When running a busy garage, saving time and making your life easier when managing customer communications are likely high up on your ‘want’ list.
Running paper diaries, fielding unnecessary customer phone calls and visits, and having to operate the rest of the operation manually can be challenging, not to mention costly.
Common problems with the traditional approach to customer communications include:
• Double bookings
• Over booking
• Customers constantly checking in for an update
• Missed appointments
• Mismanagement of resources
• Confusion and frustration – for you, your staff and customers
• Lost opportunities to increase revenue
You can drastically minimise all these problems if you put an effective customer communications process in place using a garage management system (GMS). Here we’re going to look at the specific ways in which a GMS can help.
One Central Hub
A GMS acts as a centralised platform where customers can interact with your garage. It allows you to eradicate paper diaries and it provides various channels for communication, including SMS, email, and in-app notifications. Get all your information and systems in one, easy-to-manage place.
Manage Bookings
Make it simple for customers to use your garage by enabling them to book online. Not only does this remove the need for the paper diary, it also means less phone calls to handle – whether they’re to enquire, book, or change an appointment. A GMS can do all this for you.
Manage Jobs
A GMS system can even go as far as managing the garage in terms of which bay is allocated to which vehicle, helping you manage your workload with ease.
Send Appointment Reminders
Use your GMS system to automatically send customers appointment reminders to make sure they turn up when required. You can also schedule future reminders to ensure repeat business – MOT or service reminders for example.
Customer Self-Check-In
Prevent you and your team constantly having to stop working on a job to deal with a customer dropping their vehicle off. Let them do it all themselves via the GMS’ self-check-in app. While they’re at it, let them update any incorrect information you have on file too!
Update Customers
Limit unnecessary calls from customers asking where their job is up to. A GMS system can keep them updated automatically for you every time you change the job status. This is a key timesaver. Do the job, let the system text or email the customer to tell them and just wait for them to turn up to collect their vehicle.
Manage Invoicing
Your GMS can send customer invoices, saving you yet another paper-based job. It also makes sure that they arrive with the means to pay, or better still, they can pay online before they arrive.
It Only Takes a Simple GMS System
Getting all this in place needn’t be expensive. There’s a lot of residual benefits too in addition to it improving your operations and your bottom line when you implement an effective customer communications process. Customer satisfaction will increase, you will appear more professional, and likely get much more word of mouth business.
At Simple GMS we believe that you should have access to all this functionality and much more for a simple, low price.
Find out all about us here and get in touch to book your free, no obligation demonstration.