In the first of a regular series of articles, Andy Savva aims to help garage proprietors to build a better business.
High-quality service is defined by the customer’s experience while in your care and custody. Operational excellence ensures that the customer’s car will be ready when promised and fixed right, first time. It’s as much about understanding what your customer is trying to tell you when they’re communicating their frustrations with the vehicle as it is about the proper diagnosis and professional quality work.
Andy Savva is a former multiple independent garage owner who boasts over 30 years’ experience in the automotive repair sector. Over the next few months he’ll be sharing his advice with workshop owners who want to improve their business’ bottom line, but simply don’t know how to go about it.
Selling a ‘service’ is perhaps the most difficult of all sales to make. Buying a product – whether it be clothing, food or furniture – constitutes the purchase of something you can touch or feel. Purchasing a service is something else entirely. When a vehicle owner invests in a service, that person is really purchasing a promise – a promise that the customer believes will be fulfilled in the future. That requires trust and a great deal of faith.
Your ability to perform is based upon a lot of things, not least of which is technical competency. However, you can’t demonstrate that technical competency until you’re given the opportunity to do so. The vehicle owner can’t see technical competency. They can’t touch or feel it and you can’t hang it out in front of your garage like a sign!
Where does ‘service’ begin?
Service starts when a customer sees and responds to an advertisement, hears about your business from a friend or relative, calls, finds you on the internet or just walks in. For this reason, MOTs (Moments Of Truth) have to be created. MOTs constitute those occasions when a customer has the opportunity to come into contact with any member of your team and will subsequently form an opinion about your business. These opinions will occur before, during, and after the work on their vehicle has been completed and will ultimately define your personal and business success!
I can’t stress enough how important the consistent execution of your policies and procedures are in helping your business to be recognised as one of the best. Do a great job the first time around, followed by something less-than-great the next, and you’re unlikely to see that customer again. The more people you have working for you, and the more services and products you have, the greater the challenge it is to achieve this consistency.
All of this consistent high quality service is only sustainable in your garage if your productivity and efficiency levels allow you to make a profit. Productivity is a by-product of your technicians and reception staff having the ability to execute policies and procedures flawlessly. It will take more than one training course, the odd staff meeting or, for that matter, sporadic investment in tools and equipment to reach the elusive dream.
What does ‘assume’ make?
Survival in a complicated and changing world is about assumptions. Assumptions allow us to function when we find ourselves beyond the limits of our understanding and experience. When we talk about standards, we’re just defining these assumptions in a more scientific language.
Success in the garage business can be all about assumptions as well. We surround ourselves with a wall of assumptions to help us to make sense of the chaos we confront every day. To a large degree, our success is based upon just how accurate many of these assumptions are. One of the ways we do that is to provide service based upon what we believe is best for the vehicle, assuming that what is best for the vehicle is best for the consumer when, in reality, that might not necessarily be the case.
In the end, these assumptions are about what we believe the customer wants, needs, and expects from us, not necessarily what the customer’s actual desires and expectations are. A perfect example of this is the constant battle between ‘ready when promised’ and ‘fixed right first time’. My experience of running garages has taught me that these two topics jockey for position as the number one customer concern when vehicle owners are seeking a garage for service or repair rather than the myth that price is the first and only consideration.
Understanding these topics (or ‘behaviours’) helps you to learn about the relationship that exists between the provider of garage services and the recipient of those services. It is all about questioning our assumptions then re-creating a service environment that is responsive and respectful when it comes to those things that are most important to our customers. It’s about who we are and who we will need to become just as much as it is about customer expectations, retention, loyalty, and satisfaction.
In the end, it is about creating a compelling value proposition – something your target customer will not be able to resist – and then delivering your services in a quality service environment. It’s all about managing the whole scope of your relationship with the vehicle owner, recognising that perception is reality and only perception matters to your customers.
Look at things differently
If you’d like to find out more about how Andy Savva’s consultancy services could be of benefit to your business email: andy@savvaautomotive.com.
So take this as an opportunity to look at your relationship with your customers in a new and different way. Confront your assumptions about customers, business in general, and our industry, and consider how different things could be if we change the way we look at them.
Remember, if you change the way you see things – if you change your standards and assumptions about your customers, your business and our industry – you may just change everything. In an industry like ours where confidence, self-image, and profits have been notoriously low, that might not be such a bad thing!
Now we’ve established what it is that you’re ‘selling’ to your customers, in the next issue we’ll be looking at how you go about getting started in your quest for a better business.
