Repair Shop Advice

If you’ve owned or managed a shop for more than ten minutes, you’ve probably had a salesperson call you and tell you how much business they can get you with one of their websites.  It’s a fair point – if a person doesn’t already have a shop picked out, most people look online to find shops these days.  But a few minutes into the conversation, they start telling you how they’re going to prove results – website ‘hits’.  They offer to show you regularly just how many people are visiting your website.  If this is their idea of return on investment, this is a red flag.

Why?  Let’s take a look at the value of a website ‘hit’.

They may call it a ‘visit’ but that’s not entirely accurate.  That’s because, half of all ‘visits’ to your website are just other computers that are taking a look at the material.  Search engines like Google must visit your website often, for instance, to make sure they know what content is there and can direct their users to your site. Furthermore, if you run a shop in Wisconsin, how useful is it really that someone in South Carolina visited your site?  In most cases, not at all.  Unfortunately, the majority of ‘hits’ your website gets provide no value to you at all.

A website cannot prove a return on investment based on how many visits the site gets.  True ROI comes from a customer visiting your shop.  Here are a few ways to know your site is providing a good return.

Coupons – Some shop owners prefer not to use coupons, but if you do, it’s a great barometer for where your business is coming from.  Collecting the coupons used by your customers, and matching them up with where they found the coupon, is a great way to measure what’s bringing in business.

Phone Calls – One of our website packages includes Call Analytics – a special phone number only located on your website that is tracked and recorded.  In addition to allowing you to analyze your customer service, this also enables you to see how many customers are going to your website and calling your shop each month.  By listening to the calls, you can even figure out exactly how much money those calls brought into your shop!

Online Quote Requests – Although our sites are designed to encourage customers to contact you via phone (as that leads to a higher close rate) we also provide online forms for customers who prefer to make requests this way.  Much like the phone calls, each of these forms tells you what service the customer is seeking, allowing an easy calculation of ROI.

Asking Your Customers – One way to figure out where customers heard about you is to ask!  Be careful with this one, though.  They may have gotten your name from a friend, but then gone online to learn more about you and find out your location.  Without the site, it’s possible they would have never found you.  So, in addition to asking how they heard about you, make sure to ask if they visited your website for directions or to learn more.

To learn more about how to measure your website ROI, call us at 1-866-665-1605 or email Team_RSW@repairshopwebsites.com

It’s getting harder and harder to attract technicians. We hear this from our customers all the time, so we decided to dig a little deeper into the problem. Our goal: to determine the source of the problem, so we could offer some suggestions on how to address it.

We found three major reasons that hiring is so difficult:

#1 – A study by tools manufacturer RIDGID in late 2014 found that only 6% of high school students hope to have a career in the skilled trades.  That six percent has to be split between plumbing, HVAC repair, welding, and countless other skilled trade professions – along with all of the automotive repair facilities in the United States.

This is leading to a shortage in skilled automotive technicians entering the field.  Worse, it’s indicative of a continuing challenge going forward, as older technicians retire and fewer young ones have an interest in replacing them.

#2 – Auto technicians are much more likely to be happy with their current job than most other people.  A payscale study way back in 2008 found that auto technicians were ranked the 8^th happiest employees, and many of the jobs with happier employees were jobs of passion, like Clergy, Professional Actors and Special Education Teachers.  Even today, Auto Mechanics, on average, report being “very happy” with their jobs – much happier than most other employees.

This makes it difficult to attract great technicians to your shop.   Difficult however, does not mean impossible.  A previous post provides an infographic with suggestions on how to attract skilled technicians to your independent auto repair shop, and we’ll be covering these techniques more in future posts.

#3 According to a 2015 Manpower Group study, Skilled Trades Workers were the most difficult jobs to fill globally for the fourth year in a row.  They were also the most difficult jobs to fill in the US.  The second most difficult job to fill in the US was a technician role; these are defined as production/operations, engineering, and maintenance roles.  Collectively, these two job types describe the type of person you’re looking to hire for your shop.

If you’ve been wondering if all shops are having the same problems as yours – unfortunately, they are.  That makes it more important than ever that you’re giving your hiring efforts the time and energy they deserve.  If you’re hiring, that’s probably because you’re short-staffed – that means you’re probably already working overtime just to keep things running.  But it’s impossible to have a high-performing shop without great technicians.  Just a few months of staff shortage can really damage your reputation, both to customers and prospective employees.

Stay tuned for more information on how to attract and hire great technicians, or email us at Team_RSW@RepairShopWebsites.com and ask us for the link to our most recent webinar about the topic.

At first glance, it may not seem worth the hassle to switch to a professional email address if you already have an email address that you’re using for shop business.  A professional email address will end with the same domain as your website – for instance, if your site is www.masterautorepair.com, your email might be frank@masterautorepair.com, or sales@masterautorepair.com instead of masterautorepair@gmail.com or frankjackson423@hotmail.com.

Here are three major reasons why it is worth making the switch:

• Make a Professional First Impression – One of the most common reasons to use a professional email address is that it makes your shop look more established. The most profitable customers could be trusting you with thousands of dollars’ worth of repairs (not to mention their credit card information), and to those customers a professional image means the company is more likely to be experienced with everything from vehicle repair to data security.

• Keep Your Customer’s Attention ­– If you’ve gotten an online quote request from a potential customer, there’s a good chance you’ve responded to that request by email. But just like you, customers often receive too much email to read all of them.  If your email is coming from a free online service like gmail.com or from an internet service provider like comcast.com, there’s a good chance the customer won’t notice your name and will delete it, thinking it is spam.  If that email is from sales@[yourshopname].com, they’ll know exactly who you are.

• Market Your Shop – If you own a business, you know that every interaction you have is an opportunity to get your shop’s name out there. But one of the most powerful ways to do that is to have your shop’s name embedded in your email address.  Each time someone asks how they can contact you, you’ll be providing your email address, your web address, and your shop’s name all at once.

To learn more about how a professional email address can benefit your shop, contact us at 1-866-665-1605 or email us at help@repairshopwebsites.com. 

What If You Only Had Ten Seconds to Describe Your Business?

If you own a repair shop, you understand how much work goes into building a thriving shop.  There are a lot of words that describe a high-performing shop:  competence, efficiency, integrity, technology, service.  But what if you only had ten seconds to describe your shop to a potential customer?

Unfortunately, if you take much longer than ten seconds to get a customer’s attention on your website, they are likely to move along to the next shop.  Once they search for a shop in their area, several will show up, and they’ll likely take a quick look at all of them.  The first one that answers all of their questions will be the one that gets a phone call.

So what do you need to communicate in those first few seconds?  While you definitely want to come across as a high-performing shop, there are some other questions you need to answer right away:

• Does your shop perform auto repair?
• Can you fix the customer’s specific problem? (for example, brakes, transmission, etc.)
• Do you service their vehicle make and model?
• Are you located nearby?
• Are you easy to contact?

This ten second rule doesn’t mean that a customer has to be able to read your entire website in ten seconds!  People make the decision on whether the site is valuable in ten seconds – if they decide it’s valuable, they may spend several minutes on the site reading content before giving your shop a call.  If you can’t convince them to take a deeper look quickly, however, you might not get the chance.

Notice that the site above quickly answers these questions.  The logo and picture makes it clear that this is an auto repair shop.  The shop’s location and contact information are made available at the very top of the site.  A quick visit to the “What We Do” dropdown menu will show that they can address a customer’s specific problem.  This site provides all the information required to answer most customers’ major questions in just a few seconds.

Does your site pass the ten second rule?  Give us a call at 1-866-665-1605 or send us an email at help@repairshopwebsites.com and we’ll be happy to give you advice!