An Emphasis on Customer Service and Quality
As a shop that is hugely invested in making sure that our customer journey is the best it can possibly be, we spend a lot of time assessing our services to make sure we aren’t missing opportunities to make our business better. This includes listening to phone calls by our staff on a daily basis and finding customers to act as mystery shoppers for us to evaluate our check-in process, inspection overviews and the way in which a customer is treated when presenting them with information.
Our goal with this is to always be improving. Like any shop we can make mistakes or if we bring on a new employee, sometimes it takes a little while to get them up to snuff in terms of the expectations of our shop. As an example, it is very common for someone to call us asking for a price on a repair. Commonly, the customer is searching simply for the lowest price that they can find without taking into consideration the quality of the part being installed on the vehicle, the qualifications of the person completing the repair or the length of the warranty associated with the company. This “penny-wise, pound-foolish” mentality can come back to bite the customer when the repair is done incorrectly or the part fails prematurely, and guess what? No warranty! But this can be difficult to convey to our clients because, at the moment, saving a few dollars sounds pretty good.
The staff at our shops, and actually one of our mission statements, is built around the idea of educating our customers so they don’t end up in situations that could have been avoided and ultimately end up costing them more money. In one of the training sessions I went to, the instructor said something that I loved. When a customer called them and got a quote it was quite a bit more expensive than another quote they’d gotten elsewhere.
“The other shop I called was much cheaper than you,” the customer on the phone said.
“Actually that’s not accurate,” the trainer replied, “because at our shop, you only have to pay for the repair once. ”
I love this story, because I truly believe that it is crucial to use the right parts and have the right person working on your vehicle. And this is also why I’m so invested in making sure that the experience at our shop is absolutely top-notch. Now, this doesn’t mean our business will resonate with everyone. I get that some people absolutely, positively need to get out the door for the cheapest price because their budgets mandate it. Along those lines, I’ve worked with my staff to do price-matching with written quotes from customers. We just make sure that we are comparing apples to apples. Afterall, price-matching cheap parts isn’t better for our shops and isn’t better for our customers. And it also doesn’t mean that from time to time we won’t have a part fail or something installed incorrectly. This is an extraordinarily complex business and we don’t manufacture the parts. But, we do go the extra mile to test vehicles once the work is complete, to make sure, to the best of our ability, the issue the customer came in for is solved.
At Adler, we typically will use manufacturer parts for this reason. They are the least likely to fail. However, some customers would rather do a more cost-friendly part that still is of high quality. And we’ll do that, too. Just not the cheapest parts that you find online or from some sketchy parts supplier. We believe this resonates with almost all of our customers and keeps everybody happy.