Really, 2022 already? Well yes.
Think back to the beginning of 2021, how many changes to your business did you want to make? I had plenty myself. The goal of this Shop Tip is to get you thinking about the changes you want to make before 2022 arrives.
Below are the types of changes your competitors are making. To start 2022 off right, consider putting some of them in place this year.
- Customer Communication (text, inspections, appointment reminders)
- Process Improvements (DVI, check in process, texting appointment reminders)
- Advertising (CRM, website, Google Ads, text campaigns, appointment reminders)
- Profit Growth (training, markup matrix, labor rate)
Customer Communication (Inform, Update, Make It Clear)
A few of the reasons you want to make a change to your customer communication include trust, clarity, and other improvements where needed. Everytime your customer interacts with your business, their trust can either increase or decrease. This could be through phone calls, texts, emails, appointment reminders, social media posts, etc. To increase trust, with every customer contact strive to either inform the customer, update the customer, or make the needs clear to the customer.
Process Improvements (Save Time, Make It Clear, Use Tools)
Reduce communication issues, streamline your customer intake to check out, and prevent errors instead of only fixing them. Whether you are communicating within your shop or with a customer, use your shop’s tools to improve your processes. When you step back and look at your customer intake to check out process, look for the steps you have to repeat or the mistakes you have to fix. A few ways you could do that is by pretending to be a customer, have a friend visit, or pay someone to get their vehicle repaired at your shop. Ask them to note where they think the process could have gone smoother. Working on those issues first will give you the best process improvements to work on first.
Advertising (Current And New Customers, Social media)
As you think about your current services, consider which services you would like to promote. The next best step is to determine if you have enough customers in your database to advertise to or if you should focus on new customers. You can advertise to your existing customers with emails and texts, or you could focus on new customers through paid search. Instead of wasting many hours and weekends trying to get your ads posted, you should consider having an agent support your goals.
Profit Growth (Train Your Team, Labor and Parts Profit Changes)
If your team isn’t using the tools you pay for or your Manager SE isn’t set up right, you’ll lose profits on every customer interaction. A few things I could offer is to check out the Shop Tips on getshopstuff.com. You can search through the posts and see which tip could make sense for you. You may also find your Local Mitchell1 rep who could offer some tips or ways to set up your Manager SE; then you can add services (advertising, digital inspections) while covering the costs.
To help you with your planning, I put together a Success Checklist to help you plan your strategy for 2022. This will only take a few minutes but will be a great start to the planning process.