The customer’s first experience with the service department should be during or immediately after the sales process. This builds comfort with the service department, establishes relationships, and encourages service retention (albeit in a difficult-to-measure manner). However, the sales-to-service handoff often does not occur. Even when it does, the handoff can go poorly; for example, the F&I team at the dealer could present a mind-bending array of complex service contracts, extended warranties, tire plans, and other protection plans, leaving the service department looking intimidating and expensive to the customer. This session will lean heavily on open OEM discussion into how everyone is handling this process and the various approaches, rather than data collection and metric tracking. Specific areas that this session will cover include: 
• OEM involvement in sales-to-service handoffs 
• Dealer best practices when introducing the customer to the service department 
• Ways to prevent bad handoffs/control the handoff process 
• Other OEM efforts to encourage the handoff or introduce the customer to service
shortly after the sale of the vehicle