Did you know that communication with clients during a service appointment can leave your mechanics working at 70% of their potential capacity? Mechanics spend far too much time trying to contact car owners for additional work approval and car pick-ups by phone. All that time spent on inefficient communication inevitably affects the efficiency of your workshop. A shift from phone communication to messaging is the solution you're looking for.
Workshop Scenario
Say you have five mechanics and workspaces, you might schedule them each to work on two cars on a regular day. However, with only five workspaces, only five cars can be worked on at the same time.
This means that when the first round of cars your team is working on need approvals for additional work and/or need to be picked up, you need to communicate with your customers swiftly and efficiently. Cars end up staying in the workshop longer than planned when customers are hard to reach and creates a bottleneck in the workshop.
If communications aren't running smoothly, neither can your workshop. If your mechanics are trying to reach the car owners by phone with no response, they lose precious time. Luckily, with WhatsApp Business, you can streamline and shift your communications to messaging-first.
Advantages of WhatsApp Messaging for car dealers
Messaging allows you to communicate with your customers more quickly and effectively – two important factors in securing sales. WhatsApp is not only a popular messaging channel with over 2 billion users worldwide, but it is also a preferred channel among car dealers.
Asynchronous communication
Messaging is asynchronous. It allows you to send messages to your customers without them having to be immediately available to respond. A great example of this is sending service appointment reminders via a WhatsApp message instead of calling and leaving a voicemail. Not only does it save both you and your customer time, but it also allows the customer to look at the information when it's convenient for them be it 2 or 20 minutes after you've sent the reminder.
Quicker responses
It's also much easier for customers to respond to a message than to answer the phone. If your mechanic is looking for approval for additional work and costs during a service appointment, they can send a WhatsApp message with a quick reply button. If the customer is in a meeting, it's much easier for them to approve (or not) the additional work at the click of the button than to leave their meeting to answer a phone call.
Efficient, pre-written messaging
What makes WhatsApp the most efficient is that all of the above can be done with the help of WhatsApp Template messages. These are pre-written messages that require small changes based on the situation at hand. A template message can be used in the scenarios above – a service appointment reminder and a request for additional work and cost – but can also be used for when a car is ready to be picked up.
It doesn't have to be difficult to use your workshop at its full potential – providing messaging for your mechanics and customers will help you streamline your processes with just a few clicks. Want to learn more about how WhatsApp can revolutionize your workflows? Download our Automotive Ebook to learn all the possibilities that messaging can offer you.