Investing in Improvements

If professionals in the automotive aftermarket think more about their customers' needs and less about their own goals, they're likely to see a healthier bottom line. That's the message from two Phoenix-based consulting firms who seek to help aftermarket businesses.

The first company, Measure-X, gauges a business' performance in two ways:

- at the "brick and mortar" level

-at the "click and mortar" level

"Satisfied customers are no longer adequate for a competitive edge," says David Saxby, president of Measure-X. "When businesses ignore key customer service components that seriously impact sales, their clients disappear for no apparent reason and sales decline.  They're left wondering what went wrong."

For example, at the store and shop level Measure-X can evaluate employee performance from the customer's viewpoint, including use of customer's names, eye contact, smiles, product knowledge and the ability to answer customers' questions and concerns.  Mystery shoppers collect the information, and Measure-X sets the benchmarks for measuring improvements over time.

"The biggest mistake (aftermarket professionals) make is not asking the customer questions about his needs and what (products) he's interested in," says Saxby, who sees the most value in person-to-person phone surveys on present and future needs and follow-up phone calls to judge customer satisfaction.  But business owners, he says, often are shortsighted, seeing only the immediate costs and not the long-term benefits.

"The business has to ask, 'What is this customer worth to my retail location?'" says Saxby. "A jobber customer, for example, is easily worth $1,000 to $2,000 a month and he's not a one-time visitor.  It's likely he'll spend $12,000 to $24,000 over the course of the year.  In comparison, investing some money in customer service/customer satisfaction costs is minimal."

When evaluating web sites, the company can examine how e-mail is handled and how quickly requests are handled.  Saxby also examines the effectiveness of the autoresponder, the level of telephone activity to develop customer relations, the effectiveness of the client's banner advertisements and to what degree the system is generating sales.

If marketing of the web site is needed, Measure-X links up with another company, PageViews.  Also based in Phoenix, PageViews offers comprehensive Internet promotional and marketing to North American businesses, including search engine placement, advertising buys, site linking, affiliate programs and other methods that deliver qualified prospects and customers to clients' web sites.

"The Internet is playing an increasingly important role in the highly competitive automotive industry," says PageViews owner Terry Mickelson. "Aftermarket, professionals who opt to launch a web site can't afford to spend time and money building it without developing a marketing plan to draw the right customers to the site.  Otherwise, it's like paying to print thousands of expensive color brochures and hiding them in the trunk of your car."

The worst web-related problem businesses usually have is being listed ineffectively with a search engine, says Mickelson, stressing the importance of developing the right meta tags-- the information many search engines use when building their indices. So, when a potential customer does a search on, say, mufflers in Cleveland, John Q. Aftermarket's store ends up at the top of the list.

One needs to constantly think like the users would think.

Another tactic "Most people don't know you can register every type of auto part," says Mickelson.  Nor do they know about bid search engines, where you can head the list if you agree to pay more per visit than your competitors.

For example, a quick search for "of the muffler search list for 10 cents a visit.  And if you don't want to spend a whole dime, you could be number 11 on the list-- ahead of Meineke, Merlin and Muffler- for muffler" in the Goto.com site, a search engine, revealed that someone could arrange to be at the top one cent per visit.

At the very least, Mickelson quips, it's worth a look into.

PageViews is offering a 28-page booklet, which it describes "as essentially a business model for web site development," available as a free download art www.pageviews.com.