It’s hard to set a quarter on fire. But it’s not hard to set a quarter of your revenue on fire! In fact – auto repair shops do it all the time. According to an American Express survey conducted several years ago, each year 55% of people intend to make a purchase but then decide not to do it based on bad customer service.
How confident are you that poor customer service in your shop isn’t preventing your customers from coming back? Maybe one of your techs was pleasant, but distracted. Your service adviser may have put a customer on hold for too long, or not given a thorough answer when asked. None of these are cardinal sins of customer service such as being rude or hanging up on customers. But they could be enough to scare a customer off from an oil change – or a transmission overhaul.
We’ve talked about the importance of phone skills before, and even provided some of the most important ones in an infographic. But if you’re not making all of the calls yourself, there’s no way to know whether attention, focus and helpfulness are consistently shown over the phone except by listening to the calls yourself. This is especially true if the person answering the phone is also responsible for customer service inside of the shop – it’s difficult to do two things at once, but that doesn’t stop the most well-intentioned service adviser from trying.
Take an hour in your shop to listen to your employees answering the phone and communicating with customers. You may be able to do this from your office – if not, Repair Shop Websites offers a call-tracking service that will record inbound calls from your website. Ask yourself “If I had called about something I didn’t understand and asked for help, would I trust this shop to take care of me?” If not, it might be time for some customer service training!
To learn how Repair Shop Websites can help your company gain more customers, call us at 866-665-1605 or email us at Team_RSW@RepairShopWebsites.com.
