Service advisors at most dealerships spend their day doing one job: helping customers understand their vehicles' repair needs. At Ken Garff Automotive Group, a 71-rooftop dealer group across nine states, advisors were spending significant time writing and rewriting customer communications.

"Service advisors would take notes from the technicians, write the story, and send it off," said Brent Lessing, CIO at Ken Garff. "But the quality varied. Some advisors are great writers. Others aren't. And when you're sending thousands of service recommendations a month, inconsistency adds up."

From Generic to Clear and Concise Customer Communication

Ken Garff piloted Tekion's Service Advisor AI across four stores. The agent does what service advisors used to do manually: reviews technicians' notes and generates a customer-ready email.  

Instead of an advisor simply sending off "You have bad tires," to a customer, Service Advisor AI frames it as the safety issue it is: "Your car is at 2/32nds tread depth. This is a critical safety issue. You need to address this now."

On the second visit, if the customer hasn't acted, the message escalates, and the recommendation gets stronger. Service advisors don't have to follow up manually—the agent handles the consistency.

"Before this," Lessing explained, "we'd have to track which customers got which message, whether they acted, how we escalated. Service AI automated that entire workflow."

Measuring Impact: Results from Ken Garff's Pilot

When Ken Garff first rolled out Service Advisor AI, advisors trusted it at only 30%. It was new, it was AI, and they weren't convinced it would sound right to their customers.

Six months into the pilot, trust shifted dramatically:

• 92% acceptance rate—advisors now send nearly everything AI generates without needing to reword it

• 100% adoption—every service advisor in the four-store pilot is using it

• 78% of recommendations sent to customers come from Service Advisor AI (the rest are manual sends for one-off cases)

"If we turned this off tomorrow and went back to manual emails, every service advisor said no," Lessing recalled. "That was the real test. They're making my job better. Our service advisors felt it."

What's Next: Rolling Out AI Across Multiple Locations

Overall customer communication quality and consistency have improved in Ken Garff’s service lane. The time service advisors spent writing emails dropped—freeing up hours per week for advisors to focus on high-value customer conversations and relationship building.

Ken Garff is rolling Service Advisor AI out to their California stores. And they're watching one more metric closely: revenue uplift. With better messaging, more consistency, and clearer framing of critical issues—they're betting it drives more service recommendations through.

"We're measuring it," Lessing said. "Because if you improve the message and the customer understands the safety issue, you believe they're going to say yes more often."

Watch Ken Garff’s Spotlight Session from Tekion One to hear their experience firsthand.

Ready to see Service Advisor AI in action?  

Request a demo now.

‍