Everyone has heard of the importance of customer satisfaction; yet many tire dealers fail to implement programs that are truly effective and comprehensive.

The best way to understand how customers perceive your services is simply to ask them. Just by asking, tire dealers can accumulate important – and actionable – information that often results in:

• Service recovery: turning a negative experience into a positive one
• More effective management: information that leads to positive process and behavioral changes within your shop
• Successful marketing: branding your store(s) as caring and obtaining information for future marketing campaigns
• Increased loyalty: If you resolve a problem immediately, 85% of customers will return. This directly affects your profitability.

To be truly effective, a CSI (customer satisfaction indexing) program should boost loyalty and, therefore, store profits. To do this, it needs to reach various levels within the organization and provide data that impacts those levels. Ideally, CSI should be endorsed by top management, and results should be tied to incentives (pay) and coaching/training.

Historically, phone-based CSI has been used by the automotive sales and service industries at the new-car dealership level.

However, cost can be a deterrent in the automotive aftermarket. While it may be prudent to spend large amounts of money on large-ticket purchases, such as new cars, it is not as easy to justify that same cost on much smaller (but more frequent) purchases, such as tires.

Of course, there are alternatives to phone-based CSI. For example, an independent business can use business-reply cards, the Internet (in essence, ‘fancy’ business-reply cards) and in-house initiatives. However, these initiatives often fall short of being truly effective and comprehensive.

Fortunately, CSi Communicator has developed a system that offers a low-cost-per-contact option that is effective and comprehensive. The CSi Communicator features IVR (interactive voice response) technology to call customers after their service experiences. The message can be customized (say, from the company president), both thanking customers for purchases and inviting them to take a short survey.

We’ve conducted thousands of these types of surveys and found that, in the tire business, nearly 60% of all customers will stay on the phone at least long enough to hear the voice message from the owner/president. Of those, around 25% will take a short, four-question survey.

Ten to 15% of respondents have issues with the service experience, which represents an opportunity for service recovery. Even though there is some abandonment, the data becomes statistically valid quickly because there are so many records. And, it is believed that the majority of unsatisfied customers stay on the line to voice their opinions.

In the case of Express Tire, a California-based organization with 25 company-owned stores, “Service Alert Hot Sheets” are sent in real time via text messages to the cell phone of a customer-service manager. Then, that manager can follow up immediately.

“It’s proven pretty powerful,” says Bryan Coburn, customer-service manager of Express Tire. “They are impressed that we care enough to call back, and we are able to resolve the vast majority of all concerns. Not only that, it helps us create and implement procedures that improve our business model,” he adds.

In addition, CSi Communicator provides daily reports over the Internet. Customers can query the data by date range and view trends by examining results on a daily, monthly and year-to-date level.

“I think what we have here is a nice balance of affordability and high-quality, high-quantity, credible data and reporting,” says David Merrell, vice president of strategic initiatives at CSi Communicator. “What we have done is take some of the traditional barriers to entry, such as cost and complexity, out of our model.” Merrell heads up tire-sector installations for the company.

So, by contacting customers after the sale, tire dealers can show concern for the buying experience, provide service recovery and gain a valuable KPI (key performance indicator) that can be used daily to help run their organizations more effectively and increase profitability.

– By John Webb, senior vice president, marketing and new business development, CSi Complete