In my columns this year, I’ve outlined some of the systems and paperwork our shop uses throughout the “life” of a repair job, from our initial contact with a potential customer, through the delivery of the finished vehicle.
But this month, I wanted to focus on the final step in the process: What happens after the vehicle leaves. All the steps that come before it won’t mean a lot if this final step—which includes collecting payment, making sure the customer left satisfied, and filing the paperwork in a way that allows you to find it later—isn’t also done well.
Collecting payment
We’ve been fortunate to not have a lot of problems with collecting accounts receivables over the years. All payments from customers are collected prior to releasing the vehicle. We offer 90-day financing through an outside firm and have maintained fairly strict rules about accepting personal checks, and we find that cuts down on problems. If a third-party other than an insurer is paying for repairs, we ask our customers to get payment from them and then pay us themselves, because our contract for the work is always between us and the customer, not that third-party.
Except in rare circumstances, as long as we have a final, approved supplement and the insurer has agreed to pay us directly, we do not require full payment by the insurer prior to releasing a vehicle. We can print an accounts receivable aging report from either our management or accounting system, and we follow up by phone on any supplements not paid within 15-30 days. The older a receivable gets, the less likely you are to collect, so those follow-up calls get more frequent after 30 days.
Customer satisfaction
We’ve been conducting customer satisfaction indexing (CSI) surveys of our customers after repairs for more than a decade. At various times, we’ve done it ourselves or used outside services, and have tried both phone surveys and written reply cards. Each has its pros and cons.
Phone calls by an outside service is the easiest, requiring the least amount of work for our staff. It also tends to generate the highest response rate (60 percent o 80 percent), making it perhaps the most accurate. But it can be more expensive than using postage-paid reply cards, and given how much I personally hate receiving phone calls from businesses at home, I’d rather not have our customers called.
We use CARSTAR’s customer reply card system now, but also had great success using our own reply cards. You can get response rates of 35 percent or even 50 percent if you talk to customers about how important the reply cards are both when they drop off and pick up their vehicle. Try highlighting one of the questions as you give them the card and explain that that question in particular is important. Although you can’t take away a warranty on a job if they don’t fill out the card, some shops tell customers that returning the card activates the warranty.
When we did our CSI in-house, we had responses sent to a post office box to ensure all returned cards were compiled. Doing it ourselves also gave us the ability to ask exactly the questions we wanted and to generate the detailed reports I liked. But using an outside service is less time-consuming for the shop and may give your CSI numbers more credibility with insurers and other sources of referrals.
Job file storage
I’ve talked about that throughout the process, we keep all the paperwork for each job in its own job file—and even in a particular order within each file. I mentioned this saves us a lot of time when we’re looking for a certain item. But it also saves us time when we’re transferring that paperwork to storage. Once we confirm it’s all there and in order, we take it out of the clear plastic job jacket, staple it all together, and file it alphabetically by the customer’s last name in a file of all of the current year’s jobs.
Shortly after the end of the year, we transfer all the previous year’s job files to boxed storage. Some shops file these old files by customer name. That keeps all that customer’s files together and makes it quick to locate old files if that customer comes back in.
We, however, have just kept each year’s alphabetized job files stored by year. This has its downsides, but we don’t have to spend time filing each year’s jobs into an overall filing system (nor do we have to buy and maintain the flexible storage system that it would require). And our system makes it easy when you want to dispose of, say, 15-year-old job files, to do so without having to comb through a complete filing system of all old jobs.
Coming up
In my columns in 2006, I plan to share other systems, forms and ideas I’ve gleaned through the years that have helped me and other shop owners with various shop operations: personnel issues, business management and shop marketing. If you’ve found something that’s worked well for you—or if you have a shop operations problem you’re looking for help trying to tackle—drop us an e-mail and we’ll try to include it in an upcoming column.
