PACE Collision Center touts its bodyshop to customers coming through the dealership
attached to it, which works as a self-marketing tool.
SnapshopNAME: Pace Collision CenterOwner: Joe PaisLocation: Huntington, Ind.Size: 4,500 sq. ft. (4,000-sq. ft. repair center and a 500-sq. ft. office.)Layout and Equipment: Sixteen bays, two paint booths, one frame rack and measuring system.Number of employees: About 70 Gross annual sales: $1 million per year. MonthlyRepairs: About 50 per month.HISTORY: Opened in 1992 in conjunction with PACE Chevrolet-Oldsmobile. Also serves PACE Ford, opened in 2002InsurerRelationships: About 85 percent of jobs come through DRPs. PACE works with State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., Allstate Insurance Co., Erie Insurance, Farmers Insurance, Progressive Insurance and Indiana Insurance.Any time a prospective customer comes to PACE Auto Group’s dealerships, PACE Collision Center employees seize the opportunity to educate him or her and promote the autobody facility. PACE Collision Center, located in Huntington, Ind., is the collision repair shop that serves the PACE Chevrolet-Oldsmobile and PACE Ford dealership. One perk is that PACE is the only dealership in town to have a bodyshop. PACE uses this to its advantage; anyone who comes into either dealership is offered a tour of the collision repair facility. In addition, PACE Collision Center holds an open house four times per year and all car buyers are invited. “We have a dinner, give a tour of the dealership and have various stations set up around the shop,” says Joe Pais, owner of PACE Chevrolet-Oldsmobile and PACE Ford. Each open house draws in about 50 clients and allows PACE to talk about the technology that goes into painting and repairing a vehicle—and helps them familiarize themselves with the company.“We feel it’s a relationship-building opportunity,” Pais says. With the marketplace being so competitive, it’s important to continue building your business and clientele, especially because people are initially apprehensive when they come to a dealership or collision repair facility. But the open houses and facility tours help to further break down the defensive barriers, Pais says. “It lessens the nervousness and untrusting—the natural reaction,” he says.PACE uses these open houses as a way to leverage customers to return to the dealership with their vehicles if they are in need of repair—or perhaps a new vehicle if it is totaled. And PACE’s efforts have paid off. One client got into an accident on the way home from one of the facility’s open houses. The man and his wife, who had previously purchased an Oldsmobile from PACE, ended up returning to the bodyshop to get the vehicle repaired and then bought a new vehicle from the dealership a year later. “We’ve had a lot of success stories from this,” Pais says. “The collision repair facility is a real key ingredient.”Pais and PACE Collision Center Shop Manager Jeff Rice say that this repeat business is a result of touting the collision repair shop-dealership combination. “A lot of other dealerships [with collision repair facilities] don’t show customers what happens in the back end,” Rice says. But once customers or potential customers see a $30,000 measuring system and a paint booth, it piques
their interest. Pais says that every time they give a tour, “people’s faces light up and their eyes get big.”Using the open house phenomenon to draw in customers for new vehicle purchases and then later for repairs has also impressed some in the industry. Rice says other dealership representatives have come from out of town to see how PACE conducts its open houses and uses its customer service indexing (CSI) ratings to its advantage.In fact, it’s the tour that sometimes sells customers who haven’t made up their minds about whether to buy the vehicle there, Rice adds. However, he isn’t able to pinpoint how much business he has drummed up from this. “It’s hard to quantify,” Rice says.However, Rice says he knows it’s often comforting for customers to know that if there is a problem with the vehicle or after an accident, they will be able to come back for service. “We’re the only dealership in this town to have a bodyshop,” Rice says. “They can buy from the Pontiac store down the street, but they don’t have a
bodyshop.”In addition to promoting the dealership-collision repair facility combo, each customer or prospective customer is sent home with a coffee mug bearing the PACE name and phone number. This lets PACE market to the customer when he or she comes through the shop instead of having to market to that individual out in the community. “Every day he’ll be thinking [about] our name,” Rice says. “The next time he dings the car coming through the garage, he’ll think of us.”
