It's 10:40 on a Tuesday. You've got a car on the hoist, your hands are covered in grease and the phone in the office is ringing. By the time you get to it, it's stopped. No voicemail. You call back at lunch and they've already booked in somewhere else.
Most workshop owners know this feeling. What they don't always count is what it adds up to over a month.
Why it costs you jobs
Someone ringing a workshop usually has a problem right now: a warning light, a noise, a rego inspection due on Friday. They're not shopping for a relationship. They're working down a list of shops on Google Maps, and the first one that picks up and gives them a time gets the job.
So a missed call often isn't a delayed booking. It's a lost one, and it never shows up anywhere because nobody wrote it down.
Work out what it's costing you
Pull up your phone's call log for last week and count the calls you missed during work hours that you didn't return within 15 minutes. Then do the sum:
- Missed calls last week that weren't returned quickly
- Times the share of callers who usually book with you
- Times your average job value
- Times 52 for the year
Use your own numbers, not ours.
Three fixes, from free to done for you
- Free: set your mobile to send an automatic text to missed calls, something like "Sorry, under a car right now. Reply with your rego and what's wrong and we'll call you back within the hour." It stops the caller ringing the next shop straight away.
- Cheap: block 15 minutes at 10:30 and 2:30 every day to return every missed call. Put it in the diary like a job so it actually happens.
- Done for you: instant call-backs. Missed callers get an instant text, and every enquiry from your ads and website gets rung back within seconds by an assistant that takes the rego, the problem and a preferred time, and books it into your diary. You get the job details and stay on the tools.
What good looks like
Whichever fix you pick, the test is simple: does every person who calls get a real answer, and a time, before they ring the next shop? If yes, you've stopped the leak. Then ads are worth paying for, because the calls they bring in get answered.
If you want to see how the done-for-you version would work in your shop, book a free strategy call and we'll walk you through it with your own numbers.