Over 80% of customers choose an independent workshop after their car’s warranty expires. This is how we started the first part of our article. Today, instead, we´ll ask you this question: have you put into practice any of the tips in Part 1 to revert this situation?
In the first part of the article, we gave you three strategies for improving customer loyalty:
- Adapt to customers’ new purchase habits (ecommerce).
- Leverage the expertise of being an official dealer to generate more confidence.
- Streamline the customer experience for booking an appointment, buying, and asking questions.
In this second part, we’ll see two more strategies to increase the retention of service customers.
Put your most qualified technicians on the most profitable jobs
Attracting and retaining customers should go hand in hand with optimizing the workshop; it’s useless to generate more opportunities if you won’t be able to handle them. How to do this?
First, detect which are the jobs each technician is better at. This lets you strategically assign technician to jobs and ensure that vehicles remain in the workshop the least amount of time. The greater the workshop turnover, the mor appointments you can schedule per day.
Then you need to analyze the productivity and efficiency of each technician. These indicators will highlight the need for reorganizing the department, training technicians, or investing in infrastructure.
- Efficiency: calculated by analyzing billed hours (for example, the customer pays two hours for maintenance) against worked hours (the technician worked three and a half hours). In this case, we deduce that the technician needs training or that this job is not suitable for this technician.
- Productivity: calculated by analyzing worked hours (the technician usually works an average of six hours per day) against available hours (the technician spends eight hours in the workshop). In this case, those two idle hours can be spent on other jobs or training.
This information will help you organize the workshop and discover your true service sales potential.
Keep track of what happens in the workshop at all times
Finally, it’s important that the Service Manager knows what happens in the workshop at all times. In addition to monthly indicators, you need to have a 360-degree view of technicians, customers, and vehicles.
Autologica DMS helps you analyze two key aspects of the workshop:
- Job Clock: essential to view time consumed by technicians on each task and detect delays that have to be instantly resolved. Read more.
- RO Progress: vital to see real time progress of each open repair order at the workshop, detect bottlenecks and prioritize certain jobs. Read more.
These two strategies, together with the three mentioned in our previous article, can be applied combined as well as independently, and are essential to restarting your workshop activity during the current COVID-19 situation.
Request a demo to receive more information about how Autologica DMS can help you improve workshop productivity and efficiency.
