It takes a lot of marketing and sales work just to get a customer onto your lot. Actually closing the sale takes a great customer service experience from a dedicated salesperson. The trouble is, once your customer takes their vehicle off the lot, it can be all too easy for them to forget about you. This is especially troublesome when it comes to winning them back the next time they’re ready to buy their next vehicle.
That’s where your service drive comes in. Offering a superior maintenance and repair experience is your best shot on keeping customer satisfaction high, and retaining them for their next purchase. But, if customer perceptions run a-miss of reality, you stand a chance at losing that hard-won customer.
That’s why vehicle condition reviews are so important. Our Dealership Service Center Report uncovered that 75 percent of customers would not return to the service drive if they felt employees had damaged their cars. Additionally, 80 percent would not return for another visit if they thought an item went missing from their car during their last service visit.
You know you take excellent care of your customers’ vehicles. But how can you assure them that you do? You do so by properly recording a vehicle’s condition before and after each visit. Doing this can avoid any misunderstandings, and misperceptions that it was your team that caused damage (and not the customer).
To do this, you’ll need to empower your team to do high-quality condition reviews, quickly. After all, no customer wants to sit around while their vehicle is being inspected.
●Give Them A Checklist — Remembering components to review from memory is asking your team to forget things. Give them a detailed checklist that lets them easily run through every vehicle components you want them review.
●Remember Fuel and Mileage — Customers may forget how much they’ve driven, or how empty their gas tank really was. Remembering to include these items on a checklist will give you evidence to show a customer if they have any questions.
●Don’t Forget The Interiors — Customers may think they brought a package or other expensive items into their car or trunk when they may very well have left them at home. Making sure your team checks these areas and verifies that items are or aren’t present will ensure misunderstandings are prevented.
While these are the first steps to empowering your team to do thorough reviews, the best thing you can do is digitize the process. This not only streamlines the process by removing paper forms but it also offers better documentation to avoid “he-said/she-said” issues.
●Take Photos and Videos — Jotting down notes on paper is helpful. However, taking actual photos and videos of vehicles is a superior way to track a vehicle’s actual condition. It’s easy to argue with notes; it’s more difficult to argue with picture documentation.
●Timestamp Your Records — Being able to prove that a vehicle entered your service lot with existing damage, or came in with no items in the trunk, is critical for avoiding disputes. Being able to timestamp your records helps you do just that.
One added advantage of digitizing your condition reviews is the ability to easily sort transactions by the attendant. This will allow you to see the quality and thoroughness that each person checking vehicles in and out of the service lot is bringing to condition reviews. These became great tools for motivating high-performing employees, and also training tools for those that need a little extra help understanding how best to treat customer vehicles.
At the end of the day, you and your team are driving towards exceptional CSI scores. Instituting strong condition reviews — and giving your employees the tools they need to perform those reviews — will go a long way to driving customer satisfaction and keeping those scores high. And, of course, it’ll go a long way to retaining those customers for their next vehicle purchase.
