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More specifically, what percent of the cars that you service are ones where the customer called ahead (or maybe you contacted them) and made an appointment as opposed to people who just drop in?
I’m hearing of some shops where there are very few appointments and others where almost all cars are appointments. How about your shop?
Thanks!
Tom Ham
Auto Centric
5355 Plainfield Ave. NE
Grand Rapids, MI 49525
616-364-4001
www.AutoCentricRepair.com
Tom@AutoCentricRepair.comI manage A full service gas station where walk ins and surprise visits are common place. I have stressed to my regulars the importance of at least calling ahead of time to let me know they are coming. We get so much traffic thanks to the convenience store side it can become chaotic. My waiting space is limited and having vehicles left for service almost always garauntees upsale on needed items. My difficulty is that I struggle to keep al my techs busy and if I had an appoinment book I would have very little luck keeping it filled.
we do about 10 cars a day and have about 1-2 Appointments a day . We are trying to offer incentives for pre booking.
I try to run off of appointments. I usually don’t/won’t take in the quick lof. It usually doesn’t seem to produce anything. But with that being said I sometimes think of dumping appointments all togather. I worked a K-Mart Sevice Center and I talked the boss into dumping the appointments. All of a sudden we had people lined up at 8 am to get there car fixed we double our business almost over night. We went from a last place store to one of the top one in the area.
99.9% are appointments. I’m still a one man shop primarily growing through word of mouth and my building is on a side street so I don’t get many people just stopping by.
We work 100% from appointments so that we can properly maximize our productivity. We have found that without appointments many upgrades are missed because the guys are in a hurry and don’t look over the cars as well as they should. Also because our customers know that we work by appointment they are very thankful when we can get them in the same day or next day because they are “special”.
This approach also allows us to book our Preferred Customers in advance for their next appointment “to be sure we get them in when they want to come in”. About 1/2 our appointments are made 6 months in advance (which is our normal interval for servicing).
We also do not do wait jobs unless they are planned in advance for something we know will be very quick – like putting on a part we had to order and will take 1/2 hour or less.
Having said that we do have jobs that are towed in or brought in with no appointment but they come AFTER the appointments and we make sure people understand this. They are appreciative if we work them in right away (why not we needed the work!) and it gives us one more way to make our customers feel special.
We have always been an ‘appointment’ shop, although as the economy is changing we are finding it necessary to do whatever it takes to get people in the door. Increasingly, we are taking people ‘today’ or ‘right way’. We too are in a business park and not easily seen from the street, so ‘drop-in’ business is not really practical.
> This approach also allows us to book our Preferred Customers in advance for their next appointment “to be sure we get them in when they want to come in”. About 1/2 our appointments are made 6 months in advance (which is our normal interval for servicing).
Larry;
I have tried to pre-book appointments, with mixed results. I think some of our customers were offended when we called them back, so I dropped to program. I think doing this will be a great help to our RO count issue.
How does your program work and what are your suggestions to make this simple and effective?
Thanks
Hi Andy,
We have found that about 50% of our customers love making their appointment in advance, 10%-20% will do it to get goodies, and the rest do not want to plan that far ahead.
When we first started doing it the biggest resistance was at the front desk who already had “too much to do”.
I created a Preferred Customer Program card (similar to a car care club card) which gives them $450 worth of goodies for just making, and keeping their appointment. The card is good for 13 months (that is two servicing cycles for us) and gives them things that we would do anyway for our good customers – but this way they know it is a benefit. The card includes two free 1-day loaner cars, a discount on multiple day car rentals (our rate through enterprise) a discount on their minor service and on a transmission flush. You get the idea.
Since the SA’s are always willing to give things away they got all over this program. The biggest thing in making it work to get people back on time is the SA’s must promote it as a huge benefit that goes away if the appointment is not kept. We give them 30 days grace to make a different appointment date and still keep their benefits.
Let me know if you need any more info and we can talk offline.
Most of our car count is made up from appointments but we allow time each day for drop offs and emergencies. If we had no customers making appointments, we obviously take drive ins, but until that day occurs, we will continue to take appointments and prefer the appointment customer to the drive in customer.
We are about 95% appointments. Mostly due to the face that we are on a low traffic road. We encourage appointments and tell our customers that we do it so that we can plan to have a hoist open for their car when they arrive, saving time for both of us. We never turn away walk ins, but largely encourage appointments.
About 95 percent of our customers are by appointment. Depending on how booked the day is we will take walk ins but they understand that appointments come first.
Gary
We try to book appointments , But due to the economy we have more waiter’s I just expanded our waiting room due to this. We advertise our specials – by apointment only , but you know how that goes.
We also run 12 loaner cars for the apointments , plus offer pickup and delivery , or shuttle We our up 12% this year by bending a little .
Hi Tom:)
Our core business is pre-booked appointments.
We have been offering the six-month check over appointment program for
many years:) We run our shop like a doctors-dentist office, our
clients leave with an appointment set up in 6 months for a head-toe
check over. Our clients love the appointment program, it works very
well for us!
Have a Fun Day
Update.. We were making more appointments then i thought. I think we are up to about 30% appointments we were not booking everyone .Now we i am making sure the get put in mitchell and call 2-3 days in advance.
Alan Ollie Gelfand Pres. wrote:
> we do about 10 cars a day and have about 1-2 Appointments a day . We are trying to offer incentives for pre booking.
Hi Larry, I am very happy to read that you do 100% appointments. I was sharing your review with my team. The problem at my place is we do take 100% appointment, but 50% of them do not turn up or do not come on time allotted to them. This makes things very difficult when 3 or 4 customers land at same time. I just want to know how do you handle in such situations.
Hi Imad,
We do three things that greatly increase the likelihood of them showing up for their appointment –
1- When we book their appointment at the conclusion of their current visit we give them a preferred customer card that is worth $450 face value. If they are more than a month late for their appointment they lose the value of this card.
2- we send out a reminder card a month in advance of their appointment and follow up two weeks after that with a a call to confirm they got the card.
3-the day before the appointment we call to confirm the details regarding the appointment.
By doing the above we get less than a 2% no show for confirmed appointments. Usually if they are not going to keep the appointment we know by the time we make the first follow-up call, at that time we reschedule within a month of the original date if possible.
Hope this helps.
Thanks Larry. Its a valuable feed back. Let me get back to you once implemented successfully.
Best regards
Imad
Hi Larry,
How does the Giftcard come in to play with 450 face value?
What are the restrictions/obligations to you and the customer?
Diane/Tom, We are about 50% booking, however I will take what ever I can. I would love to learn a technique like Diane has to prebook and get them to come in. I will tell you all that when everybody comes in at 8am it is overwelming for my service writer and I.
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