By: Anthony Analetto
Originally Published in AutoLaundry Magazine
In many ways, every new trend is an old idea refined. In car washing, the latest trend in response to our sagging economy seems to be building customer loyalty. It’s certainly not a new idea, but the means have definitely been refined and are, increasingly, on the top of everyone’s mind.
You may already be in the throes of evaluating
some of the car wash POS systems that promise to make building a loyalty
program fast and easy. While not new, these systems have certainly become more
powerful in their ability to improve wash frequency and ticket averages. But
today I don’t want to write about new technology. I want to dust off an old
idea that is probably the most instrumental in turning your customers into
raving fans: Customer Service. In particular, I want to focus on training,
elevating, and empowering your staff. Some people enjoy this aspect of being an
entrepreneur. Others shy away from it at their own peril. For both, I want to
throw out a tried and true way to enroll your employees in a common vision of
creating loyal customers out of every patron to your wash. It is called the
“Manager Book-Around.” An oldie but goodie for building customer relationships
that I hope you enjoy.
The Manager Book-Around
The concept is simple. Each week at your manager
meetings you and your staff will discuss a popular book related to management
and customer service. This isn’t an informal chat between you and the location
manager over a cup of coffee. Schedule a specific time that your managers,
assistant managers, cashiers, head service writers, and any key people who
manage other people or interact with customers can come together for a formal
training session. After you’ve addressed all the regular issues that crop up at
your manager meetings, get up and move to the front of the room. Make a show of
it. Let your managers see how serious this topic is. Put up a flip chart with
the following three lines, leaving space to write below each.
1.)
The book title
2.)
What you got out of it
3.) Lessons you have or could have applied
Share your review of the book, invite questions,
and pass it on to the next person to present the following week.
More than meets the eye
You are your employees’ primary role model on how
to interact with customers. You can explain your expectations until you’re blue
in the face, but adding a manager book-around to your meetings takes it to a
higher level. First, it establishes that you actively try to learn how to do a
better job each day and that you expect them to do so as well. Second, it
unifies everyone in a common belief that it’s their job to provide a better
experience for your customers. Third, it sets down the expectation that their
jobs involve them serving customers, not just washing cars. Yes, you read that
right. Delivering a clean, dry, shiny car consistently isn’t enough.
Maintaining your building, equipment, and even the flowers up front won’t keep
customers loyal to your business. This article is on building customer loyalty
and that demands delivering an experience that your customers desire.
Site appearance, policies, promotions, and product quality are all important,
but if you can get your staff to smile and make patrons feel welcome, on their
own desire and initiative, that’s when the magic that makes the cash register
ring (or POS station beep) starts to happen.
Where to start
There are two books I like to use when starting a
manager read-around and I struggled with which one to use for this article.
Chances are you’ve already read both titles. The first, The One Minute
Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson is often my first choice at
established full-serve or flex-serve businesses with seasoned managers. The
second, Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles, however, has
broader immediate application to all wash types and has become my personal
favorite to begin. The genre of short, inspirational, business books that can
be read in a couple of hours is filled with many options. These two examples
are fun, easy to read parables with dramatic impact. I’ve summarized Raving Fans below and provided an
example of how it positively affected some of the washes I used to manage. Any
book can work, and your enthusiasm for the titles you select can carry more
weight than the words between their covers.
Why Raving Fans
The cover of Raving Fans claims it to be “A
Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service.” Below that is a little gold star
stating, “Satisfied Customers Just Aren’t Good Enough.” And in a couple
of hours, your employees will finish the book, enthusiastically ready to make
raving fans out of your customers. It works. The book is that good.
It starts off by revealing the secret that you
must “decide what you want.” Before, I mentioned that the magic of creating
customer loyalty happens when your staff knows the right thing to do for your
customers and feels empowered to do it independently. The book describes the
process of deciding what you want, as creating a vision of perfection centered
on the customer. Think about it. In one line of text, your managers now
understand that it’s their job to create a perfect world for your customer.
Even more, by giving them the book to read rather than telling them what to do,
it implies that you expect them to maintain their customer-centric approach
when they’re not being watched. Most importantly, it lets them know and
appreciate how important their daily actions are to the success of the car
wash. Wouldn’t you be more enthusiastic to work someplace where you were valued
and important? Well guess what, your staff will be too. Suddenly it’s a whole
lot easier for them to smile when talking to your customers.
Rather than spoil the rest of the Raving Fans
parable, I’d like to, instead, provide an example of how it worked brilliantly
at a chain of full-serve washes I was directing. At a manager meeting, while
discussing another secret in the book entitled Deliver the Vision Plus One
Percent, we came up with an idea to wow our customers. At the time,
attendants would wave or yell “car ready” to alert customers to take possession
of their vehicle and drive away. Already using a POS system to track license
plates, many customer names were already entered into our system and
automatically printed out on the receipt. The idea generated in the Manger
Book-Around meeting was to print out a duplicate receipt and leave it on the dashboard
for the finishing attendant. Instead of waving, they were trained to say “Mr.
Doe, your car is ready” with the name prompted from the receipt. If the
customer’s name wasn’t available, they knew to substitute the color, make, and
model of the car. Frantic waving became “White Ford Mustang Ready.”
The beauty of the Manager Book-Around is that it
focuses everybody’s attention on constant improvement. Soon after calling
customers by name became standard practice, attendants were then trained to
read back to the customer what they purchased. Instead of silently walking
away, attendants said “Thank you Mr. Doe, you bought the super shine today. So
we washed the outside of the car, we vacuumed the inside mats, seats, and cup
holders. We also washed the windows inside and out, dusted your dashboard,
cleaned the rims, dressed the tires, and did your undercarriage wash today. How
does everything look to you?” This later evolved to include a towel on the
ground which, in turn, became red carpets and so on – all originating from a
Manager Book-Around meeting.
SUMMARY
What goes around comes around. A car wash is a
service business and a simple smile can make a world of difference in creating
customer loyalty. When your employees have a clear understanding of how you
expect them to treat customers, along with the confidence to do the right thing
without direction, magic things can start to happen at your business.
Technology can make things easier, but it’s the people that make the
difference. Your job as an entrepreneur is to elevate people who will then
elevate your business and bring you huge rewards. For anyone interested, shoot me
an email at aanaletto@sonnysdirect.com if you’d like more books that
work well for Manager Book-Around meetings.
