Craig Urlich from MSR Collision Repair Group in Brisbane, Qld on Track My Car
In this webinar, Gavin and Craig discuss how Craig was able to use Track My Car to help massively in his business! Read the rest of the article below or check out the video to watch it now!
What problem were you trying to resolve that led the MSR Group to Track My Car?
Customer Communication! As we all know with most work providers these days, they require repairers to keep the customer updated with a phone call every three days. A phone call, text message, email, whatever method they choose and it is getting more and more difficult.
So once again, the MSR group approached Planning Plus to come up with a solution, not so much a mobile app as they didn’t expect customers to be able to install an APP but more a link that they could then access and be able to log in and take a look at the vehicles repair progress whenever they wanted to. This works brilliantly with having the contractors clocking on/off jobs within Planning Plus as this updates the status in Track My Car.
Team Benefits
Track My Car was an easy sell to the Admin Team, as every customer is asked, “would you like a phone call, text message, email or Track My Car”. The team was finding that is was definitely the younger people that took the Track My Car option every time, however, it is becoming more popular because anyone can log in at midnight if they like to check on the updates of what stage their car is at. The biggest sell was, if this works in the proper manner it will stop incoming calls as well as outgoing calls.
Once again it comes down to time, how can we buy back time? When you have repair shops with a hundred odd vehicles onsite, that is a lot of phone calls each day with updates to customers or people calling your bodyshop to see where their vehicle is. By using Track My Car, it stops a lot of phone traffic and free’s up a lot more time for more relevant calls.
Setting up Track My Car
The program was originally rolled out site by site, starting with our smaller site first. During the roll out we offered it to all customers. We let them know that it was new and we did have a few teething problems here or there, e.g. someone could not log in, sometimes it was our fault and sometimes it was the customer trying to log in. As we got the smaller shop working smoothly we rolled it out one by one through the larger shops.
What has been the general customer feedback?
Overall they are tending to find that when given the option of a text message, phone call or Track My Car the majority are taking Track My Car. They can look at it anytime and not having to take a phone call whether they are at work or in a meeting for example. They can check on the status from home or on their lunchbreak. We are also finding a lot of uptake from people whose English is not very good, if they struggle with communication over the phone this makes things a lot easier.
Customers aren’t getting a text message every time the car moves through the workshop, it’s just being managed in the background. They can log into Track My Car at their own discretion, however if we do need to send them an important message, we can add that into Planning Plus and make visible to customer. It will then ping them with an SMS to just say “Hey, there’s an update in Track My Car”. They click on that, open it and find the update which works really well.
The link gives the customer their Vehicle details, Status of Job whether it is in workshop, gone through the repair or ready for pick up. They also have a map of the shop location.
How Track My Car has benefited the business
The Work providers are excited we are using this with our clients, they love the idea and its technology moving ahead, keeping the customer informed, I believe it’s the future. It makes sense, we are on our phones all the time and when a message comes through, they can read it. It is giving the customer control of looking at the status. It is another way we can buy back more time by getting the customer involved.
It is great that you can offer various options for communication and as we know people are becoming more and more time poor so if they can just get something quick and easy and manageable , and we are communicating via this technology on anything from 30 cars a week, 50 cars a week or 100 cars a week, that is where the benefits come back to the business, the benefits to the work provider and the comfortability that it creates for the client.
Where it has helped us is we have had some customers that don’t want to know about their vehicle until it is finished so they choose to take the Track My Car as the preferred communication option because they can then check on it at their will. We believe that customers who have been using it so far, if they have another accident they will come back to us. They’re going to say “we’ll take the Track My Car option” and again because it’s easy.
Do you think Track My Car could benefit your collision repair business? Check out our live preview by clicking here!