As a service advisor, you will play a vital role in an automotive shop. You’ll liaise between the customer and the mechanic while managing and assisting with the shop’s workflow. Service advisors help customers decide what work should be done on their vehicles, from routine maintenance to specialized repairs.
Once you complete your training and start applying for work, you will have to show a potential employer that you possess the technical knowledge of vehicles, good professional skills, and the experience to succeed at the job. The program at CATI will provide hands-on experience in vehicle maintenance while preparing you for work in a professional shop setting.
To help you put your best foot forward in your upcoming job interviews, we’ve compiled a list of questions that might come up. Read on to take a look!
How Would You Handle a Customer Who Is Unhappy With Their Service?
This is a very important question to answer correctly. When an interviewer asks this question, they are looking at your people skills and your ability to handle criticism. If you have no personal experience with this, you’ll want to explain how you would handle the situation based on the knowledge you gained at CATI’s auto service program.
Talk about how you will take the time to listen empathetically to the client’s complaints and do everything you can to make sure the client is satisfied. If you cannot help the client, you should explain why and ask if there is something else you can do. Covering these key points in an interview will show the employer that you can succeed in a customer-oriented role.
A Client Complains About a Clunking Sound in Their Car. What Might Be the Problem?
As an automotive service advisor, it’s vital that you have a good understanding of the subsystems in a vehicle and how to service them correctly. As you begin your career, this will be important when speaking with clients and giving them estimates on what the problem could be and how long it will take to fix.
Through your time at CATI, you’ll learn that the problem with this question is most likely that the transmission is low on transmission fluid or has worn-out gears. To answer this question, you can reference any experience you have had working on similar problems and how you dealt with them in the past.
Tell Me About a Challenge You Overcame
When an employer asks you this question, they want you to show your problem-solving skills. They want to hear that you can think on your feet and do the right thing after a mistake is made.
When answering this question, talk about a time when you made a mistake but corrected it appropriately. Say you mistook a client’s diagnosis of their car’s issue and it caused problems for the auto shop. You could speak about how you rectified the situation by offering follow-up services to a client, and what you learned from that experience moving forward.
How Do You Stay Organized in Your Service Advisor Career
In your service advisor career, you are responsible for liaising between the client and the mechanics, creating work orders, and managing the workflow of the garage. Your interviewer asks this question to understand how well you are prepared to handle a busy garage.
To answer this question, you’ll want to go through your process for keeping up with all these responsibilities. Go over your organizational strategy, how you prioritize tasks, and what you would do if you become overwhelmed. Throughout your time at CATI, we will show you the responsibilities of a service advisor in today’s auto shops and advise you on how best to manage your responsibilities on the job.
Are you ready to begin your service advisor training?
Contact CATI for more information!
