Why I put a technician on the front desk once a month

In a lot of garages, the workshop and the front desk don’t really understand each other’s job.

A job card comes back without the right information. Reception asks for tyre sizes and nobody in the workshop knows why. Little things, every day, and they add up.

So every month, once a month, I took one of my techs out of the workshop and put them on the front desk for the day. Here’s why, and what it did for my garage. I explain it in two minutes here.

Front of house is harder than it looks

The first thing it gave them was an understanding of how difficult the role is when you’re dealing with people.

Try picking up the phone and convincing someone they need a thousand pounds’ worth of work on their car. That’s not easy. You have to justify it, to someone who can’t see what the technician saw.

A day doing it teaches more than any amount of being told. It’s why I say front of house has the hardest job in your garage.

Good information has to flow both ways

It also cemented something that works in both directions.

Front of house has to get the information right that we give the techs. But the techs have to give back the correct write-up and diagnosis, so front of house can get that message across to the customer.

When a job card comes back without the right information, it’s the person on the desk who has to ring the customer and explain. Sit in that chair for a day and you understand why it matters.

My techs also realised that when I asked for the tyre depths, or the make or size of the tyres, there was a reason for it. It wasn’t front of house being awkward.

One team, not two

What it actually did was make our front of house and our techs gel into one. They appreciated even more how important it was for both sides to do their jobs correctly.

The bonus: a team that can cover the desk

It did something for me as the owner too. It gave me a very flexible team.

If I needed someone on the front desk for a couple of hours in an emergency, I could pull any of my boys out of the workshop. They knew how our garage system worked, which suppliers we used and how to use the phone system.

Was it a hundred per cent? No. But if it was 80 or 85 per cent, it was still better than all the other garages down the road. And that’s what separated us from everyone else.

We had a team working towards one common goal.

Andy Savva

How to start it in your garage

• Pick one day a month and put it in the diary, the same as you would a booking.
• Rotate it, so every technician gets a turn on the desk.
• Have them do the full day with front of house: the phones, the quotes, the garage system, the suppliers.
• Afterwards, ask what surprised them, and what they’ll do differently on their next job card.

It costs you a day on the ramp each month. What you get back is a workshop and a front desk pulling in the same direction.