HOUSTON — Focusing on customer service makes your business just like any other collision shop. What you need to create to truly stand out is the customer/employee experience.
Shops need to create an environment where employees want to do their job, rather than feel like they have to do it. This is all part of fostering a successful customer/employee experience, and its success lies not just in a shop’s employees and customers, but also in its leaders.
A positive customer/employee experience helps drive repeat customer business and also build word-of-mouth promotion, which Formica says is vital to shop success. “If 85 percent of your customer base is not referrals, you need to have focus groups with your customers and find out why,” he said.
“Walt Disney said, ‘If you can dream it, you can do it’,” Formica said. “But you have to know what your business purpose is. Disney’s purpose is to make people happy, and it sells imagination and fantasy. And you need to as well.”
Formica says to break the stereotypes and perceptions of those out there in the collision repair industry — images, for example, of dirty waiting rooms with bad coffee, old magazines, a run down waiting room and unprofessional employees. “You are not in an auto body repair shop, you are in a relationship-building business. What you have to do is what Walt said: ‘You don’t build a product for yourself. You need to know what the people want and you build it for them’.”
Customers seek reliability, empathy, trust, tangibles and a positive, memorable experience. “If you just fix my car, I can go to anyone to fix my car. But I want to come to your business because of that relationship you have built,” Formica says. “Your business is only as good as you are today. You can stand out and be better than everybody else if you just change that experience a bit.”
This all begins with your people. Formica reminded the audience that Walt Disney said, “You can design, create and build the most wonderful people in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.”
Disney hires people to fill a role, not a position, Formica said. “Some of you have nice people in your shops. But you may have the wrong people in the wrong roles. Because you won’t create connections with your clients if you don’t have the right people,” he said.
“Your every action is a direct reflection of your entire business,” Formica said. So carefully evaluate your “on-stage presence” and make sure you are presenting the right image to your clients.
Formica finished with a final Walt Disney quote that he encouraged shops to remember: “Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends."