Being great at fixing cars isn’t enough to get your customers coming back to your workshop every time they need a service.

Why? It all comes back to an expression you may have heard or read before: people may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

If you want customers to become loyal, to come to you every time they need a service or repair, then you need to make them feel like you care about them and their car. It’s all about providing good customer service.

You could be the best mechanic in the world but if, for example, the way you communicate with the customer is lacklustre, dismissive or, worse, rude, that customer isn’t coming back.

How do you know you’re getting customer service wrong? Look at your retention rate. How many customers are you seeing repeatedly? How many have you seen just once and never again?

Common ways workshops lose customers for life

Wondering what you could be doing to lose customers? Here’s a checklist of some incredibly simple things many workshops do that really annoy customers:

• When answering the phone, the workshop employee fails to introduce themselves or even use the business name
• Taking days to reply to customer enquiries received via email or Facebook
• Not telling the customer when they can expect their vehicle to be ready for pick-up, or even when the workshop intends to look at it
• Not keeping the customer informed throughout the day on how the job is going, and whether more diagnostic investigations are needed
• Providing extra services, like new wiper blades or a fuel treatment, without customer approval
• The final cost of the repair or service is greater than the customer was expecting or than was originally estimated or discussed
• Leaving it to the customer to call the workshop for information about the progress on the repair or service, or when the car might be ready for pick-up
• Telling the customer the car will be ready at a certain time but, when the customer arrives, the car is still in the workshop and the invoice is nowhere near ready.

How to improve your customer service experience

If any of the above sound like a customer service sin you might be guilty of committing, the good news is that providing great customer service is actually easy. It just means changing your mindset a little and remembering how you treat the customer is as important as fixing the car.

To help you find out where you could improve your customer service, Capricorn has partnered with TaTBiz to create a self-assessment quiz. You can take it here.

 Then you’ll be able to come up with an action plan for how you can improve.