not be working on non-revenue generating tasks. Your process map should outline who — not the technician — should be portering boats, finding parts, searching for tools, or other administrative tasks.
Dealers should consider adding a critical team member to their service ranks to help improve the tech’s efficiency level — an Expeditor. The Expeditor role and terminology is borrowed from the restaurant business, where kitchens are challenged with getting food from various stations to tables while they are still hot and fresh. An Expeditor serves as the dispatcher, who announces to the stations to “work” a menu item and then signals them to plate the food with a “push” order. This keeps the kitchen talent working on the right orders at the right time ensuring hot and fresh food being delivered to hungry customers.
You, too, can enjoy this level of efficiency and effectiveness by adding an Expeditor, who, with a little time on the job coupled with some boat, engine and shop knowledge, will become your champion of efficiency. He or she can ensure the right boat is in the right place, with the right technician at the right time, every time. An Expeditor alone keeps the shop efficient and Service Writer focused on communicating and selling service to the boat owners.
When the job is complete and the tech has proudly signed off on the job that it was done right, the repair order should be completely documented with the other two Cs — Cause and Correction — so that anyone looking at the RO can thoroughly understand what the issue was and how it was fixed.
Step 7: Detail & Delivery
By now, as the Service Manager, you’re feeling that your service process is tight, and all goes smoothly for your customers. However, just as the Write-Up step served as a first impression, the cleanliness of the boat at customer pick-up or delivery will be the lasting impression. So, don’t let all these mapped out efforts go down the drain by delivering a dirty boat with greasy fingerprints.
Most dealers refer to this as Detail and Delivery, but I recommend you use the term “courtesy wash” to create an expectation of what’s promised. Be sure to include a well-timed courtesy wash that will leave a lasting glory for a job well done and the dealership. Service Writers can use the courtesy wash to motivate the owner to pick-up their boat on time by asking, “When are you picking up the boat? I want to have it courtesy washed for you so it’s clean when you pick it up.” Whatever process you document, don’t shortcut the delivery or pick up, lasting impressions are very profitable in the form of repeat and referral business.
The job isn’t complete until the customer is followed-up with. Customer feedback is so very valuable, whether positive or negative, and I recommend you include this follow-up into your process maps. The positives are valuable when they are shared with the crew; the negatives are your time to shine because emergencies don’t cripple your shop, everyone will learn from the mistake, and you can now update your process maps to prevent the problem from happening again and to ensure you delight your customers.
Updating your process maps
Once you have published your first version of a Service Process Map — first version, because an effective process map is a living document that should always be updated as new and better practices or methods are adopted — it is critical that you continue to learn how to improve them every single day. Your first pass at this won’t look the same after months of improvements are added in. You will make mistakes, but documented process maps give you the means to adjust and improve.
Updating you process maps is the cure for complacency, which is the first step toward mediocrity. Grow big ears and listen to your crew, listen to your customers, and get insight into new ideas, tactics, strategies and best practices from other sources, such as our team and our products and services here at the MRAA, as well as our fantastic partners, to help you continue to update your processes in pursuit of a better result and a stronger business.
Process maps benefit business like yours in so many ways. They help you focus your team on the customer’s perspective. They improve the start-to-finish process while improving cross-department communication. They serve as excellent training tools for new team members, and they will improve consistency across your team. Meanwhile, process maps boost efficiency by uncovering flaws, obstacles and bottlenecks that hold you back, like extra steps, activities, forms, reports, or approvals. Finally, process maps build transparency into your processes by providing you, the manager, with the big picture of gaps that exist between what you expect and what your business actually delivers to its customers.
This blog was published as part of MRAA’s focus on helping dealers get their customers back on the water more quickly. Check out more resources here.
If your service department ran as smoothly as a well-oiled machine, there’s a great chance that you could improve upon your Repair Event Cycle Times and get more boats in and out of your shop while also reducing the stress on your staff and driving greater levels of revenue.
The path to getting to that point is quite simple. It’s through the creation and refinement of a service department process map.
Your service department requires great coordination, several contributors, the right parts inventory and a little bit of luck … all just to get a single boat repaired, let alone navigating a whole day’s, week’s or month’s worth of ROs.
There are several key elements of every service department’s success, and if any one step doesn’t go well, it can create a domino effect, hampering the entire system, delaying repairs, agitating customers, hurting your smooth system and reducing your potential.
Mapping those activities allows you to get more clarity on your processes, identify places for improvement and become more efficient. Your service manager and your service team should take the time to write down each step, from initial customer inquiry to post-service follow-up, as well as the details of what goes into each step.
If you haven’t yet process mapped your service department, here’s an initial set of steps you can start with:
Initial Customer Inquiry
Scheduling
Write-Up
Dispatch
Parts
Repair
Quality Control
Detail & Delivery
Note: To help MRAA Members further, view this page of best practicesfor downloadable recommendations and best practices that other dealers have offered and MRAA has compiled for your benefit. Check them out and implement them into your processes.
After you’ve mapped out your shop’s unique approach to conducting business, including those details mentioned above, you should go back and ensure each step is accounted for, and that you are taking the customer’s experience into account along the way.
While it takes time to create a process map that works for your dealership, the time spent working on your business will be worth the effort. If we can help you shorten up the time commitment or provide any guidance, you should enroll in the Marine Industry Certified Dealership program, which offers you a sample service process map as well as guidance from a Certification Consultant to make the process work perfectly for your dealership’s unique circumstances.
With a service process map in place, your dealership will become more efficient, you’ll be able to service more boats, and you’ll drive greater revenues at the same time.
Note: MRAA has an entire library of resources available to help you reduce the amount of time it takes to get customers back on the water. Check it out here.
Imagine if you could share your knowledge of recreational boating and your passion for the industry in a way that ensures your voice is heard. Sometimes it feels like you share your thoughts only to be overlooked. There is a way to share your insights and ensure your educated insights on boating issues are seen and clearly heard. You can confidently continue your advocacy efforts and be part of larger team by becoming an industry ambassador.
The MRAA is looking for more dedicated dealers to join our Dealer Ambassador program, because when dealers talk, decision makers listen! The Dealer Ambassador program is a team of dealers throughout the country who are willing to engage at a state and federal level on policy priorities of the recreational boating industry. These range from testifying Infront of Congress and your state legislature, to simply forging relationships with legislators in your state.
Currently, there are Dealer Ambassadors in every state but FOUR! We are currently seeking industry leaders in these states: South Carolina, New Mexico,West Virginia and South Dakota! The entire MRAA team is determined to add committed dealers in these states (and potentially others, too), so we have representation in every state of the union.
If you are interested in joining the Ambassador program or want more information, email Chad Tokowicz, Government Relations Manager.
February 23, 2022, Orlando, FL – As part of its continued growth, momentum and long-term direction, Regal & Nautique of Orlando (RNO) has named Wanda Kenton Smith its chief marketing officer with responsibility to direct and manage its internal marketing department and all associated marketing activities.
Kenton Smith, an award-winning marketer who brings more than 35 years of senior level, global marine experience to the organization, has worked with the retail dealership in a consulting capacity for more than five years.
“Regal & Nautique of Orlando has enjoyed a remarkable upward trajectory over several years and considering our aggressive plans for the future, we felt the time was right to enhance our internal marketing leadership,” said owner and GM Jeff Husby. “We’ve known and worked with Wanda for many years. She brings not only a passion for our dealership and the brands and products we represent, but a unique skill set and extensive experience that should positively support and impact our business growth.”
“I’ve long been a fan of Jeff Husby and Regal & Nautique of Orlando,” added Kenton Smith. “I’m so impressed by the significant growth the dealership has experienced which is attributed to the exceptional quality and caliber of the entire organization and its high-performance leadership team. I’m excited by the opportunity to become an integral part of this awesome team and to contribute to its continued growth and success.”
Kenton Smith’s career includes stints as editor of both b2b and b2c marine publications including serving as a current national columnist for both Soundings Trade Only and Boating Industry magazines; former VP of marketing for a major boat manufacturer; 13-year owner and president of a $20M full-service advertising agency and PR firm with 35+ global and national marine accounts; chief marketing officer of the world’s largest boat club; marketing chief for two leading marine retail organizations; former president of Marine Marketers of America; plus current marketing consultant and owner of Kenton Smith Marketing where she continues to manage a handful of national marine accounts.
ABOUT REGAL & NAUTIQUE of ORLANDO Regal & Nautique of Orlando is the #2 ranked dealer in North America for 2021 according to the Boating Industry Top 100. The dealership is a multiple award-winner including a three-time consecutive recipient of the Marine Retailers Association of the America’s “Top Ten Greatest Dealerships to Work for in North America,” and was named “Dealer of the Year” by the Water Sports Industry Association in 2019. Its service department won the #1 “Best in Class” award 2x named by the editors of Boating Industry magazine. RNO has received dozens of top sales and service awards among the boat and engine brands it represents, along with the coveted National Marine Manufacturers Association CSI Award for both Regal and Nautique. Owner Jeff Husby was also named as a BOLD MOVES recipient by Boating Industry magazine for his significant leadership contributions and impact to the marine industry.
Regal & Nautique of Orlando represents new boat brands Nautique, Regal, Moomba, Supreme and South Bay Pontoons. The dealership also handles premium preowned boat sales and service. For more information about Regal & Nautique of Orlando, visit www.OrlandoBoats.com or call (407) 425-2628.
The recreational boating industry and outdoor recreation partners and agencies celebrate the Aquatic Invasive Species Awareness Week, which runs February 28 through March 4, 2022.
Aquatic Invasive Species (AIS) are aquatic organisms that invade ecosystems beyond their natural, historic range and whose introduction can cause significant economic and environmental damage to regions. While AIS are in every region of the U.S., several species are most visible to the recreational boating industry.
The Marine Retailers Association of the Americas continues to be an active partner to outdoor recreation and government agencies working to combat the spread of AIS by promoting changes in boat designs, boater education programs, and federal, state and local decontamination and inspection programs.
As the leading trade association for the North American boat dealers, MRAA has a responsibility to help prevent the spread of AIS, which cause long-term negative impacts to communities and ecosystems and threaten the future of recreational boating.
Industry stakeholders are encouraged to share resources with their networks and across their social channels, e-mails, and external communications with industry partners, including:
• North American Invasive Species Management Association (NAISMA) free webinars
• National Invasive Species Awareness Week free toolkit
• Three Things Boat and Trailer Manufacturers Can Do to Stop the Spread of AIS via LinkedIn
• “Clean, Drain, Dry: How Boaters Can Help Stop the Spread of AIS” via Discover Boating
Now in its 75th year and fourth generation of management, Strong’s Marine has long been the home of Super Service, and it’s not uncommon to hear President Jeff Strong speak on the importance of “client delight.”
So it comes as no surprise, then, to note that when the topic of Repair Event Cycle Times surfaced around in the marine industry in the early 2020s, Jeff and his team sat down for a conversation on what they could do to address the issue.
The result of this conversation generated nearly a dozen ideas for Strong’s and its manufacturer partners to consider in getting boaters serviced and quickly back on the water.
Check out this list here, and then entertain a similar conversation in your dealership. Not sure where to begin?
Your service department holds the key to a quality customer experience.
With the twists and turns of every new season, the needs and demands of boater buyers and owners change. These evolving needs, of course, are brought on by the ever-changing economy, technological advances, product development, consumer sentiment and satisfaction, and experiences found elsewhere in the market place.
For dealerships like yours, it can feel impossible to stay up to date and meet the sometimes-insane demands customers place on you and your team. Nowhere is that more evident than in your service department, where you feel handcuffed by unavailable parts, worldwide supply chain issues, and not enough technicians to go around. Yet the market place has conveniently timed those issues with the reality that everyone wants a boat and everyone who has a boat seems to have a service issue that needs rectified TODAY.
The whole mess is enough to make you second guess your career decisions, but I digress.
As the market place changes with those evolving needs, so should your focus on where to improve your go-to-market strategy. Today, partially due to the issues outlined above and partially due to the fact that your sales department is selling everything it can get its hands on, that means putting the focus on strengthening your service department.
Assuming you don’t want to philosophically rethink your entire service department by asking the one question this dealer asked, you can make an enormous impact simply
by focusing on your Repair Event Cycle Times. Not familiar with Repair Event Cycle Times, or RECT? You should be because it defines today’s leading customer experience metric.
Repair event cycles time is defined, most simply, as the amount of time it takes to repair a service issue and get customers back on the water. For some dealers, that means the time between drop-off and pick-up; for others, it means from the opening of an RO to closing it out and accepting payment.
How, exactly, you measure it is not as important as just making sure that you are measuring it, and more importantly that you are working to shorten the amount of time it’s taking to get customers back on the water.
Caption: This chart above shows the average number of days between the write-up and the close-out of the average repair order in the boating industry over a 12-month period from April 2020 through March 2021. These benchmarked statistics are being used to drive change in the boating industry. How do your numbers compare?
The chart should be enough evidence to convince you that we need to do better. If not, a recent survey MRAA conducted in partnership with the Recreational Boating & Fishing Foundation and Discover Boating, notes that one of the top two drivers of dissatisfaction among boaters who purchased their boat over the past couple years was the total turnaround time to get a boat in and back out from a service appointment. (For more insight into what’s happening with RECT at the dealership level, check out this study, too.)
I get it, and you get it. There’s a lot of factors working against you in this realm. The customers don’t get it, though, and candidly, I’ve heard many dealers report that their customers don’t care about supply chain or workforce shortages. All they care about is having a boat that runs.
The best dealership and service department managers will work to shield their customers from the ongoing, behind-the-scenes challenges we face, and rather, will work to instill better steps and efficiencies into their systems and processes. And the best managers will communicate in a much more proactive fashion like this dealer did.
6 fundamentals and 1 Pro Tip worth revisiting to help service to drive a better customer experience.
By Jesse Swain
Vice President of Customer Experience
Barletta Boats
Today’s dealers operate in an entirely different service environment than they did just a few short years ago, and some of the most successful dealers have started running their service departments a little differently to remain successful. Some of the service department fundamentals that I’ve identified in these dealers and that I’d like to share with you today are nothing new, and they will not only help drive greater efficiency but also help deliver a much better customer experience. Besides, these 6 fundamentals are always worth revisiting to help sharpen up your business.
1.Internal Communication
Highly successful dealers often practice excessive internal communication between department managers. Quick, daily huddles within the dealership can help ward off many unforeseen hiccups throughout the day. A great tool that helps keep everyone on the same page is software that can help with efficiency and aid in delegation. As a manufacturer, we can see the benefit this offers dealers, oftentimes, unfortunately, through the interactions we have with less-organized dealers. At those dealerships, lack of effective communication, delegation and accountability lead to multiple people from the same dealership contacting us for the same issue.
2.Customer Communication
Great dealers practice “getting ahead of it.” It’s always better to call a retail customer with a potentially disappointing update than it is to bury your head and wait for the customer to call requesting the status of their repair work. Some of the most common customer complaints we see on social media relate to a lack of communication — “They never called me back!” Once this complaint surfaces, it doesn’t matter how well you take care of them, because the customer experience has been spoiled.
3.Training
Ongoing training and cross-training helps service teams know their product and allows them to be capable of completing tasks in multiple areas of the department (Service Advisors who know how to handle warranty claims in the event the Warranty Admin is absent, etc.). Training opportunities at successful dealers can be as simple as sending Service staff to work Boat Shows for some much-needed customer face time. This helps your service staff get to know existing and new customers in a different environment than at the Service counter. Additionally, the best technicians in the industry are those that are invested in by their employers, whether that’s through manufacturer or other industry training opportunities, particularly to help them find be successful in the high-tech world we work in.
4.Dealer/Manufacturer relations
When dealers and manufacturers work together on all levels, the customer experience has a much better chance of being a great one. Nowhere is that more evident than in the service department, where dealers oftentimes rely on manufacturer support to take care of the customer. The most successful dealers typically strive to build good working relationships with manufacturers, and vice versa. One of the worst things a dealer could do for a customer is to not raise their hand and ask the question when something out of their realm or reach comes up. Strengthen your communications and relationships with manufacturers to improve the customer experience on all levels.
5.Parts Department Inventory
Great dealers know their fastest-moving parts and keep an inventory of them to minimize downtime and help keep customers on the water. Not only will it help keep customers happy, but it will help your service team become more efficient. Think about how much time is spent pulling the boat in from the lot, uncovering it, diagnosing the problems, and then covering it back up, and taking it back to the lot. Do you really want to do it more than once if you don’t have to? Keeping fast moving parts on your shelves will help.
6.Service Writing
The Service Writer has one of the most important roles in the dealership. Great Service Writers practice the “one and done” approach by touching on every different system within the boat and confirming that the customer doesn’t have any complaints other than the obvious one that the boat is in for. Many times, a small repair need gets overshadowed by a large one, and when the time comes to pick up the boat the customer realizes that they forgot to mention that the anchor light wasn’t working, which can cause more delays in getting to the water. Service Writers also have to opportunity to upsell other services and accessories during the initial boat check-in process, and some dealers even offer an incentive or commission for doing just that.
And here’s a Pro Tip: As they grow and add boat and engine brands, great dealers assign their Service Writers to specific brands, which helps with product familiarity and drives greater efficiency throughout the entire department.
There you have it. As dealers run into higher levels of customer demand and more challenges on the workforce and supply chain side of the business, getting back to some of these basic fundamentals. While they’re not necessarily new, they offer a good refresher in case your service department needs a good kick-start to get moving again.
A graduate of Universal Technical Institute, Jesse Swain spent 6 years as a technician at marine dealership and marina before spending another five years working for two different marine engine manufacturers. Today, Jesse is the VP of Customer Experience at Barletta Boat Co., where he uses his expertise in service management, warranty administration and troubleshooting to help Barletta and its dealer network drive outstanding levels of customer satisfaction.
MINNEAPOLIS, March 1, 2022 — The Marine Retailers Association of the Americas, in collaboration with VRZ Consulting, released the results of a comprehensive, marine industry service department study. The survey results, which featured insights from more than 260 marine service departments, outlines some of the challenges dealerships face in repairing boats more quickly.
The genesis of the study came out of a summer 2021 meeting that the MRAA Executive Committee held with its colleagues on the National Marine Manufacturers Association Executive committee, and specifically upon review of data supplied by MRAA’s partners at Lightspeed DMS. That data showed that industry repair cycle times, or the amount of time it’s taking to get customer boats serviced and back on the water, was exceeding industry expectations and only worsening.
“Today’s most significant metric when it comes to monitoring the boat ownership experience comes down to the repair event cycle times,” explains Matt Gruhn, MRAA President. “With a pandemic-inflamed perfect storm of issues on dealership service departments – impacted by technician shortages, supply chain issues and unprecedented demand – it has become critical for us to not only benchmark where we’re at as an industry but also to begin showcasing opportunities on how the industry can collaborate to begin implementing new approaches to getting customers back on the water more quickly.”
The study was sparked by the collection and publishing of Repair Event Cycle Times, or RECT, which when presented to the two associations’ executive committees showed that it was taking more than 50 days, on average, to service and return boats to customers. In the event of warranty work, data showed that it’s taking more than 70 days to repair boats.
Last fall, MRAA convened a work group of dealers, manufacturers and suppliers to begin addressing the issues and identifying solutions for reducing RECT. The results of that and subsequent conversations has transitioned into a focus MRAA will place on helping the industry improve its repair cycle times.
“I just love looking at what it takes to flip the switch from more of a reactive service department to more of a proactive service department operation,” says Valerie Ziebron of VRZ Consulting, who moderated the RECT strategy meeting. “When we’re talking about Repair Event Cycle Times, we’re talking about customers waiting for their boats. Ideally, we should be asking how we can make sure that we are fast tracking or expediting our service work when we can. We can be training our service writers and technicians to be looking for opportunities to get more work done more quickly and boats back in the hands of their customers. This study, the workshop and other subsequent conversations are already bringing ideas to the forefront.”
For those interested in viewing the full results of this survey, you can find them under the Free Resources Tab at www.MRAA.com/improveRECT. On this page, viewers will find numerous resources and opportunities to help them improve upon the repair event cycle times that challenge their profitability, CSI scores and overall customer experience.
About the Marine Retailers Association of the Americas At the Marine Retailers Association of the Americas, we believe that for the marine industry to thrive, the retail organizations that interact with the boaters in their community must thrive. With that in mind, MRAA works to create a strong and healthy boating industry by uniting those retailers, providing them with opportunities for improvement and growth, and representing them with a powerful voice. For more information, visit MRAA.com or contact us at 763-315-8043.
About Valerie Ziebron President VRZ Consulting Valerie and her team have decades of experience helping marine dealerships learn and adopt more proactive process. www.vrzconsulting.com
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