John Rock, retail innovation EV and customer experience manager for Cadillac, has spent the past few years traveling the country getting the luxury brand's dealerships ready for the Lyriq electric vehicle and other EVs to follow.
Rock, 39, discussed his work helping to get Cadillac service departments ready for EVs as part of the Oct. 4 Fixed Ops Journal Forum with Fixed Ops Journal Editor-in-Chief Dan Shine.
Here are edited excerpts.
Q: When did you start your work getting dealership service departments ready for EVs?
A: This actually goes back to when [General Motors CEO] Mary [Barra] made the announcement that GM was going to go all-in on all EVs and Cadillac was going to lead the way. So for several years we've been putting together plans to implement this with dealers, and what does this look like, and how do we compete with the [direct-to-consumer] market, and sort of what requirements do we have for service departments? We started with an EV assessment program where the dealer network development team and myself went out in partnership with ABM [a procurement provider for GM installing EV chargers at its dealerships]. We analyzed dealerships, we saw what their needs are, what they'll need for charger locations. We worked with sales and aftersales as well to develop a plan for lifts because you need certain lifts in order to lift the battery packs, which are heavy. This has been about two years' worth of effort to get dealers prepped for the Lyriq sale and aftersales service support.
How should manufacturers be supporting automakers support dealership service departments to get ready for these vehicles?
The gorilla in the room is the direct-to-consumer model. We firmly believe the franchise dealer model is the stronger business proposition between [direct-to-consumer] and franchise. But for that to be the stronger position, we need our dealers to be aware of the changes.
The lube/oil filter was always the entry point for retention; that goes away with an electric vehicle. Now, tire rotations become the entry point in order to service an electric vehicle. Not only do the techs need to be trained internally, but the service writers and service staff need to be able to know how to communicate with customers. It's not just saying, "Come on in for your 30K." It's, "Hey, we're going to do an over-the-air update. This is what it's going to require."
We've been partnering with our own internal training team; we've partnered with Deloitte to sort of figure out what we need to do for simulation runs. And we've really started this process from ground zero and brought it up to where we're ready to launch in Europe and launch future products. But we firmly believe the franchise model is the stronger model. Some of our Cadillac dealers are fourth generation. They've been around the brand for 100 years or so. They know what they're doing. They're fantastic at it. We just need to give them the tools to support the electric vehicles.
How did Cadillac approach the development of the customer delivery process for EVs?
Early on we knew we had to partner with Deloitte, a great research company. Myself and their team went to LaFontaine, which is one of our premier Cadillac dealers, and we [did] simulated deliveries of the Lyriq. We figured out how to do the enhanced [pre-delivery inspection]. We went through sort of the pre-op certification making sure everything is clean, everything is fixed, there's no transport damage, if there are any OTAs they are applied. And we did sort of multiple simulations going back and forth with, "This is how we do it with ICE vehicles; this is what we need to do differently with EVs. How can we streamline this? How can we make this work?" And really it was a great synergy between our Cadillac dealership, Cadillac leadership, Deloitte and the ground teams. We could not have done this without the service techs. Guys were like, "I've been doing PDIs for 10 to 15 years, I could do it this way. This could save us some time. This is a better way to do it." And we really did listen and reiterated this program [is] called Project X until we [get] down to what we think is probably the best plan to get Lyriqs PDI-prepped, ready to go and get the dealer staff trained up to deliver them.
And Cadillac will refine that process as needed?
That's exactly what we're doing. We've been flying all over the country with our deployment team doing what we call a "meeting in a box," which is a pre-delivery readiness campaign. It's a very intensive three to six hours we're in the dealership. We do everything with the sales and aftersales teams together. We bring them up to speed, we do a walk-around, we show them what the enhanced PDI is like, we bring up the training on what charger basics are with charge times we expect. We've done 18 of the 21 initial [meetings], but then we're going to hand off to the regional and field teams to follow up. We fully plan to be engaged with this throughout this entire launch and then after launch support, where I'll still be traveling out to dealers seeing what worked, what didn't work, how we iterate, how we change, how we improve. Continuous improvement is really what we're after. And we want to make this just flawless or as flawless as we can.
What feedback are you hearing from dealerships?
We have a bell curve. The people at the very bottom were negative — a very small percentage. We have the middle who are sort of like waiting to see, not quite sure what the future entails. And then we have the promoters who are super on board, like they've already cleared the space [in the showroom]. They're the easy ones. My job is to take that middle bulk and then the tail end and say, "This is the future. This is where we're going. Let me show you how you can be profitable, how it can be easy, how we can beat the[direct-to-consumer] market." I have to sort of bring them along. This is no different than any sort of sales position where you're trying to sell the new vehicle.
Once we bring the actual Lyriq to the showroom and to the aftersales department, to the PDI guys — that's really where the sea changes. That's where the tide comes back in there. "Oh, this car is phenomenal. I can't wait to be a part of this." Then when we talk about the level of support we have for our dealers where myself and the team are going out there and saying, "We know transition is scary. We're here to help you. This is not a fire-and-forget mission. We are going to be here, we're going to be side by side with you guys." Because this success is critical not only to our dealer franchise partners, it's critical to GM. We love what we're doing, and we love being engaged with the field.
Send us a letter
Have an opinion about this story? Click here to submit a Letter to the Editor, and we may publish it in print.
