By Mike Davey
Hamilton, Ontario — February 28, 2017 — Every week we run a different survey on various aspects of the collision repair industry. Our most recent survey took a bit of a different tack. This time around, we asked our readers to let us know what they thought about our coverage of the Canadian collision repair industry. We also asked you to let us know what you thought about some of the regular features that appear on a weekly basis on collisionrepairmag.com.
Our next survey puts the focus squarely back on the shops across the country. In particular, it looks at investments in equipment and the rising costs of administration. The survey should take less than two minutes to fill out. You can find our new survey here.
First, we asked survey respondents to let us know what they thought about our coverage of the Canadian collision repair industry? We’re pleased to say that all of our respondents thought we were doing at least a “Fair” job (8 percent), with the majority rating us “Good” (58 percent) or “Great!” (33 percent) There were two other possible answers, “Poor/Needs Improvement” and “Terrible,” but no respondents chose them.
However, this doesn’t mean the respondents found nothing to criticize. In particular, it was felt that we do too much “promotion” of banners and franchise shops and there were several comments that indicated we should provide more coverage of independent shops. The consolidation story in the Canadian collision repair industry has drawn a lot of ink in the last decade, but it’s definitely true that independents still form the vast majority of the industry. We’ll rededicate ourselves to featuring and highlighting more independent shops both in our cover stories and elsewhere.
Next we drilled into specific features, including the Autonomous Report, Tuesday Ticker and Friday Fun. In all cases, readers asked to tell us what they thought about these features, using a scale from 1 (Great!) to 5 (Terrible).
The Autonomous Report is our weekly round-up of news on autonomous cars and self-driving vehicles. Overall, the Autonomous Report drew a response of “Great!” from 18 percent of respondents, and a response of “Good” from 72 percent of respondents. You can check out the most recent Autonomous Report here.
Next, we asked respondents to rate Tuesday Ticker, our weekly feature that recaps financial news from across the collision repair economy and the automotive industry as a whole. This has proven to be a very popular feature since we introduced it a few months ago, and the survey responses confirm this. A total of 58 percent of respondents rated it as “Great!” with 42 percent rating it as “Good.” You can see the most recent Tuesday Ticker at this link.
Finally, we asked readers to rate Friday Fun, our weekly feature that recaps some of the funny, bizarre or strange items from the collision repair sector and the auto industry. You can check out the latest one here if you missed it on Friday. Of the three features mentioned, Friday Fun received the lowest overall ratings, with 25 percent of respondents rating it as “Fair.” However, they could have chosen to rate it lower than that, or told us to axe it completely. Nobody seems to dislike it, but they’re not as enthusiastic as they are for Tuesday Ticker or the Autonomous Report. It’s worth noting as well that 34 percent of readers rated Friday Fun as “Great!” with a further 41 percent rating it as “Good.”
Our next survey puts the focus back on shops, in particular in regards to investments in equipment made in 2016 and plans for 2017. You can take the survey here and make sure to watch for results next Wednesday on collisionrepairmag.com!
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| The chart above highlights how readers rate our weekly features. Tuesday Ticker, which recaps{source}<br/>{/source} essential business news, appears to be the clear winner. |
