Notes about Customer Intake

1. Hearty Greeting within seconds of coming through the door, followed by a leading question. This (hopefully)makes them feel welcome and comfortable and signals to the customer that you are leading them and they are to respond to your leading, beginning the back and forth of conversation. If this doesn’t happen, they don’t know what to do and generally will feel awkward and uncomfortable. We want to avoid this.

a. “Are you dropping the car off for service?” or

b. “How can I help you this morning?”

2. If they say “my name is x and I have an appt”: ( Having gone through the scheduler, we know their appt) we say “Oh yes, we have you down for a reg. service and looking into a noise”. We do not say “what are you here for?” If we don’t remember off the top of our head, we will open the appt and then read off what we have. They will then agree, or, they will give us more information. We will listen attentively and reflectively and take notes on all their requests.

3. We then give them the guide statement “I’m going to go get some information from the car, I’ll be back in a moment and we’ll get your work order written up”. This keeps them in the loop and lets them know what is happening and that they are expected to wait. You could also ask them to come along. Either way it needs to be communicated what is happening and what they are expected to do.

4. We then do a walkaround and discover what additional work can be recommended and get the mileage so we can recommend the correct service.

5. We come back in and make an estimate that recommends the service the car is due for at that moment and any of the discovered work that the car could benefit from. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO THIS CORRECTLY UNTIL THE WALK AROUND IS COMPLETE!!!

6. We print out the estimate and go over it with the customer using the best selling techniques to make it easy for the customer to understand why we are making those recommendations and what the features and benefits are. Once we have their agreement and signature we move on to dispatching out to the shop.

Synopsis: All of these steps must be followed in order every time. If the customer is allowed to come and go without us following all of these steps, then we have become order takers and are no longer controlling the interaction in a professional manner