Building customer loyalty in the workshop is one of the main obligations of every mechanic. The topic is really broad and we will try to summarize it best here.

• The relationship
• Amaze the customer
• Price
• Become their point of reference
• Customer support
• Digital

If you are a workshop and you want to retain your customers, this is the right article. There are many speakers who say they know how to best advise, the way to love a person in the workshop. In reality, there are very few people who concretely know how to indicate the right way to build customer loyalty to a workshop. That's why we decided to write this article! In it, we will bring together all the main strategies and tips that you can put into practice right away at no cost, or a little more.

Retaining a customer can be seen as a long-term investment. A loyal customer is a customer who can generate positive word of mouth, offline or online, through reviews on platforms such as YouDriver.

A workshop that has positive "word of mouth" can distinguish itself from its competitors and acquire new potential customers in an "automatic" way.

How many times have you thought "I would like to increase my turnover, I need new customers"? Do you know how much that "NEW" costs you? 5 to 10 times more than keeping current CUSTOMERS.

Recent market research claims that, without good online word of mouth or promotional and advertising tools, getting a new customer into the shop costs 7 times more than returning a customer. Did you know that?

There are several aspects that a workshop must consider in order to effectively retain the customer.

The relationship

The first aspect, of course, is the trust that must arise between the workshop and the customer. Being a relationship to be built over time, the sale of the service must always be customer oriented. Put more simply, we need to make sure that our management and our way of doing things are as friendly, transparent and accurate as possible.

To gain customer trust, we need to show them just as much. To do this, it is necessary to establish a sincere and crystalline relationship, to later make it solid and lasting.

Sure, it won't be as simple as snapping your fingers, but brick by brick, all customers will come back to us if they trust us. The workshops that can offer a free service are very many, but if the person trusts us, it is very likely that he will return to our workshop despite other attractive offers.

At the basis of loyalty, there is the quality of the relationship that is established between you and the customer . There is no second chance to make a good impression: it all starts with the customer acceptance stage.

It is the essential moment to transform that first moment of contact into relationship. Education and courtesy are a must, it goes without saying. Listen to your customer, try to understand what their needs are. Remember that the car is a tool for living certain moments in that customer's life: working, living their hobbies, taking their children to school, running errands.

A good relationship means taking an interest in the customer, knowing how to satisfy his expectations and gaining his trust over time and knowing how to renew it. Precisely for this reason it is essential to be a trusted advisor: knowing how to advise him on the products, those most in line with his driving style, usual route, type of vehicle and use he makes of it.

Never give the impression that your advice is disinterested.

What does it mean to listen to the customer and understand his needs?
People like to tell their experiences, problems, fears, insecurities. Listening, you may find that your customer suffers, for example, from allergies and therefore you may recommend an activated carbon cabin filter with anti-allergic, antibacterial and fine dust filter effects. It costs a little more, but your customer will be happy to spend a few euros more if they gain health.

In this, the YouDriver app can help, which allows you to offer an acceptance service that protects both you and the customer from every point of view (legal, administrative and insurance).

Click here to join YouDriver for free

Amaze the customer

In addition to the technical aspect that must be flawless, let's concentrate and pay particular attention to even the most minimal aspects which, however, make the difference.
Quality is something perceived. Everyone has their own yardstick. Don't indicate that you work with quality or that you offer quality services… prove it with facts!
Amaze the customer.

How?

The small attentions make customers very happy.

In the case of the coupon, we can point out that we have changed those horrible and annoying tax holders, always half detached and damaged ... or carried out a safety check on the tension of the seat belts (think of a mother and the baby in the cradle).

We recommend, in fact, to create an agreement with a car wash in the area, in order to wash the cars for which the interventions are greater from an economic point of view.
Probably if we have an intervention of a few tens of euros, we will not be able to return the expense while, if we change the clutch, we will have a higher markup and we can think of having the washing carried out at our expense.

In addition to this aspect, we can create other small services such as the courtesy, for example, of having the car found parked in such a way as to simplify the exit maneuvers.

They are ways to amaze the customer, offering something more.
The only caveat, do not make them discounted or recurring services. Because otherwise your customers will take them for granted, demanding them every time.

This, however, will also allow you to raise the level of your performance, and not only affect the price of a repair

Price

The third fundamental aspect is the price.

We know, the price is one of the thorniest aspects to face. Nobody is happy to go to the mechanic, especially when the red light on the dashboard comes on.

Loyalty, as we have seen, means relating, listening and talking to your customer, understanding their needs. To improve this relationship, we try to dilute a customer's spending throughout the year.

Small maintenance can be done, such as checking the EGR valve and cleaning it, before it gets stuck or breaks. We can also think about the use of additives in the tank, to preserve and increase the life of the fuel pump and injectors.

All this ... because we know how much these interventions now cost, and that the quality of spare parts is no longer what it once was.

This allows you to work on the "price" in a different way. You will no longer present interventions worth hundreds or thousands of euros, because this scheduled maintenance distributes the intervention costs. Furthermore, by having more frequent contacts, the customer increases the retention rate. In other words, customers remain loyal to a company over a certain period of time.

Another tool is to educate customers and not just sell. Educating customers means giving information about the products you sell or have bought, giving advice on their use, care and maintenance. Even in this case, educating customers means creating a relationship of trust.

Furthermore, by seeing the car more often, you will be able to communicate in a more “smooth” way any interventions with an important cost, such as an intervention for distribution or tire changes. Small tip: always ask the customer what his spending ceiling is. This way, you can avoid any nasty surprises.

YouDriver allows you to plan these interventions, as well as have a more effective relationship tool with your customers than SMS or various chats. You can send photos of work, direct messages, and activate reminders for these small maintenance interventions.

We recommend that you take a look at YouDriver.com.

You will find a whole range of workshops in your area. YouDriver.com is also one of the main sites in Italy for workshops. Tens of thousands of workshops are already registered in Italy and also abroad. Registration is free and allows you to make your workshop known, in a simple and immediate way, to all the thousands of people who visit the YouDriver.com website and app.

Click here to join YouDriver for free

Become their point of reference

A little piece of advice, which could turn your customers around, is to expand the offer.

Create partnerships with other businesses. Other repair professionals such as tire and body builders . It often happens that a customer does not know who to contact, in case of particular interventions. Become their point of reference, for everything related to the "car" world.

You will be that brand, that professional that your client immediately thinks of when he thinks of his car. Increase your authority over those drivers in your area, increase word of mouth and decrease the chance of being compared with your competitors

The more services are provided to the customer, the more customers can contact us and solve their needs in our workshop.

Customer support

As a penultimate aspect, we must have good customer service.

Activate the YouDriver service: customers can write to you to get information on the progress of interventions on their car. This aspect is really simple to achieve, and allows us to bring the customer even closer to our person and to our workshop.

Abandon tools such as WhatsApp, where customers write to you maybe even on Sunday, in the evening, at the last minute or on a lunch break. A tool like YouDriver is active for you 24/7, without having to be there to reply to messages and listen to audio. On YouDriver, you have all the history of the processes, communications, as well as photos of the works, etc.

Click here to join YouDriver for free

Digital

The last aspect we want to talk to you about is a good digital positioning.

With the pandemic, all that local research has increased. Have you noticed the increase in searches "near me"? Thinking about it for a moment ... close to what? At the workplace, at your children's school, at the supermarket ...

This is why it is important to understand that not only the physical presence “geographically” is important, but also online. By now we all rely on the smartphone we have in our pockets, to look for the workshop near our home, to choose the restaurant that has the most reviews or to buy a gift for one of our family members.

For this reason, it is important to have at least an online presence and to rely on online tools such as YouDriver that give visibility to your workshop.

Not only! YouDriver is a 360 ° digital tool, which allows you to activate all that has been said so far (reviews, customer acceptance, messaging with the customer, scheduling of interventions ... and so on).

Signing up for Drivers is really simple and it only takes a few minutes to turn your workshop around.

Click here to join YouDriver for free

credit photo FREEPIK