We Got the Power, Should Service CSIs Die, Return to LIVE Apple Events

‍SPEAKERS

Kyle Mountsier, Paul Daly

Paul Daly  00:23

I'm not gonna say it. But we probably have a good between the two of us seven, eight hours of working already. Gods coming up, but we gotta talk about the news first.

Kyle Mountsier  00:36

The people really bounce first. Because that's what's that's what's today. You know, hey, hands and hands in the dirt. Eyes on eyes on the clouds,

Paul Daly  00:49

the clouds. Sometimes its head in the clouds.

Kyle Mountsier  00:53

Sometimes I feel like right now.

Paul Daly  00:56

Yeah. Lately I've been wondering what my brain is up to, at certain times of the day. Like, have you ever been just so diluted, diluted with information that you're like? I don't know. Have you ever have you? Do you ever? Do you watch Stranger Things?

Kyle Mountsier  01:08

No, I can't do that show.

Paul Daly  01:10

Yeah, well, I've watched Stranger Things. And there's a scene where all these like little vampire bat things are like swarming around this one guy. And they're just attacking him from every angle. And he's got like this trash can live with nails in it and like some homemade spear. And that's kind of how I feel like with details around the middle of the 1990s Metallica is playing. So we are coming in. Let me just tell you, I saw a call sheet yesterday. And if you don't know what a call sheet is, so a call sheet is like where every detail nuanced piece of information, time organized. Phone numbers, dates, you know, names, session names, things you need to remember, links are all on one sheet. And ours is like six pages long. And I was like, dang, we got some details together. I wish we had a screenshot to show you. It's got some confidential information, so we probably couldn't anyway, but let me just say we are ready. We are ready for you at a soda con if you have not gotten your tickets. A soda con.com We still have tickets available. We're probably going to leave. Can you get them at the event? Do we figure that out yet?

Kyle Mountsier  02:13

Ah, that's a great question.

Paul Daly  02:15

I don't know maybe. But if you're a dealer, and you happen to drag yourself in there, we'll figure it out.

Kyle Mountsier  02:20

Let me just fly that the thing is what that one the bet. That's it.

Paul Daly  02:25

But I can say is we have like 1700 people registered for the Monday night party.

Kyle Mountsier  02:30

Yeah, that's gonna be legit. That's

Paul Daly  02:33

also we're sharing auto collabs episode streaming them today is Anthony Jean goalie actually, this is a super fresh one. We just had the interview in the conversation yesterday. So super, super fresh. Anthony is one of those guys that just gets it done. He's from Philly close to my heart knows how to just stay consistent over time and just lean in and deal with the change man steel with the change. Exactly.

Kyle Mountsier  02:53

Hey, if you're wondering what to do in Philly, listen to the episode because Oh, yeah, great suggestions with a little right hook when when you expect the jab. So just that that's true.

Paul Daly  03:03

I being from Philly. I was even like, that is where I would spend if I had an hour because that was the question right? If you had an hour to spend do something in Philly during a certain time What would you do? And he answered that question. brilliantly. I mean, just brilliantly

Kyle Mountsier  03:17

so brilliantly. Like A Native like local. You know, I was kind of embarrassed that that was like if you were in Nashville and someone was like Where should you go everyone's like Broadway, Broadway Broadway and then the Nashville people were like Nah,

Paul Daly  03:31

no, like keep going to Broadway Please don't Don't Don't let don't mess our local spot up. Yeah, Broadway, go to Broadway go to Broadway. All right, let's talk about some news. today. We got a couple of things going on. So let's talk about we felt like we needed to give you an overview. This is a first ever in the show, we're gonna give you an overview of several news stories. We do this a lot in our daily email, if you don't get it, you should get it. Uh, so to.com Sign up for the daily email. And a lot of times we'll pick a topic and then we'll give like three hits on it, right, three different stories that are all kind of related. So just like within 60 to 120 seconds, you can be like, Okay, I'm kind of caught up on that topic. So we're gonna do that in the in the show this morning. So today is all about the power. We're gonna give you four quick shots about electricity. It's the hot topic, so we're gonna start high level. So California yesterday experienced several temporary power outages. Despite Gavin Newsom telling residents there were no outages apparently according to Newsweek and the people without power. There were power outages.

Kyle Mountsier  04:33

Yeah, no power over here, everybody.

Paul Daly  04:36

Now we're good. We're good. Its powers. You just don't see it. So operators, you know, the regulatory operators, they ordered a stage three alert, which is the highest level before they start rolling blackouts. So everyone gets a text message on their phone being like, Yo, shut stuff off right now. And so residents actually reacted really quickly and they were able to avoid the major repercussions of rolling blackouts. And I can't remember what the data was. But that mean like that message went out and everyone's like, shut it down. Right. So the toasters went off, air conditioners went up to 78, Tesla's got unplugged it was the whole thing. And so they were able to avoid that. So there you go. That is the first little piece of our electricity coverage this morning call you get number two.

Kyle Mountsier  05:17

I got number two. Tesla is in development of a dry coding technique for battery cells, which what that means is it could reduce the overall cost of the model why which cost is a big rebuttal to evey transition of their main battery pack by $5,500. On the cost of that that's a wild cost change. That's how that's the battery costs half as much now that reduces the cost of the vehicle by 8%. Think about that. Think about the the number of people that could be good that could access this. It's an important step to really reach their production goals, goals. They said of producing, as Elon tweeted just a couple of weeks ago, 30 million Tesla's by 2020. For now, production is not at the point where they where they have scale. And so they are thinking, Hey, bring down the overall cost and boom, we get off to the races. Really cool technique. You can link it in the show notes. Want to explain it right now. Because we got a next one to roll Paul, you got this

Paul Daly  06:18

go from Tesla to Toyota, just after year F after announcing their full lineup of BEVs by 2025. Toyota has finalized plans to create its own battery and a press conference. They said through this integrated development of vehicles and batteries, we aim to reduce the battery costs per vehicle by 50% compared to the Toyota BZ for x in the second half of the 2020s. That was Toyota's chief technology officer must Masahiko my era. That's journalists at the press offerings. Got it. So 50% test is like 50% and Toyota was like, oh, yeah, we'll take that 50% it probably didn't write back. And last but not least, Kyle. This is our fourth story and it was covered in the email today. But

Kyle Mountsier  07:01

here we go. So crabs and lobsters have the capacity to potentially help us power batteries. It has been found that and material and their exoskeletons called chitin, which can also be found in a few other places like jellyfish and I believe we're like,

Paul Daly  07:21

like tricking somewhere down south. Oh, y'all got that?

Kyle Mountsier  07:26

You got that. So this is crazy. So what happens is unlike traditional battery electrolytes, the crab goo they're calling it will break down and soil, five months leaving zinc that can be recycled behind. The director of the University of Maryland Center for materials innovation, Link being who said in the future, he hopes all components in batteries will be biodegradable, not only the material itself, but also the fabrication process of bio materials. And this is one step to get there. So for all you crab and lobster fans, save those crab and lobster shells. They may be valuable in the near

Paul Daly  08:01

Just think how many dumpsters in Louisiana are full of those things. Yes,

Kyle Mountsier  08:05

people just going to be pulling them out. It's like

Paul Daly  08:09

when you're reading that all I can think of since I have kids, so I've seen every Pixar movie several million times. Is that scene from Alana where the big crab with the bioluminescent algae, so I could think of the bioluminescent algae crab. All right. All right. All right. Speaking of people being crabby segue. Our CSI scores in service actually hurting the overall customer experience while new research shows that turnover high stress and customers who leverage a CSI as in like they come in and be like, Yo, I got a survey right here. What are you going to do for me? Right customers leveraging it like that might be indicating that it's time for an overhaul in an annual survey conducted by consulting group Ducker Carlyle of service advisors, managers and technicians on behalf of auto manufacturers CSAs. And the trouble that they cause actually came up 1000s of times, sometimes solicited, but sometimes completely unsolicited, like questions like hey, what do you see as the biggest hindrance to your job performance or overall mentality or attitude? So some examples of what could be doing this? Are employees getting notifications that you just got a bad CSI, right? This is even during the workday, right? You're trying to serve a customer and notification comes up at somebody just trashed you on a survey, or you're at home trying to relax a little bit get a notification, someone just trashed you on survey, that really does demotivate you to do the job. So also, some of the things that were talked about are close ties to pay plans often are things that are outside the service advisors control. And we'll talk about a suggestion that to help fix that in a minute. But Kyle, you i both very familiar with the CSI world I was.

Kyle Mountsier  09:51

I don't I don't care whether it's service or sales. This has a massive, massive impact on employee retention, employee satisfaction and the ability for an employee to continue throughout their day. Not just that, but typically the questions associated with a CSI score are derived from a single process that is meant that can actually inhibit the ability to serve the customer. Well. And I've seen this over and over and over through my 12 years on the retail side of the business, that when you move CSI scores out of the limelight, and out of the pay plans, all of a sudden, everything increases, because it's less of a focus on a score and more on an actual experience. And I believe that OEMs definitely, as this report says, need to take a very, very, very hard look at whether their CSI scores have actually reduced, the like, worsened the customer experience, because of attention on a score instead of an experience. From an overall brand perspective, this is timely,

Paul Daly  10:55

you know, it's there, I understand the side of the argument, or it's like, hey, how else are we going to metric how happy the customer is? You know that most times consumers only fill those things out more, it's already skewed. Right, you're more likely to fill it out if you have a bad experience, right? So due to the wrong direction,

Kyle Mountsier  11:13

absolutely. And they're on scales of zero to 10, which has been proven over and over and over in every case study in the world inside and out. That is ineffective and hard for hard for any person to appropriately score someone. So like, at a minimum move to net promoter score of one through five, like at

Paul Daly  11:33

least what do you recommend? Or what do you recommend? Right, one of the one of the things that they talked about in there, and was like, you know, you could get a customer who really cares about tire pressure, and you could get trashed on an entire CSI score, because there's 36 pounds of pressure instead of 34 or 35. Right, which doesn't even I mean, like the service providers are not checking the tire pressure, but they're the they're the ones who has the pay affected by it. One really great suggestion, which I think would work really well is to more is to rely more heavily on third party mystery shoppers, right? Because that shopper is going to approach it with a reasonable mindset. And it's still a great way to keep everybody accountable. I don't think you should stop looking at CSI scores. But really, solving for the experience like you just mentioned, cost solving for the experience, we're going to talk about this a ton at a soda con, solving for the experience is going to be the thing that makes everything else line up as it should be everything. So there you go, there's a takeaway. So we've thought we need to cover a fixed ops story. We don't talk about fixed ops enough and industry doesn't talk about the person. Yes, no, that's true. It is 50% right of the revenue and the profit it's even easier I think to forget about it in these days when there's so much margin on the sales side, right like a disproportionate margin. But if you just remember two three short years ago everyone was like fixed Ops is going to save us all

Kyle Mountsier  12:56

that was really uncomfortable well, and it still will absolutely agree agree. Speaking of videos on like a train wreck the

Paul Daly  13:18

disclaimer, I in no way shape or form think Apple is going to save us all however, their new product launch is today at 10am Pacific time. And it's likely to feature new phones, watches software, all the stuff that Apple users geek out over and non Apple users will turn their nose up at it's just really fun entertaining show to watch that just happens on repeat several times of year one nice thing about this one, it's good to see it return to in person.

Kyle Mountsier  13:45

Yeah, that's that's gonna be great. I you know the energy there will be will be really cool. I'm probably going to have to watch it back. Maybe I'll watch it on the plane.

Paul Daly  13:53

On your free time today. Kyle, you're not gonna dip out of a social contract for three

Kyle Mountsier  13:57

hours Exactly. No, but I'm excited about the new Apple Watch I think is there's gonna be a lot of enhancements to it things like reading body temperature pretty cool stuff that they're doing there is kind of on the is on the hook potentially. They've talked about some new ear buds even like some of the conversation around the potential of 8k video being shot on an iPhone is is pretty wild. So we'll see what we'll see what happens I don't want to we're not the rumor mill out here. We just you know there's there's been some intentional leak stuff out there I think sells it's a really a brilliant thing. They have to leak things. They they just they have this content marketing scheduled down to a tee and yeah, so who else has millions of people show up to a live stream event just to watch product launches?

Paul Daly  14:48

Yeah, it's amazing. So they always are a little cryptic in their ads. And this one says far out it's got the Apple logo in the stars. I don't know maybe it's satellite texting is one of the features you can connect via satellite. Yeah, I don't know what its gonna be. I'm interested to see how they integrate, like so when they were alive, right? They just put on like, great, great, great showmanship, right? The programming, the videos are always fun to watch. And then we moved to COVID. So they got really good at these inner like interlinking video segments, right where they transition from one to another, it'll be interesting to see what they do, trying to blend the live and what they've learned from doing the virtual stuff. Um, but without a doubt, whether you're an Apple fan or not. This is brand building, community building lifecycle marketing at its very, very best. The fact that they get so much press, and so much attention on this, like they don't go to CES and the big electronics shows they're like, oh, no, no, we're cool recording. And they can only do that because they can do that. So I don't know. Speaking of what we can do today, you can get out there you can sell for the customer experience. You can encourage you to coworkers, you can sign up and get tickets to a soda con to come visit us because we're gonna be there in just a few days. But for now, we got a Wednesday to do

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