Leveraging Customer Data to Improve Retention

Challenge:

In today’s competitive business world, customer retention is key to long-term success. This story showcases how, in my current position, we tackled a declining rate of repeat customers. Despite a steady stream of new faces, a high percentage of visitors only came to the shop once. The “revolving door” trend threatened this auto repair shop.

Although the shop enjoyed a steady customer acquisition rate over the years, retention rates were declining. Specifically, visit frequency for customers who had only 1 visit in about a year and a half had increased to 51%. The goal here to identify why customers were not returning after their first visit and more importantly, to understand how we could turn them into repeat customers.

Action:

In order to understand why customers were not returning, we created and launched the first customer satisfaction survey. The goal of this survey was to identify areas for improvement. Additionally, we sought to extract other key insights into our customer’s needs. 

To promote participation, we displayed multiple posters in the lobby for customers to scan and access the survey. Meanwhile, we launched an email campaign to our 350 most active customers.

Results:

An analysis of the survey data revealed concerns with unmet expectations around scheduling. Based on this feedback we launched our Lyft service where we offer guests transportation on our behalf if our loaners are unavailable.

Additionally, the data revealed that our customers greatly valued 3 components of service above all else: Loaner Vehicles & Shuttle Car service, Text Message Communication and our Free Digital Vehicle Inspections. As a result, we also revamped our brochures and marketing material to reflect these key benefits. Ultimately this initiative served as a reminder to always put the customer’s needs first. And if there’s ever any question, the data will not lie.