By Erin McLaughlin
Tempe, Arizona — August 16, 2017 — Personal relationships with customers will always be important, no matter how computerized and automated the industry becomes. Mike Carrillo, Vice President of Business Development with AutoShopFollowUp.com, and previous owner of an auto glass and detailing shop in Arizona, is building a company geared exclusively toward autobody shops, with the aim of making relationships between customer and shop owner feel more personal, and more human.
“We wanted to try and shift shop/customer interactions back to a more personalized relationship,” said Carrillo. “Businesses often send mass emails to all their customers in order to communicate, because it’s convenient. But it also means shops can’t build personal relationships with the customer. At the end of the day, customers want a more human relationship.”
Their goal is simple: to create a shop/customer relationship that feels authentic. To do this, AutoShopFollowUp.com offers two different services. First, they conduct follow-up phone calls to customers after visiting one of their client’s shops. In these phone calls they gather feedback from the customers, and then draw up detailed quality reports based on the information the customer gives. As well, they encourage customers to rate or review the shop they visited online.
“Our aim is to get the customer talking,” said Carrillo. They ask open-ended questions, allowing the customer to talk about that they think is important—from the coffee in the lobby being old, to how happy they are with their vehicle. This hugely expands the kind of information shops will receive on what they’re doing well and what they should improve, and allows shops to see how they’re doing from a customer’s perspective.
In addition to phone calls, AutoShopFollowUp.com offers a thank you note service, sending personalized cards to customers.
According to Carrillo, their service has increased their client’s customer retainment by about 60 percent. “There’s a need for retention based services,” said Carrillo. “Customers who receive this kind of personal attention will, next time they’re considering where to take their vehicle, think, ‘Mike’s my guy, that’s where I go.’”
AutoShopFollowUp.com currently offers services in Canada and the United States. For more information on the company, please click here.
