What Goes Around Comes Around - Inspiring your employees to make raving fans of your customers

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.