It’s been awhile since we checked in on Jake, the Car Doctor. When it comes to car repair, he is guy you want working on your car. He’s got a wonderful garage-side manner and his intuition is as good as his advanced technical training. If a car can be fixed — or even brought back from the dead — Jake is the guy you want in the bay. Mechanical exorcism is part of his daily routine.
But when it comes to marketing, Jake is haunted by his lack of knowledge on the subject and his inability or unwillingness to take decisive action to promote his shop. His main source of marketing is by word-of-mouth, which over the years has been effective enough to keep food on the table but hasn’t been enough to grow his business. Stagnant water has a stench and Jake’s stagnant business was beginning to reek.
His friends have been telling him for the last few years that he should build a website not just because everyone else is doing it but because that’s the way business is being done these days, Well…in essence, I guess, it is because everyone is doing it just like everyone used to buy space in the Yellow Pages (which did turn yellow over time, metaphorically speaking).
Like many shop owners, Jake’s hesitancy to move forward with a website was predictable. Although the cost to build one was bothersome his bigger fear was receiving a negative review. You have to understand Jake is very sensitive to criticism ever since a customer accused him of “fixing more than he should have,” although he probably saved his customer’s life by replacing a faulty brake line. Jake tried to call him to get permission to make the repair but couldn’t reach him so he acted on his own for the sake of safety. Instead of being thanked, the customer said he was cheated.
That incident scarred Jake emotionally. His customer’s reaction didn’t seem fair. Bamboozling wasn’t part of Jake’s nature — he advised customers on what needed to be fixed right away and what maintenance and repairs could wait. As a premier shop, he picked up customers from other shops that offered sub-standard service and questionable consultation.
Even picking up some business from shoddy shops wasn’t enough. In essence, Jake’s Place, which is located in an out-of-the way alley, was all but invisible except to regular customers. Having no online presence assures his invisibility, which did gnaw at him but not enough to do something about it. For Jake, it was all about avoiding the negative review. He reasoned that if he didn’t have a website, then any customer who might get upset wouldn’t have the chance to post a negative review on his site. Of course, he conveniently forgot that reviews — both negative and positive — could be posted onYelp, Angie’s List and Google.
If you’re thinking this is a shame, it is. Fortunately, Jake came across a Motor Age interview posted on YouTube that seemed to speak directly to Jake.
“The customer’s experience has to match his expectations or there could be problems. If a customer spends $300 and the work takes three hours instead of the expected $30 and 30 minutes,” you’re going to get a bad review,” says the interviewee, Nathan Scripps, general manager for MotoREV, an online marketing program for repair shops.
Although you can’t always match experience and expectations, Scripps says you can’t just blow off a negative review because of the potential ramifications. “If a customer is happy, he may tell someone about his experience. However, if a customer is unhappy, he’s definitely going to tell somebody. In fact, he’s going to tell several people.”
As Jake viewed the Scripps interview, he learned that all was not lost when a negative review is posted because they can be managed. Scripps says the MotoREV program has the capability of delaying a negative review so it can be handled before it winds up on Yelp, Google or Angie’s List. This is simply done by surveying customers about their repair experience. Just by asking how their experience was, Scripps says this provides an outlet for customers to vent and gives shops the opportunity to bring the customer’s experience and expectation back into balance. This is especially important if the negative review is over something major that has the potential of damaging your business.
“Through MotoREV you get an email on your phone and you can hit the customer’s phone number and talk to the customer in minutes. Start a personal conversation to fix the problem. This gives you the opportunity to take care of it privately before it posts publicly,” Scripps emphasizes.
The worst thing that can happen, Scripps says, is to have just a few reviews because if there are some negative ones, they take on a lot more importance. Rather than shy away from online reviews, Scripps says shops should actively try to drive a high review count and a high star rating on their websites. “No matter where customers go — Angie’s list, Google or Yelp — they all link to your website. The best story, the best education and the best social proof exists right there on your website.”
“Oh, yeah, the website,” Jake mused. He had considered hiring a website designer but didn’t want to pay through the nose. For a brief moment, he considered hiring his teenage son, Zeke to build his website. Sanity finally prevailed when Jake dismissed Zeke as a kid who liked models, none of which were cars. Frankly, the site Zeke would have designed might have gotten a lot of traffic but for the wrong reason.
After thinking this through, Jake remembered that in the Motor Age interview, Scripps had mentioned that MotoREV offered a complete online marketing program, including building websites. Would it make sense to have the resource that offered effective and professional ways to deal with negative reviews also design a website? Jake went to www.motoshop.com/motorev to find out. Now he can go back to doing what he does best: fixing cars.
