If you want to improve sales at your auto repair shop or tire store, you need to know what your customers think about your services.
One of the best ways of getting the opinions of customers is through a customer satisfaction survey.
You’ve probably gotten these types of surveys before. Customer satisfaction surveys usually come with some kind of store discount or incentive.
If you’re unfamiliar with customer satisfaction surveys, here’s a good example of one from a repair shop in Michigan.
If you’ve never set up a customer satisfaction survey before, don’t worry. It’s very easy to do.
To help you get started, here are some tips to help you create a customer satisfaction survey for your auto repair shop.
Types of Customer Satisfaction Surveys
There are lots of different types of customer satisfaction surveys. Some of the popular types include:
- In-Person Customer Satisfaction Survey
- Mail Customer Satisfaction Survey
- Online Customer Satisfaction Survey
Choosing the right type of survey, all depends on your customers’ preferences. In-person is a popular method for auto repair shops and tire store because of wait times.
It’s easy to give returning customers a clipboard to fill out a survey while they’re waiting. Online and mail are other options. However, you won’t get as many completed surveys.
Questions to Ask
It’s important to ask customer satisfaction questions that will help improve sales. To do this, you need to ask a variety of questions.
In your survey, you’ll want to include questions on:
- Satisfaction: How much do you like our services?
- Services: What types of services do they regularly get from your repair shop?
- Demographics: Age, Type of Car, Income, Location, Education
- Suggestions: How can you improve service?
When asking about satisfaction, you don’t want to ask questions such as: “Do you like the service our store our store provides?”
Yes-and-no questions are always a bad idea. It’s better to ask a question such as: “On a scale of 1 to 5 (1=Poor, 5=Great), how would you rate our customer service?”
Scales allow you to measure the degree to which people like your services.
You’ll also want to include questions with categories such as, “What types of services do you regularly purchase? Oil Changes, Brake Repairs, Tune Ups, etc.”
Be sure to show your questions to employees to see if they make sense before giving them to customers.
Incentives
Once you have your survey ready, you’ll want to provide survey incentives. In most cases, a discount should be enough.
If you’re having trouble, you may want to provide a free service such as a fluid check. You could provide money or prizes, but that is usually too much and can quickly become costly.
Analyzing Data
Once you get a good number of surveys, you’ll want to analyze the data.
Take some time to figure out what customers think of your repair services. Once you have analyzed the data, be sure to use it to your advantage.
Change the way you provide services to customers based on the data. Maybe customers are unhappy with wait times. If that’s the case, look for ways to improve their experience.
Also apply any demographic information that you got (name, age, car type) and include it in your marketing plan. It will better help you target customers.
Summary
Following these tips will help to improve your sales at your auto repair shop or tire store.
The most important thing about customer satisfaction surveys is to use the data to your advantage. Many businesses run these types of surveys and then sit on the information.
It’s a waste of time and money to not utilize the data.
