Congratulations—you’ve just opened your auto body shop! While establishing a car repair business is undoubtedly a significant accomplishment, you can’t afford to rest on your laurels just yet (or ever, really). After all, roughly one out of five new businesses in the U.S. fail within their first year.
To beat the odds, you’ll need a rock-solid strategy for your business’ next few months. Read on for the BayIQ guide on how to run a successful auto body shop.
Prioritize Customer Service
Any successful business understands the importance of customer service, and that’s certainly the case for auto body shops. When you treat your clients right, they’ll keep coming back whenever they need your services.
On the other hand, if you overcharge them for your work, aren’t 100% honest about what they can expect, or avoid going the extra mile to keep them satisfied, don’t be surprised if they look elsewhere for car repairs and maintenance.
If you want to keep your customers loyal, make a point of:
- Providing exceptional service. This is self-explanatory—if you can fix customers’ vehicles quickly and effectively, they’ll return to your shop again and again.
- Offering total transparency. Giving customers honest quotes and a clear understanding of what will happen during their appointment is a quick way to earn their trust.
- Establishing a reward program. While loyalty programs can’t compensate for dishonesty or subpar service, they can help you retain your customer base. In fact, a high-quality reward program can actively increase customer satisfaction.
Invest In Your Team
Your independent auto body shop can’t thrive without the appeal of top-notch workmanship. The key to providing quality customer service is employing hard-working technicians who know what they’re doing. These workers might collect higher salaries than less-qualified mechanics, but they’ll also work faster while making fewer mistakes.
Even if you can hire people who fit this description, keeping them around is another story. If your workers find a more appealing offer elsewhere, the time and money you’ve put into their growth will effectively evaporate.
What this means is that you’ll need to put as much effort into keeping your employees as you do into retaining your customers. To this end, create a strategy for employee engagement, invest in your workers’ continued education, use technology to improve internal communication around your shop, and encourage a healthy work-life balance through flexible scheduling.
Leverage Technology
Regardless of how familiar you are with the ins and outs of running an auto body shop, this can be a challenging career—even when things are going according to plan. But you can certainly make life easier for yourself by keeping up with technological developments in the industry.
These days, auto shop software can help you:
- Simplify your marketing strategy
- Offer online appointment scheduling
- Provide automated service reminders
- Digitize your vehicle inspection process
- Automate your shop’s workflows
By utilizing well-designed programs built to meet the needs of independent shops like yours, you can complete more work in less time while increasing your total car count—all without having to hire more techs.
Don’t Forget Marketing
Treating marketing as a high priority can be tricky when you’re already dealing with the day-to-day duties that come with owning an auto body shop. Even so, you need to have a plan to get your name out there—potential customers won’t choose your shop if they don’t know it exists.
In the 21st century, the most effective marketing takes place online. By focusing on platforms like email and text instead of TV and print ads, you’ll reach the widest possible audience and maximize potential engagement. (You’ll also want to create an SEO-friendly website to welcome your new customers. Our friends at AutoVitals can help you with that.)
Word of mouth is another form of marketing you’ll want to take seriously. If your auto shop software automatically solicits customer reviews after they get service, your employees won’t have to worry about this process. Instead, they’ll be able to focus on doing their crucial jobs—and giving your customers a reason to rave about your business.
Consider Scalability
Every company has its own workflows, but not every company takes the time to define them clearly. By nailing down your procedures and organizational methods early in your shop’s life, you’ll be able to keep expanding while minimizing unexpected growing pains down the line.
You’ll also want to find shop software that can keep up with your company’s changing needs. Switching to a new system years from now isn’t impossible, but it’s far less convenient—and more expensive—than picking the right program the first time.
Market your Body Shop with BayIQ
At this point, you should have a better idea of how to run a successful auto body shop. Despite this, you may not know how to juggle all these priorities with your existing workload. Fortunately, finding a solution to one of these problems can help you solve the rest.
Marketing strategy will vary between industries, so it’s best to choose a marketing software catered to auto body shops. And the more features built into the same solution—the better! If you can create and manage a loyalty program for your shop, set up email/text marketing, and solicit online reviews in one place, it’ll be easier for you to get started and optimize your results. Investing in the right program can improve customer satisfaction, enhance employee efficiency, and increase your shop’s overall profitability.
If you’re seeking a program that can do it all, give BayIQ a try! With features like appointment scheduling, online review collection, reporting, and rewards program creation, our automated marketing software can help your shop outdo the competition with ease. Take the first step by requesting a BayIQ demo today!
