Maddy Blount was working as a service advisor for Conway Beam Truck Group in East Syracuse, New York, when she found out about the service advisor courses through her service manager. She knew that Mack requires each Certified Uptime Dealer to have a certified master service advisor so they can be sure that customers’ needs are met with the most highly skilled personnel.
She says she has taken both the Mack service advisor master development path segment which includes Navigation and Admin Setup; Anatomy of a Case and Case Navigation; Operation Codes Mapping; Troubleshooting and Managing; Customer View of Process and Interaction webinars, the Achieving Communication Excellence (ACE) virtual course, and a 50-question comprehensive exam.
Once COVID-19 hit, she found that Navigation and Admin as well as Achieving Communication Excellence classes were going to be offered virtually, rather than the three-day class she had planned to attend in Greensboro, North Carolina. She jumped right in.
“The platform for my virtual classes was pretty basic. We did an Adobe Connect class, where the administrator would send a link to a classroom, we would click into the link and be in class with everyone else taking the course. There were not any video chats/cameras, but for those of us who had a microphone we were able to communicate with everyone as well as a group chat option that we mainly used for communication while listening to the instructor speak,” she says.
Blount actually became a service advisor at Conway Beam Truck Group out of sheer coincidence. When she moved back to New York state, a salesman she knew there told her that the shop was looking to hire someone. She didn’t have any previous experience in the field but was eager to learn and see what it entailed. After being onboard for about two years she says she’s experienced a wide range of the challenges that come with being a service advisor in the industry. But she says she wouldn’t do anything to change it.
“Being in this position has given me knowledge and experience I would not have received elsewhere. I am not sure what the future looks like for me, but I do know I wouldn’t be the person I am today if things had turned out differently and because of that I will forever be grateful to have received the opportunity to be the service advisor in such an important industry,” Blount says.