Drive More Customers to Your Collision Center

By Richard Arnold

The growth of your collision center depends on your ability to gain new customers. Unfortunately, the scope of marketing efforts for many collision shops is to place an ad in the local yellow page phone book. Not that this practice is a bad one, but there is much more that shop management can do to drive more customers to the collision shop.

Do you have a marketing plan for your collision center? If not, you should. An effective marketing plan can bring more customers to your door. Through the process of developing and writing a marketing plan for your shop, you will conduct a competitive review and market analysis, review advertising and media options, and identify ways to build customer awareness as well as leverage referral business. And in today's world, the task of writing a marketing business plan is much easier than in days past. There are numerous tools and resources available to you through your paint jobber and other collision shop consultants to assist you in getting this important task completed.

Another important key to gaining new business is tracking and measuring current business through Customer Satisfaction Indexing (CSI). Most dealerships conduct CSI on new car sales and some do it with their service departments, but research shows very few perform this important business function at the shop level. As in other areas of a dealership, when properly done, a well-ran CSI program for the collision center will help turn customer feedback into useful marketing and management tools that insure long-term profitability. And remember, for greatest effectiveness, CSI should be done on a consistent and ongoing basis, and administered by a third party for the highest level of credibility. Keep this statistic in mind when considering implementing a shop CSI program: The average disgruntled customer tells 17 people about his experience. How many people will those people tell?

As Review Center, speaking of referrals use your satisfied customers to help spread your good name around. Start sending your customers a Thank You card for choosing your shop to bring their pride and joy back to pre-accident condition. And take it a step further by enclosing a small "pass along" card (printed on one side with your shop info) that your customer fills out with their name, address and contact info on the backside. The idea is to get your customer to "pass along" this referral card to a friend, family member or associate that we all know will likely be in an accident sometime soon - especially if they drive in any metropolitan area. Increase the "pass along" success rate with an incentive for the person who passes it along once a referral uses your shop. Reward them with a gift certificate to a restaurant, tickets to a movie, or maybe just cash. Get creative. Nothing beats word of mouth advertising.