Skip to content

Reminders

Why send reminders?

Sending reminders can greatly improve your productivity and increase your sales. The rate for which reminders transfer in appointments can reach 83% when sending signed letters with phone follow-ups. With an average billing amount of $300 and 100 reminder letters, this represents an increase in income of $24,000! In fact, the results of a study based on 50 car repair shops using GEM-CAR concluded that the conversion rate for security-based reminders could reach 83%. The customers who received reminder letters and did not respond after three weeks received courtesy reminders.

Note

If you send reminders for oil change, your conversion rate can lower between 10 and 20%.

In the beginning, sending reminders to your customers can be embarrassing. This feeling is normal because you might think that your customers hate reminders and solicitation in general. In facts, reminders are not necessarily solicitations and some clients who have busy lives will even appreciate that you refresh their mind. Here is the soft approach that we suggest and that is usually well accepted by customers.

  • When making oil or tire changes or inspections, ask your technicians to take notes about jobs that could be done on the vehicle.
  • When your customers pay their invoice, inform them about the jobs that could be done on the vehicle to keep it in good shape and make them realize that you care about their safety.
  • Then, invite them to make an appointment for the said problems. About one quarter of customers will accept right away.
  • If they refuse, remind them that these suggestions will be commented on their invoice and that a reminder letter will be sent to them when the time comes. If they disagree, they will tell you right away and do not insist.

Therefore, make sure to enable option 39 in the GEM-CAR settings to be warned when invoicing customers for whom there is no address in the customer profile. If you do not, you could miss a chance to send a reminder letter to these customers.

Reminder types

Invoice reminders

These reminders are related to invoices. When doing jobs, your technicians can do inspections and suggest further work. These suggestions can be added as reminders on invoices, and the reminder letters that follow near the due date will include references to the dates of the appointments, the vehicles and the invoice numbers for which the inspection was made.

Example

Estimate reminders

If, after having been proposed estimates, customers decide not to go forward with the reparations or maintenance, these estimates can be transferred to a proposed and rescheduled step and reminders can be attached to them. This kind of reminder does not have any link to invoices and is used to follow up on estimates.

Tip

Add the estimate numbers and customer-friendly descriptions, like, for example: Breaks should be changed in 3 months or before 5,000 km.

Keywords: #quote # proposal #estimation

Example

Preventative maintenance reminders

These reminders can be configured for insuring follow-ups on manufacturer preventive maintenance for vehicles. The reminder letters that will be sent near the due date will include job codes and descriptions of the preventative maintenance work. Dates or mileage criteria are defined by GEM-CAR following the vehicle’s manufacturer’s guidelines.

Example