THE CAR COUNT MYTH: WHERE IS YOUR CAR COUNT? (PART III)
Is your car count growing or shrinking? In Part One of this blog, I discussed how 60%-80% of car count is the responsibility of the team…not the owner!
And in Part Two, I talked about what you should be holding your team accountable for.
If you’re ready to take charge, make the decision starting today to…
- Set clear expectations for your team.
- Measure their performance daily. Part of this goes back to that attrition rate. Knowing how many customers you’re losing at a point in time doesn’t tell you nearly as much as keeping track of that attrition rate over a long period of time. The process of determining attrition rate is done with what’s called an attrition survey, and if you conduct this survey monthly, you’ll be able to see trends. Did your attrition rate spike after you hired a new service writer? Did it fall after a class your counter staff took? This is just the beginning of what a customer attrition survey can tell you. If you’d like help measuring your shop’s attrition rate through an attrition survey, give my team a call at 1-866-520-3030. We can help you get started.
- Hold your team accountable.
- Train and coach them to meet reasonable expectations and to give great customer service
- Require your staff to do customer call backs. There are a lot of services out there who you can pay to do this for you, and it’s tempting to save yourself the time by hiring them. But only your service writers can build that lasting relationship. Outsourcing that job to a third party means that your shop can’t resolve concerns as they come up (the first time you’ll hear about them is when the bad review shows up on that third-party company’s website)…your shop also can’t build trust and loyalty by following up on items outside of the scope of the repair. If that customer told your service writer about an illness in their family, will that 3rd party caller use that call to strengthen that relationship? Or will that call be all business? Don’t miss this opportunity to earn that customer’s friendship, trust, loyalty and referral in the name of saving a few minutes on the phone.
- Once your internals are fixed — and only after they’re fixed — advertise like crazy to the right customers, in the right way.
How can I ask you to do this? How do I know this will work? Because my shop is up 14% in car count this year over last year!
It all starts with a commitment to shifting a big part of the car count burden to your employees and holding them accountable. And that means you have to measure.
I have been remote managing my shop for over 9 years. It’s not easy to go from “winging it” to measurement, tracking and accountability, but I can tell you that it’s made the difference in my shop and in my clients’ shops.
And it has meant winning the attrition game and growing throughout this (and previous) economic downturns.
If you’re ready to take the next step towards measurement — whether it’s attrition or marketing or any other facet of your shop — but are worried about the time and commitment it might take, don’t give up until you’ve talked with my team at 1-866-520-3030.
No matter how you choose to do it, I strongly encourage you start making your team responsible for most of your shop’s car count. It will mean less stress on you as the owner…and on your wallet. And it’s a big step towards growing your shop to a point where it can be successful whether you’re there in the shop or hundreds of miles away doing what you love with the people you love.