How AI training helps dealership service advisers boost business

Todd VonBlon, a service adviser for more than 17 years, knows it’s easy to fall back into old habits after periodic training sessions.

But those lapses aren’t an issue anymore for VonBlon, an adviser at Tom Wood Subaru in Indianapolis. He can brush up on customer sales via role play with online sessions created by Fort Lauderdale, Fla., company RockED.

VonBlon said he can do the roughly two-minute training, powered by artificial intelligence, virtually anytime.

“You can do the sessions daily, so whatever you learn stays fresh in your mind,” he told Automotive News. “I’m a better overall adviser because I get frequent reminders of what I’m supposed to be doing.”

Dealership groups are using AI role-play through various vendors to give service advisers more frequent training, withinitial results showing it can help boost repair sales.

For years, the top complaint from Tom Wood Automotive Group service advisers was lack of training, said Bill Demaree, corporate director of fixed operations for the group which owns 13 stores in Indiana and Minnesota.

“Those complaints have just disappeared,” he said.

Demaree started looking into AI training three years ago to supplement an in-house trainer and twice-a-year sessions. He wanted to find a platform that could track advisers’ performance during training.

Tom Wood Automotive adopted RockED about a year ago and the platform emails summaries of each adviser’s performance to the adviser and supervisor.

“That helps us coach them and help them get better at their jobs,” he said.

Demaree also wanted to offer daily training opportunities. RockED’s short sessions, typically accessed via a cell phone app, check that box.

“They can take it on their way to work or before their jobs start or during lunch,” Demaree said. “We recommend they only take two or three a day because we don’t want them doing it just to do it – we want it to be meaningful.”

AI interactions give advisers a low-stakes way to practice selling needed work to customers. During training sessions, AI agents pose as customers and provide immersive role-playing for customizable situations that mimic real-world scenarios, such as overcoming price objections and handling upset clients, Demaree said.

He would not disclose how much the group pays for RockED, which is used by more than 12,000 dealerships, according to the company’s website. But it typically costs about $1,000 per month per store.

West Herr’s bespoke Microsoft Copilot training tool

At West Herr Automotive Group, Tom Druzynski took a different approach. About a year ago, the director of service operations for the 41-dealership group in central and western New York, used Microsoft Copilot AI to develop a role-playing tool for training advisers.

Advisers already did live one-on-one training with a coach. But Druzynski wanted to give advisers access to more training that was customizable. While exploring Copilot’s capabilities, he discovered he could build a program to achieve that.

Tailored training is important because the group employs about 160 advisers with a range of skill levels, Druzynski said.

“We can set things up for any type of client you want and change the selling approach accordingly,” Druzynski said. “The tone of the questions can change very dramatically. AI can take on any kind of personality you want — push back hard with questions, for example.”

And if advisers don’t adequately handle a situation, the program coaches by automatically providing feedback that points out weaknesses and ways to improve responses to customers, he said.

Developing the program wasn’t very difficult, but it required a lot of research, he said. The key: Knowing how to write correct prompts to set up various training scenarios, Druzynski said.

“It’s garbage in, garbage out,” he said. “And you have to fact-check what it creates.”

How AI training in service affects dealerships’ financials

Druzynski said it’s hard to quantify if AI training has improved service and parts financials.

But after the group started using Copilot training, many AI-trained advisers are seeing nearly an hour more of flat-rate pay per repair order, he said. With flat-rate pay, technicians are paid a certain amount of hours for specific repairs, based on an industry standard or a manufacturer’s estimate. The advisers are closing a higher percentage of sales and adding more hours to their retail tickets, Druyzinski said.

“I can’t say it’s all due to the AI training, but it’s having an overall good effect,” he said.

At Tom Wood Automotive, AI training has significantly improved the customer experience because advisers learn how to present recommendations that customers understand, and it builds value in the work being sold and overcomes objections, Demaree said.

“A great illustration of this is our focus on presenting and selling alignments and commodities in recent months,” he said. “Our alignment numbers improved by almost 20 percent during the last couple months and our close rate on air and cabin filters improved by almost 19 percent.”

AI offers benefits, but human touch still required

AI-based coaching has advantages, said Brian Crossin, director of the National Automobile Dealers Association academy training facility and a former instructor. For example, advisers can make mistakes without being embarrassed in front of peers and AI has no qualms about challenging advisers in ways peers might feel uncomfortable.

“AI is infinitely patient … and you can program it to be whatever you want it to be, so it can be more consistent than peer-to-peer role-playing,” he said. “You can also do AI training at scale.”

However, it’s not a total substitute for human training, he said. Crossin said he believes AI training will become more common and the industry will benefit.

Demaree agreed.

“Just do it,” he said. “If you don’t, you’re doing your employees a big disservice.”