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Are You Lighting Your Service Retention Money On Fire?

—Originally Published in Fixed Ops Magazine For Customer Experience —

In the auto industry every market is slightly different and I’m also a firm believer that a prescription without an examination is malpractice. So – when I’m speaking with a prospective client, I always ask what’s currently being done for service and service retention and how it’s working. When asked, it would boggle your mind to know how often we hear dealers say: “It’s ok”, “horrible” or even worse, “No clue.” How do you know if you should continue a service campaign if you don’t know if it’s working? A service director once said the following about a campaign he was running for service retention:

“It’s the worst service retention campaign….we’ve been consistently running it for the past 2 years, and it doesn’t work.”

We speak to hundreds of dealership decision-makers a month. The focus of a majority of these conversations is service retention. We all know how important customer retention is for any business, however it continues to be a serious challenge for many dealerships. It’s a big problem because of how closely the manufacturers watch your service retention number. Service can be the lifeblood of a dealership. The best, most reliable service customers are the ones who stop by every three months for an oil change. Truth is, service carries every month, because not only does it generate revenue, but it’s also the richest source of sales customers. But, that’s only possible when service retention is top-notch.

If you want better customer retention, start with creating a better customer experience. Bring the customers in, treat them well, do the job right, and charge a fair price. When done properly and with sincerity, they will return to you as well as refer you repeatedly to friends and family. Sounds easy, right? Well, there’s a problem…

THE SERVICE RETENTION PROBLEM

You are contending with other dealerships AND independent service centers. Price, more than ever before in recent memory, is a serious concern for customers.  It’s tempting to try to compete with the little guys, but in a race-to-the-bottom, you can’t win. A tiny operation with generic supplies and one service will always be the ‘low-price leader’. Racing to the bottom results in cost-cutting shortcuts that can hurt the customer experience. A deep discount can only be a one-time teaser to woo a customer back. You cannot and should not play this game, (just ask Circuit City) even if you’re the rare company that can win it. The true sale must be made on the experience.

PRICE SHOULD ONLY BE A VARIABLE WHEN THERE ARE NO OTHER DIFFERENTIATING FACTORS

While you’re pushing hard to distinguish yourself from the Lightening Lube stores, stop and think like your own customer for a moment. Don’t make the same mistake that your customers make all the time, focusing entirely on price. If all marketing programs were created equal, price would be the only concern. They’re not. The true litmus test is the dollor-for-dollar ROI generated. A million-dollar price tag is a bargain, when the return is $20 million, just like $99/month is a ripoff when it fails to produce. A focus on cost, conceals value. Value is Benefit vs. Cost. Great quality service is cheap at twice the price. Keep that in mind, because at the end of the month nobody wants to say, “I know we didn’t hit our numbers, but we got a really great bargain on the marketing that failed us.”

THE SOLUTION:

My advice to dealers for their customers is the same thing I tell my dealerships as clients, and it’s boilerplate sales copy.  “Build the value for your customers. Create a great customer experience. Be distinct and market yourself distinctly.” Then, sell your service drive on it’s own, with amenities, services, and skills that no neighborhood Lube-mart can touch.

Craft a great service customer experience and they’ll happily pay full price for the next oil change or service interval.

If they have never been in your dealership before, do something above and beyond.  Something quick and easy like noticing that their headlights need restoration and take care of it for them at no charge. Let them know you handled it for them to keep them safe, and thank them for coming in. Things like this show that you care about the customers themselves, not just their pocketbooks. Get creative and empower all members of dealership staff to do whatever they can within reason to make customers feel comfortable and special. There are many ways to do this without spending money or losing profit.

Making them feel like a VIP is the best possible customer experience. With that customer experience, you are creating customers for life.

If a person has a truly winning experience, they will probably tell a few close friends. However, if they have a bad experience, or at least what they perceive as a bad experience, they will tell EVERYONE. Grocery checkout clerk, Walmart greeter, whoever. They’ll tell anyone who will listen.  A client of mine once mistakenly told a customer (who left angry) that a repair would not be covered by the warranty. Despite making immediate attempts to call the customer back to apologize and correct the oversight, the customer went on a 24-hour dealership review-site marathon slamming his store. The impact was tremendous.

Negativity spreads like wildfire… and your money is flammable.

On a handful of occasions, while looking for a dealership’s website, I’ve found hate-sites ranked higher than the client’s own webpage.

burning-money

INDUSTRY ESPIONAGE

One of the valuable bells & whistles of our retention product is a custom video landing page. On the page we flat-out ask where customers used to service before coming back to your dealership and why. We call this “Industry Espionage” I read every one of these reasons personally. Most of it is simple stuff. It may surprise you how a few easy changes can drastically improve the customer experience and the way they feel about you. Simple things can increase the frequency at which they visit you. Replenishing the hot coffee, free doughnuts, shuttle service, WIFI that actually works and accurate wait times can do wonders for you. Kid’s play rooms and cafe’s are great, but nothing can compete with the real basics:

Simple courtesy, competence, realistic completion times and accurate job estimates can directly impact a positive customer experience.

Industry Espionage Pic

GETTING THEM IN

Before you can show a customer some love with a positive customer experience, you have to first get them to come in. So how do we get new people in or get lost/inactive customers to come back? Marketing. Good marketing would be better, and unique marketing would be best. As we all know, there’s a lot of competition out there. Many other companies are fighting for these very same customers. No mystery there. Constant mobile banners, pop up’s on the computer, radio spots (most of which are horribly annoying) television commercials (equally annoying), costumed people dressed as livestock or superheroes spinning signs on every corner, and we all have Direct Mail pieces in our mailboxes multiple times per week.

THE PROBLEM

Most of these look exactly the same. There is usually very little difference between one dealership’s service coupons and another’s. Further, these are not much different than the after-market service center coupons either. With the exception of whoever put in the lowest price, they don’t give customers much of a buying preference. Price is only what you pay for something. The focus should be on the value you get, FOR that price. We have all paid more than we had previously anticipated for something because a buying preference was created based on value being built. Value needs to be added. Sending a message that doesn’t communicate the unique value the experience will just become a spending contest. Because when the message is the same, whoever puts the most pieces out there wins, whether print media, digital, or broadcast. The more unique, the more you stand out, the more objectively effective your efforts are, the less you have to spend for the same result. That’s value, not cost. I’ve seen 2000 pieces of unique direct mail outperform 10,000 pieces of run-of-the-mill stuff all day long.

Plus – and trust me on this – the customers who come in for value & experience are the customers you really want. If your marketing is only targeting the “lowest-price-shoppers” then you better make sure that you are ALWAYS the lowest price, or you will lose them as fast as you got them.

TRACK-ABILITY

Running a campaign within any medium of advertising needs to be easy to track. Whether this is done through OP Codes or another method (and I highly suggest another method because OP codes are only as good as the person entering them in) you should always be able to tell at a glance if a campaign is bringing in customers. But more importantly, whom it is bringing in (ie: current customer, lost customer, no-history customer), number of visits, the total ROI to date for the campaign as well as an exact total upon completion. If it worked well, keep running it.

But the bottom line is this: if you can’t tell at a glance how well the campaign is producing – with hard numbers – find another.

Customer experience trackability

With the programs we run, if a customer isn’t standing in your dealership with our marketing in one hand, and handing you cash with the other hand, we don’t claim them.

We don’t just preach this stuff, we practice it too. We have over 90% retention with our strictly automotive clients. Many of whom have recorded video testimonials for our website.  When was the last time that your experience and results from a direct mail company prompted you make a video testimonial about them?  No one wants to to jump in front of a camera, and they certainly wouldn’t do it and lie.

Now that’s real value – and in this industry – its priceless.

PassChecks® Service Retention in Fixed Ops Magazine

We are proud to announce PassChecks®, the newest addition to our already industry-leading service retention solution. It’s pretty exciting to see the word spreading about PassChecks® – below is an article that was featured in Fixed Ops Magazine.

PassChecks® Service Retention

This incredible retention tool is really gaining a lot of traction.  PassChecks are truly making a name for themselves.  It’s exciting to see the brainchild of our CEO succeeding.

Find out more about increasing service revenue from inactive and no-history customers with PassChecks® here.

Fixed Ops Pulse PR Combined

Pulse Creates New Smartphone Integration to Reclaim Lost Customers

Pulse Mail Ninjas have announced a very high tech companion for their VIP Checkbook program. This new technology automatically sends alerts to the customers smartphones whenever they are near your dealership. This keeps your dealership on a customers mind whenever they need service.  Barcodes also allow for pure reporting of the offers that are redeemed.

Pulse CEO, Jonathan Benjamin, was recently asked about the success of this program. “Our VIP Checkbook [service retention] Program had already been delivering industry-leading ROI. But we’re already seeing that this new technology is helping to deliver even higher response rates.”

“….customers have even been requesting the digital versions of the offers. This shows a shift in the way customers will want to interact with businesses in the future. Simply put, you can’t get any closer to a customer than their smartphone. With service offers directly on the customers phone, they don’t have to worry about leaving their coupons at home.  Or, generally not having them close when they need them. This results in more customers responding to your marketing efforts.

The Sizzle or the Steak?

Sizzle Steak Retro

 

My friend Regena recently took her new Hyundai to the dealership for an oil change. The wait time was a bit more than she had been told but she’s pretty laid back so it wasn’t’ a big deal. What WAS a big deal was what happened next…

When the service was complete she went up to pay, in a hurry to get to her next appointment, and they can’t find her keys and ask her to wait while they go find them.

So she waits….and she waits. And she waits for 10 more minutes. They can’t find them. As she stands at the service advisors counter waiting, they tell her they are still looking.

Twenty minutes have now passed. Still no keys and now she certainly will be late to her next appointment, but still she waits, with a not so happy look on her face.

“We’re still looking”. They tell her.

Thirty minutes later they finally find the keys and bring them so she can leave.

And then it happened….

“Be sure to give us all tens on the survey that you receive from Hyundai. We are big on our service scores…” The service advisor tells her.

No apology, no refund on service, no discount for the next service. Nothing. Just business as usual – as if this was common practice.

This begs the question: What is more important, the sizzle? Or the steak?

Psychologically, most people don’t want to be the one that gets someone else in trouble, especially at work. So people actually do score their experience higher than it actually was, especially when ASKED to. After all, the advisor could have been very nice. Also, was HE the one who actually lost the key? Who knows.

Is it more important for the manufacturer to see great scores from the surveys even though the customer had a less than desired experience? Does the – perceived – sizzle of great survey scores outweigh the steak of customers having a great overall experience?

Of course not. Never.

For those that dare to think it does, so be it. However for those, I’d be willing to bet that increasing service retention is a constant source of frustration and challenge.

The result of this mentality is disastrous. It means dealerships can receive awards for customer service while actual retention numbers go down.

The manufacturer would be happy, while you’re simultaneously losing an amount of in-brand customers that even dwarfs the number of solicitation phone calls you get in a day!

Bottom line:

Independent repair facilities are already trying to steal your customers… and it’s working. Let’s empower our people to step it up a notch and make it more difficult for them to leave.

The first step is treating customers like VIP’s. The second step is reclaiming the ones who have left with unique marketing and great offers.

Step one is within your power. If you need help with the second part, you’ll love what we have to offer. See it in action here.

Is the key to the future in the Rearview Mirror?

RearviewI recently saw a video where mothers were interviewed about their thoughts on how they felt they were doing as a parent. Most focused on their shortcomings, things they thought they were failing at, or areas that needed improvement.

The interviewers also asked their kids (in private) how they felt about their mothers.  The children only spoke of the things they loved about their mom. They talked about how beautiful mom was, the good ways she treated them or the fun things that they loved to do with her.

The video was very moving. It was also quite profound and applicable to various aspects of our lives. How we view ourselves can be – and usually is – very different than others see us. We tend to focus on shortcomings, failures, things we still have yet to achieve, how far we still need to go and future not-yet-met long or short term goals….while others mainly focus on how far we’ve already come, how good we have made them feel, all of the things we’ve done for them, the love we’ve given, the fun we’ve had, the generosity, support and help.

That’s what others mainly see.  If we went around interviewing people and asked what kind of person they thought we were, and the feelings they have toward us, I think it would bring us to tears.  Emotional- happy-tears of course.

More than that though, is the “why”…

I think the reason is that part of our soul would smile knowing that somehow, some way, we were on the right path – that we are achieving and have achieved so much already.

One of the things that I tell my coaching clients all the time is: “Just move forward,  theres a reason that the windshield is bigger than the  rearview mirror, the rearview is just for a little  perspective.” But now I see that it’s way more than just for perspective.  The past should be celebrated. We tend to get so focused on the horizon, on future plans and the big-hairy-goals of our lives that we forget to periodically look back to to see the distance we have traveled and to be proud of it. Even if it hasn’t yet brought us to where we want to be….we are certainly on the way.

It’s completely acceptable and ok  to want more, while simultaneously being grateful for growth, how far you have come and be happy with what you have already achieved.

As a matter of fact, I believe looking back and feeling the gratitude is an intricate part of the process to receiving and achieving more.

I for one, am super-grateful today for this reminder to look in the rearview and take inventory of past achievements.  It’s just the fuel I need to keep moving forward.

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