How Gamification Increases Staff Productivity for Your Dealer Business

I was driving on the main road into Middleton, a town in rural Nova Scotia in Canada, where there is an electronic speed sign that flashes your speed as you arrive in town. I didn’t think about it at the time, as I was thinking more about the meeting, I had with the Bruce Auto Group in town.

Back in November, the President, Justin Barker identified staff productivity as a key business driver for 2023 as inflation was driving costs up. To make an effective change to behaviour it was recognised that measuring efficiencies in real-time and rewarding the team on this basis would be the key to driving productivity. Justin wanted all the KPIs on one page for his salespeople, technicians, parts & service advisors to ensure operational excellence in sales and aftersales operations. Those KPIs are as the following:

Sales Team

The key KPIs to be tracked on one sheet were as follows; enquiries created, 3-month conversion rate %, Units sold/invoiced, MPU, discount %, upsells % of paint/GAP/alloys/accessories, finance %, deal GPU, total deal profit. These KPIs allowed him to see if each salesperson was getting their fair share of enquiries, how good they are at converting, their negotiation skills (discounts given) and their customer experience scores to maintain the right balance between sales performance and customer satisfaction.

Technicians

The key KPIs here were hours attended/worked/sold, idle productive/non-productive, to show real efficiency, productivity & utilisation for the current week or month. Layered on top of this, the VHC KPIs tracked were % checks done, % videos sent, red & amber identified per check to give a true 360 view of the skills of each technician.

Service Advisors

The KPIs tracked were the number of invoices, profit per invoice, % & value of credit notes, sold & worked recovery rates and % of VHC red & amber work sold to give a very good view of service advisors’ performance.

Parts Advisors

The key KPIs were the number of invoices, profit per invoice, % discount given, % & value of credit notes.

Gamification

Justin told us that these people are a competitive bunch and how daily and monthly league tables would motivate them. Setting benchmarks between stores and people demonstrates what good looks like. Within the KPIs there are many attributes which provide opportunities for multiple people to win, so it is not always the same winner. Those in the lower quartile are transparently identified for training and mentoring needs.

Indeed, Justin took inspiration from that speed sign too, the smiley face encourages good behaviour and the sad one also communicates effectively. Fast forward to February 2023, Bruce Auto group have wallboards in the sales offices & workshops that automatically update every 30 mins for the relevant staff to see their leader board for the current day and month to date. Most of the team wants to be the leader that evening, so making that extra sale, invoicing that WIP before closing drives daily performance which in turn drives monthly & annual results. Any concerns the management team had about the wallboards were shown to be groundless as the teams like them a lot and they add a bit of banter to a high-performance environment.

John Hogan is the CEO & Chief Data Scientist at Real World Analytics (RWA). RWA helps dealer groups become more efficient with actionable drillable dashboards & reports. Visit realworldanalytics.com/automotive/our-solutions for all our solutions, or check out our customer stories. If you want to find out how we can help you drive your dealer business forward, contact us here or email auto@realworldanalytics.com

This article is previously published in Auto Retail Bulletin.