For some reason, the wholesale parts industry has an aversion to pushing buttons on a phone and calling a customer. You are great at picking up, putting on hold and eventually answering the call. But for some reason, the easiest and best way to make more money and satisfy more customers is something you avoid.
I am not here to make friends, but rather to make partners of all of you for my brothers and sisters who provide service to vehicle owners. Some of you already get this, but most of you don't. Don't believe me? Ask your customers.
"How is calling a repair shop going to improve my profits?" So glad you asked. Quality auto repair shops understand that they trade time for dollars. Their entire revenue stream is dependent on great time management. Let me share with you an example of the way it should work between a great supplier, repair shop and our shared customer.
Once a technician has done his or her magic determining the causes of a customer's concerns with a vehicle and has identified necessary maintenance needs, he or she writes up the repair order with the findings and submits it to the person responsible for creating an estimate and determining parts availability before contacting the customer.
The service consultant then calls the customer and negotiates the needed service and the time the vehicle will be available. Once the service consultant has received authorization, he or she will immediately order the parts needed for the job. Most good repair shops are making all of this happen within a couple of hours of receiving the car, or at a time they have pre-negotiated and communicated to the customer.
Close by, at the service facility's preferred parts supplier, an order comes through by phone, fax or computer (preferably the latter). Someone responsible for monitoring that order verifies the items are in stock and assembles the order for delivery. On the rare occasion (we all hope) that a part shown in computer inventory is not in the store, the person in charge of the order determines what it will take to get that missing part into the hands of the technician and immediately calls the person who placed the order to provide them with a true and accurate time that the part can be delivered.
Want to really impress a busy service consultant? Shoot them an e-mail as well. Man, would that be cool: information without having to get off the phone. Repair shops that value your time as well as their own want you to underpromise and overdeliver just like they do. By giving an accurate delivery time quickly, the consultant can call his or her customer back sooner rather than at 5 p.m. and work out a revised pickup time and alternate transportation if necessary. Take it from someone who wrote service every day for about 10 years — customers love this kind of attention and consideration. These days, it's more like they expect this kind of attention and consideration. And if you're not willing to give it to them, they will go someplace else.
You will almost always retain the sale, because you will now be an invaluable partner rather than someone throwing curveballs at the service consultant. The advice is free; the implementation is a paradigm shift. If you make this work, you likely will lose some customers who waste lots of your time and resources. You will more than offset that with more sales from your most loyal customers who have been waiting for you to work like they do.
Donny Seyfer is a second-generation repair shop owner and ASE Master Technician. An active industry educator, Seyfer hosts two automotive radio shows, serves as chairman of the Automotive Service Association of Colorado, works nationally to help repair shops with IT and service information utilization and writes for Motor Age, a sister publication of Aftermarket Business.
