Two of every five service advisers leave each year. How can dealers keep their best ones from burning out?

Think of a U.S. dealership where five service advisers work. If it's typical of the industry, two of the advisers will leave within a year.

That high rate of turnover among advisers, measured in a new National Automobile Dealers Association survey, can disrupt the efficient operation of service departments. It can force dealers to spend big to replace advisers who often seem to be passing through a revolving door. Both factors hamper productivity and profits.

But advisers who quit their jobs -- and auto retailing altogether -- cite their own list of grievances:

• Long workdays and oppressive schedules, including weekend shifts, that play havoc with family life. 
• Inadequate pay, especially when their income depends too much on commission sales. 
• Ever-increasing and demanding duties, coupled with disrespect and verbal abuse from bosses, shop colleagues and customers. 
• Automakers and dealers relying too much on rigid customer-satisfaction surveys to judge the advisers' performance and set their pay. 
• Feelings of powerlessness and lack of appreciation. 
• Pressure from managers to lean on customers to buy service work and products they may not need in order to meet dealership profit targets. 

"I wouldn't recommend [to] anybody to go into that business," says Jorge Gonzalez, who worked eight years as a service adviser. "It's not worth it, the hours vs. what you make." Gonzalez, 28, now sells real estate in Houston. 

Fixed-operations directors acknowledge the high-stress challenges that face service advisers, who they say can be a dealership's most important employees. They list specific steps they are taking to improve working conditions in an effort to keep their most talented and experienced advisers. 

Some of those initiatives are tangible, such as limiting service advisers' schedules, rationalizing their daily workloads and revising pay plans to rely less on commissions. Others are more general as managers take steps to train advisers better and give them greater autonomy and recognition. 

Yet despite those gestures, NADA's latest Dealership Workforce Study reports a 39 percent turnover rate for service advisers in 2015. Half of all advisers will last just 2.3 years or less in their current job, the study suggests. 

Last year, the average service adviser earned $64,635, a 2 percent drop from 2014, according to the NADA survey. By comparison, the average dealership sales consultant made $67,846 in 2015.

The average scheduled workweek for a service adviser in 2015 was 45.6 hours, about three hours more than for technicians and parts workers. That average fell by an hour from the previous year. 

But at nearly one-third of dealerships, the study notes, service advisers were scheduled to work 50 or more hours a week last year. In extreme instances, service advisers and directors say they have heard of 75-hour workweeks. 

Fixed Ops Journal, in an unscientific survey,

spoke with former service advisers who no longer work for franchised new-vehicle dealerships. They agree that as much as they liked many aspects of their work as advisers, especially helping customers, they felt burned out and compelled to quit.

Bill Lurie, 42, spent nearly three years as a service adviser at a Chrysler dealership. He says he felt "abused by the manufacturer with the [customer-satisfaction] surveys, the pay, the hours. It's a horrible business." He now runs an auto repair shop in Raleigh, N.C. 

Even veteran service advisers who are still on the job and have no plans to leave describe working conditions that routinely can seem overwhelming. 

"In this job, you're literally trying to control something you can't control," says Drew Hopkins, who has spent 22 years as a service adviser at Parkway Ford-Lincoln in Winston-Salem, N.C. Hopkins, 46, says his good relations with dealership managers and customers help him "get peace" with the pressure he endures.

Jeff High, 42, has worked as a service adviser at Mercedes-Benz of Memphis in Tennessee for 19 years. He says advisers are "moving targets" as the expectations of consumers -- and thus of car companies and dealers -- become ever more demanding. The key to his success, he says, is to "keep communication up" with his service customers. 

How can dealerships work to prevent burnout and keep valued service advisers on the job? It doesn't have to be merely a matter of more money, service directors say. 

Service adviser is "the toughest job in our dealership -- in any dealership," says Tom Hernly, service manager of Shaheen Chevrolet in Lansing, Mich. He adds that the advisers at his dealership "have been here a long time" -- one of them for 28 years. 

To combat rapid turnover, he says, Shaheen treats its advisers as assistant service managers. "They're empowered; they feel part of the process," Hernly says. "They know they're not going to get chastised for making a decision." 

Bill Housholder is director of fixed operations at Ganley Auto Group, which operates 28 dealerships, mostly in the Cleveland area. He says the company is working to centralize its recruitment and training of service advisers and has initiated staggered shifts for advisers at several dealerships to limit their work hours. 

"We want them to work at their pace and their stress level," Hous-holder says. "We want to keep our guys under 50 hours [a week], closer to 45 if we can. We would rather limit hours and keep our people highly productive than have them be less productive working long hours." 

Instead of hiring advisers with experience at other dealerships, expecting them to be immediately productive, some managers say they increasingly are hiring nontraditional candidates, as long as the applicants have the right skills and customer-friendly attitude to be effective service advisers. 

"Why would you want to hire someone who got fired from the store down the street?" says Paul Maggia, the general manager of Byford Buick-GMC in Chickasha, Okla. "It's more important to ask "What talents do you have?'" 

Dealerships' recycling of "underachievers" continues to contribute heavily to the high turnover of service advisers, says Don Reed, CEO of DealerPRO Training in Gahanna, Ohio. Communications skills are more important for adviser candidates than experience that may not have been positive, he says. 

"Whenever [dealerships] have an opening, they advertise for a service adviser, and they get someone who's worked in four or five dealerships in the past seven years and didn't perform well," Reed says. "But they hire him into their store." 

At the same time, hiring applicants who lack experience makes it even more vital that dealerships train service advisers properly and consistently, says dealership consultant Lee Harkins. 

"The way you're trained to do the job is: "Watch this guy for two days,'" says Harkins, CEO of M5 Management Services in Pelham, Ala. "And he shows you how to do this and that, but you don't understand why you're doing it." 

Harkins says advisers need to learn first how to communicate well with service customers, not to maximize sales. Common measures that dealerships use to gauge the productivity of service advisers, such as hours per repair order, are "antiquated," he says. 

Better criteria, he adds, are how many customers an adviser retains and how much needed service work he or she identifies during the basic service drive walkaround and multipoint inspection. 

Brett Coker, president of Coker Automotive Consultants in Pensacola, Fla., says dealerships need to celebrate their best service advisers as conspicuously as they do their top salespeople. 

"Advisers are really low on the dealership food chain," Coker says. "They are the face of our business, yet we give them the least amount of recognition and training and appreciation." 

Too often, Coker says, the most productive advisers are "rewarded" with more responsibilities. Service managers should farm out routine paperwork and phone calls to clerical employees, he proposes. 

Service departments can adjust other processes to help advisers succeed, says Jim Phillips, director of education at the NADA Academy. "I've never met a lazy service writer, but I meet service writers who don't get it done all the time because they're simply overwhelmed," he says. 

Shops should avoid "feast or famine" scheduling of service appointments, exhausting advisers during the busiest hours, Phillips says. They can make sure advisers have the vehicle history and essential manufacturer's information when a customer arrives, he adds.

Rick Wegley, an instructor at the dealership consultant NCM Institute in Kansas City, Mo., says that overscheduling service advisers is a false economy. If service customers must wait to meet advisers or feel they are being rushed and not getting the proper attention, they are likely to express their discontent with low marks on satisfaction surveys, he says. 

That outcome, Wegley adds, creates a "big vicious circle" with service advisers at its center. 

Consultant Coker says dealerships must do a better job of rewarding service advisers for the revenue they generate, rather than treating them as drudges in the "back end" of the store. 

"This is our future," Coker says of service departments. 

"Let's make this not the back end, but the backbone of our business." 

But even under the best circumstances, the duties of a service adviser always will be highly demanding, says Dave Wright, fixed operations director at Shaheen Chevrolet. Job candidates must realize that, he says. 

"You need to understand the pace, what you're coming into," Wright says. "This ain't a candy store."

David Kushma contributed to this report.