How SMS can Improve Auto Shop profits!

A phone call connects to your customer

Your customer service agents spend their whole day on the phone to customers

• getting the go-ahead on jobs
• informing them of status changes
• and generally keeping them updated and happy.

Except, it's slow

Customers get a phone call and don't recognise the number. They don't answer because they're in a meeting. They're in the bathroom. They forget to call you back. They don't check voicemail until the end of the day. That means you don't get answers quickly enough and that slows your whole workshop process right down.

Have to take a car off the bay? Super-inefficient.

It's also expensive

There are many costs to a phone call, and the least is the actual phone charge.

• You have to be sitting on the phone and dedicating all your attention to it. If you're busy, that means you can't (and shouldn't) be doing anything else. Where time is money, there's no money in sitting on the phone.
• A good percentage of calls are unanswered, so you have to call again or your customer has to return the call. That's called phone tag. Don't play it.
• There's a mental cost to accepting a phone call. You're interrupting your customer's day and in some cases that can get annoying. You're trying to help and they get annoyed! Not cool.

Text to the rescue!

That's where text messages can help. It's much quicker to send a text message, and you can often do it in-between other tasks or while on the phone to a mechanic. Customers usually read text messages within a minute and they can respond right there, even during a meeting.

End result? Less of your team's time, faster responses and faster workshop turnaround. You get a full log of the messages, which reduces arguments about who agreed to what.