CAR DELIVERY PT 1:
Send Each Customer Out Into the World to Send You More Business! (6th in a Series)

There’s an old adage about never getting a second chance to make a first impression. And while first impressions are important, there’s an impression even more important than the first one — the last(ing) impression.

This is the opinion about you that your customer carries away with him — and holds in reserve till that inevitable moment over some future lunchtime when someone says: "Hey, Joe — something’s wrong with my transmission. Didn’t you get yours done at XYZ Transmissions a few months ago? How’d they do for you?" And Joe’s going to say one of two things: either "Great — they treated me great" or "Buncha crooks. They raped me on price and did a crummy job." (This latter answer’s been tempered, of course, to meet the standards of the US Postal Service through which GEARS is disseminated.) Obviously you want Joe to wax rhapsodic about the fine dealing he had with you — because every buddy he sends in as a referral is a cheaper lead you didn’t have to buy an advertisement to get. And it’s a customer who’ll be an easier sale because he arrives with a higher degree of trust and a lower degree of skepticism about you. (But if he tells the buddy he hasn’t been pleased since he left your place, it’s a customer you’ll never get, no matter how many ads you buy.)

There’s only one place you can truly cement this lasting impression in the positive, hugs-and-kisses fashion that’ll generate referrals for you — and that’s when you deliver the car back to the customer.

No matter how swimmingly the transaction has gone so far, a poorly done or short-cutted car delivery can leave a sour — and long-lasting —taste in the customer’s mouth. But on the plus side, a customer who wasn’t exactly Mr. Cuddles when he was fishing out his credit card can emerge from an effective car delivery as a True Believer, ready to sing your praises and pass the collection plate.

The fact is, you can use your car delivery to turn a transaction completely around — for better or for worse. It’s that pivotal, and that important. So important is it that many of our business’s best salesmen will tell you they do more focused selling here, near the end of the process, than they do during the Trust, Need and Value stages. There are two general areas that have to be right to make your car delivery click profitably: First, the car has to be right, and second, your reinforcement of the customer’s decision has to be right. You make sure of the former before the customer comes to pick up the car, and you execute the latter once he’s there. So first let’s make sure the car is right.

Remember the big deal in earlier Satisfaction Files installments about finding out exactly what complaint the customer voiced when he first brought his car in? Here’s where that ground-work will bear fruit and pay off — and it’s the single most important step of getting the car right and ready to deliver. Refer back to your notes now, remind yourself what the customer’s original complaint was, and then make sure — personally — that that exact complaint has been fixed!

The transmission could’ve been chipped beef on a shingle inside, and your builder could have put Leonardo da Vinci-grade artistry into rebuilding it — but if you turn it back over to your customer with his same, original complaint still in evidence, what’s the customer going to think? His first thought will be: They didn’t fix it!!!

Now, the mere act of rebuilding will have fixed many of those initial complaints. The instances where you have to be double-careful are outside the transmission — with, say, a bad motor mount. You may be giving him back a tranny that now functions just perfectly, but if he still feels the THUD! of the bad mount, his perception’s going to be that you didn’t do a damn thing for him.

Other tricky areas include — but are certainly not limited to — exhaust systems, suspension components and engine tune. Your initial diagnosis should have found the source of that initial complaint, and since you fixed it, it’s certainly something to include in your estimate when you sell the job, and on the bill. But wherever this original complaint originates from, by all means — make sure it’s fixed!

Make sure everything else is fixed, too. Take the car out for a road test. Take it for two. Take it for three. Make sure different guys in the shop all drive it, and all concur that it’s shifting at just the right time and with perfect shift quality. It’s all of your reputations on the line with every car, and everyone should agree that the work meets everyone’s quality standards.

Now, if you’ve been in our business any longer than about half an hour, you know how often a newly-rebuilt transmission will leak — so in between each of those several road tests, bring the car back in, put it up on the rack, and give a good, long look with a good, strong light. Many leaks don’t show themselves until the unit is up to full operating temperature, so make sure at least one of your leak inspections takes place when the tranny’s good and hot.

You can’t spend too much time checking for leaks; a leak is the kind of problem that will sure-as-shootin’ find its way back to you as a CB — so sooner or later you’ll be fixing it. It’s inevitable. Doesn’t it make sense to fix it before it can irritate your customer?

Just as irritating as getting a car back with a leak or with the initial complaint still there — is getting one back with grease smeared all over the steering wheel or the headliner or the windshield. Or… being a habitually Beethoven-soothed driver suddenly having Pearl Jam vibrate your lunch (in your intestine) because someone changed the radio station, turned the volume way up — and left it that way. Or… knowing you had bridge toll in the change bin, except now there’s only four bits in there. They’re irritating because they feel like violations — violations of the sanctity of the car. You’d feel the same way — you know you would.

To sidestep these customer irritations, you have to have the cooperation of everyone in the shop. Touching personal areas of the car — like the radio — have to be verboten; greasy, dirty hands likewise. And establishing a comprehensive interior inspection as part of your pre-delivery checklist is always a good idea.

But it goes beyond just making sure nothing’s wrong. If you’re looking for top success with your customers, make sure there are extra things right. Your objective here is to make the customer feel good about the money he spent with you — by making sure he feels good about his car. In fact, you want to make him feel better about his car (and its new lease on trouble-free life) than he has in a long time.

It’s so easy to do this, it’s amazing that more shops don’t. Check the air pressure in the tires — and fill ‘em if they need it. When he drives away with newly restored great handling, it’ll increase his perceived value of the service you performed for him. The very best feel-good strategy is to wash the windows; ain’t nothin’ makes you feel better about your chariot than having a sparkling, crystalline vista spreading before you through nice, clean windows. Helps the thousand-and-some dollar tab at the shop feel more like money-well-spent.

There are any number of little extra steps you can take to earn your customers’ pleasure. (We know of a little old grandmother who’s been gratefully patronizing the same shop — and paying its top, carriage-trade prices — for nearly twenty years, simply because a technician once noticed the blinking-twelve of the digital clock she didn’t know how to set, and took it upon himself to set it for her. That fifteen seconds of thoughtfulness earned the shop a lifetime of trust — and a lifetime customer.)

It’s a matter of scoping out the car, looking for opportunities, and capitalizing on them. The tires, the windows, the clock — they’re just starting points. Use your imagination and you’ll find lots of ways to make customers feel good about their cars. It doesn’t cost an arm or a leg, either, because you don’t put your top builder on "detail detail" — it’s strictly the domain of your most entry-level guy — at his entry-level pay rate.

Since prepping the car for delivery to the customer is so critical to satisfaction, and to referrals, why not formalize it — with a standard checklist for every car. Include performance checks you want covered on road tests, include leak checks, and include those must-do "extras" that aren’t really extras at all — like checking the tire pressures and washing the windows.

Maybe most important of all, include signature or initial blocks next to each checklist item for the personal validation of each technician involved in each step of the checking. This’ll not only send a message of how serious you are about quality, it’ll also spur the technicians’ pride and sense of being part of a team.

Whew! That’s a lot of activity — on everyone’s part — to get that car ready for its all-important re-rendezvous with its owner. But now that it’s perfectly prepared — and will make the customer feel better about it than he has for a long time — the spotlight shifts: to you!

So take a deep breath and get ready for the pivotal point in ongoing customer satisfaction. In our next installment, you’re on!

Next time: What do you get when you cross famous friend-winner Dale Carnegie with Johnny Carson’s Karnak the Magnificent? Why, you get a customer who feels good enough about forking over a grand-and-a-half he didn’t want to spend to recruit his friends to do the same thing! Cool! See you next issue!