By Steve Knox
I have started asking myself that question from time to time: ‘how are you doing?’
This has forced me to perform self-checks. It could be something that everyone needs to do during this time, because we are all dealing with an unprecedented level of uncertainty, unlike ever before.
In my usual environment, I have some control over what happens with the businesses. I understand my role, my commitment to the store owner, commitment to my team members and commitment to my family. All of these responsibilities have made these desperate times all the more difficult to navigate.
However, these are the commitments I have made, so navigate I must.
Last fall I assembled a plan for 2020. It included checkpoints where I would stop and look at our performance, analyze our numbers and build a plan to move forward. This sequential plan would create a gradual climb in success; however, the emergence of this global pandemic quickly halted our rise.
So where do we go from here?
I think the first point to realize is that we are not in this alone. There is no industry out there that has not felt the impact of the virus in one way or another. The second point to consider is that this situation is temporary—soon we will be rebuilding and starting fresh, and we just need to hang in there.
The third and most important point, which I will highlight, is that this is actually a huge opportunity for improvement.
With fewer vehicles on the road, creating fewer collisions and in turn, less business, we gain the benefit of time. Using this time to refocus on my initial plan of self-checks for both myself and my facility has uncovered opportunities in every aspect of our business. I am analyzing every repair process component. I have studied costs like never before. I have looked for areas to trim. It is oddly exciting to know that for everything we trim, it will, in turn, create the opportunity for enhancements in things like the technologies we use, estimating processes, supply usage and customer experience.
Technologies we have never really taken advantage of before are now becoming key tools for our business. For the first time, I can truly say I am excited about photo-based estimating. It is such a great tool; I have to wonder why our industry has never embraced it so strongly before. It is efficiencies like this, that have to come to the forefront.
Estimating has been another great subject around the shop. For example, do we perform a good estimate on a drivable vehicle without having the customer leave the safety of their car? This question has led to the invention. Insurers understand that photo-based estimating will likely drive supplemental damage up. However, hidden damage not captured in the estimate also affects workflow in the shop. We have therefore updated our standard operating procedures with an emphasis on initial teardowns, as a response to the effects of these new estimating procedures.
I have also had the opportunity to study our supply usage. Perhaps we are using too much of some supplies, and we are giving away others. Overall we have room for improvement when it comes to small hardware and products such as specialized adhesives. I have gone back to the guidelines that insurers have provided us in order to help stop our leakage, uncovering several areas where we were not properly highlighting the supplies we used.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, an area of our businesses that we should have in mind right now is how our customers are feeling about what we do. Our traffic has slowed, so every customer we deal with is going to have a much larger effect on our customer service scores. They have been very important to us in the past, but never as important as today. Whether it is highlighting the disinfectants you have applied, providing delivery, implementing contact-less in-store services—these all make a difference in the customer experience. Now when an adjuster speaks to a customer on the phone, they can recommend a facility that they are proud to mention, yours.
In closing, how are you doing? Are you performing self-checks? Are you looking after your family, your employees and your obligations to owners? Are you looking after yourself?
Remember, any challenge in life is an opportunity to be better. Let’s take this one and make ourselves the best we have ever been.
Steve Knox, general manager at CARSTAR Fredericton and CARSTAR Fredericton North, is an I-CAR instructor and a former member of the CCIF Steering Committee.
