How many consumers read reviews?
Are reviews especially important for the auto repair industry?
What are consumers looking for when reading reviews?
Thankfully BrightLocal recently released their Local Consumer Review Survey 2023 to help us find the answers to these questions and more when it comes to reviews. This thorough, in-depth and well-constructed survey includes viewpoints from 1,117 United States consumers in January 2023.
If you had to choose between a day where half of your customers didn’t show up or a day where half of your staff didn’t, which would you pick?
For most shops, the second scenario is much scarier. The struggle to secure motivated technicians remains as challenging as it was two years ago. The undeniable truth is that the services of a skilled technician are in high demand. Without an ample number of technicians utilizing the space and equipment, it becomes difficult to make a shop profitable, even if the customers are loyal.
If you have recently had a tech or two leave your shop what reason did they give you? Was it pay? Even if the pay was a nice bump over what you were paying them, do you think that is the real reason they left?
As you’ve probably observed many times, when humans make a big decision there are often two stories – the truth, and then the story they tell you to make you feel better about it or to avoid a discussion about the truth. And most often, we are willing to believe the story because it makes us feel better and helps us avoid having to make hard changes.
We have spoken to a lot of auto repair shop owners and managers who have told us that they don’t like to bother their customers by asking for reviews. Is that feeling justified? Do consumers really dislike being asked for reviews?
The great news is that the fine folks at Moz have helped us get a lot more insight into what consumers think about being asked for reviews as part of their Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior Report. We covered in detail their findings about how consumers evaluate reviews and particularly how that affects repair shop owners in the blog last month.
We have been emphasizing the importance of reviews for auto repair shops for years, most recently in our blog How Google Reviews Win You Business. We now know even more about how consumers process reviews and what they do after reading them thanks to a recent survey that comes from the very well-respected SEO firm Moz. The survey was conducted in September 2022 with 1,300 consumers.
Here are some of the key points of the survey that reinforce previous findings:
Unfortunately, there are far too many “businesses” in the marketing industry that use fear and misleading tactics to get the attention of small business owners. They are willing to do whatever it takes to sell their services and some of their tactics are downright evil. Auto repair shops are among the businesses they target. We hear from clients all the time about an email they received with a warning that scared them into action by manipulating marketing companies. Here’s what to look out for and how you can investigate these claims yourself.
Your website is one of the first opportunities that most potential customers have to interact with your shop. Anything you can do to make it easier for them to contact you provides you with more opportunities to win their business. That’s why click-to-call was such a great invention.
While click-to-call is still very relevant to today’s consumer, you may be missing opportunities with those potential customers who prefer not to call a business. With the growing number of consumers who would like a near immediate response but prefer not to use the phone is it better to offer texting or a chat?
As we get ready to crossover into the fourth quarter, we turn to a time when many organizations start their annual planning process. There are lots of different ways to do this and it’s truly up to you to determine what process will work best for your auto repair shop. You don’t have to do it at this time of year either. What is important though is that you take the time to do it at least annually.
Have you heard a story about a large company suffering a cyber attack and thought to yourself, “I’m glad that we are too small to worry about that”? Well, I’m sorry to tell you that you absolutely do need to worry about cyber attacks on your auto repair shop.
In ideal circumstances, you will not find yourself in the position of needing to bring in more business to your auto repair shop quickly. But right now we are in unprecedented times as far as all the things that are happening in the American economy.
So whether you are in need now, or want to put a plan in place in case you need to bring in new business during a slowdown or dry spell, the following eight ideas can help. The ideas are mostly low cost, with the cost really going into the time for somebody to execute on them.
