When Arron Manuel opened his collision repair shop in 2008, it was in an off-the-beaten path location with low visibility. Without much road traffic to draw new customers, it took word-of-mouth recommendations, advertising and direct repair relationships with insurance carriers to build the shop’s reputation in their community of Ada, Okla. From there, Manuel Collision Center quickly gained momentum and by 2018, the business had moved to a new location and business had tripled. For Manuel and his team, the key to success since Day One has been a strong focus on customer experience. Educating customers and keeping them informed has led to Manuel’s nearly 5-star ratings on both Carwise and Google Reviews.To achieve strong customer satisfaction, Manuel and his team have a few different methods. First, to kick off a positive relationship when customers come into the shop, Manuel says they give each customer a repair guide that outlines the repair phases their vehicle will go through. It’s all about setting the right expectations. Rather than giving an estimated repair completion time right away, Manuel and his technicians share this information only when they have what they need to get started: after the repair blueprint is completed, the carrier has given approval, and the parts are received. This ultimately makes their repair time estimate for the customer more accurate, rather than making a promise to the customer they can’t keep as soon as they drop their car off at the shop.“Our CSI has been better than ever because in this way we rarely ever miss a promise date anymore,” says Manuel. “The updates we give to the customer are custom and crafted each day by our CSR, providing info from our production management team about where we are in the process at all times. Most customers will receive an update every three days by text or email, at minimum.”Manuel says CCC’s customer experience dashboard in CCC® Repair Workflow is instrumental in keeping his team on track and monitoring customer satisfaction.“We utilize CCC’s customer experience dashboard daily for estimate and post-repair follow-ups,” says Manuel. “In the estimate follow-up we thank the customer for the opportunity to work for them and offer to answer any questions they may have. The post-repair follow-up is done a week after pick-up to make sure that everything is still doing great and they had a great experience with us.”When they send their post-repair follow-up, the message encourages the customer to leave a Google review about their experience. “We have boosted our reviews online since we started to include the Google prompt in our follow-up.”By staying focused on improving the customer experience and using digital tools to help them strengthen communications with customers, Manuel says they’ve been able to build momentum and expand their business to include more services. Today, they have a fleet of 30 rental vehicles that allows them to provide for customers’ transportation needs while their vehicle is being repaired. “These vehicles have our logos on them, so the added benefit is the exposure they get all over our town and surrounding areas,” Manuel explains. "This is now another key part of our customer experience.”Manuel’s advice to collision repairers who are ready to take their business to the next level is to prioritize the customer experience and look for opportunities to improve it. “Customer feedback is a vital tool for improving your business,” says Manuel. “We used to get complaints from customers when a repair would take longer than we estimated, so we decided to change our approach. CCC’s customer experience tools help us keep customers in the loop about the progress on their vehicle, and makes it easy for us to follow up post-repair and capture those hard-won reviews.”Ready to improve your shop’s customer experience and build up your online reviews? Learn more about CCC’s customer experience tools for collision repairers.