As a car wash business owner, you know how important it is to attract new customers while retaining existing ones. However, marketing can be time-consuming and...
A service and ticketing solution is the key to car wash organizations efficiently resolving issues across their sites, streamlining scalable system operations, and ultimately creating a smooth and efficient day to day experience for their employees.
Ticketing software provides wash owners with the tools they need to ensure that their wash managers and employees are equipped to quickly and efficiently get the necessary answers, while also providing them with a positive return on investment (ROI).
How do you know you’re ready for the right investment?
As wash organizations grow and welcome new sites to their wash family, process scalability and operational excellence become top of mind to ensure a smooth experience for their customers. Keeping washes running smoothly takes great coordination and visibility from the core team.
Consider John, who has a chain of 3 car washes. Currently, he has a wash manager at each of his locations. He has worked diligently to staff his sites with quality talent, and they do a great job keeping the washes running smoothly. John is the go-to tech guy for each of his managers. They communicate with him if their POS system has any issues, if the gates are not working as expected, when the XPTs freeze up, when the internet is being spotty, etc.
John resolves these types of issues as quickly and efficiently as he can. He communicates with his managers and employees most often through the phone, but sometimes needs to contact his software and hardware providers and may need to follow up as these types of issues can take some time and updates from his vendors, maintenance team, or inventory providers.
John is running these 3 washes well and is seeing profit pouring in. He’s gearing up to invest in more washes and grow his organization. As he makes these investments, he’s interested in understanding what level of support he should purchase with his vendors.
He’ll likely need an IT and maintenance guy to begin handling some of the common site issues his team deals with. He wants to tag-team these responsibilities and hire the right people to set his team up for success, but he doesn’t have visibility to the necessary data to make the right decisions.
His team can’t easily see who called their vendor last, how long they took to resolve the issue, what the last update was on a particular issue, and has to dig through texts, emails, teams, slack, etc. to try to find the information he needs. 
With the current process, John has no visibility into how long certain issues take to resolve, so he’s not sure what level of support investment to commit to with his vendors. He tries to document these in excel, but keeping up with all the updates takes longer than it’s worth.
As he scales up to 5, 10, 20, etc. washes, he’s not going to remember which site had the last issue or update for him on a pending resolution, nor will he have visibility into what kinds of issues are most commonly occurring, or which sites need more attention.
If you’re at a point in your journey like John is, ready to scale and build your organization, you’ll want to consider investing in operational success early!
What does the ROI look like?
Without the right ticketing software system in place, it can become difficult for site managers and operation leaders to keep track of updates, resolutions, etc., leading to an experience like this for their employees:
As you can see, it is difficult to quantify time spent and resolution conclusions. Duplicate issue details, disjointed communication systems, inefficiencies in the process all lead to an unproductive service process within the org.
Centralized data management through a well-implemented service solution is the key to success here. As an owner, you want to know that you’ve made the right decision to invest in the tools and software you need so you see productivity, success, happy employees, and happy customers, all with the ability to track your ROI.
Learn how to pick the right system for you.
Help desk solutions are not just for your internal business
When nurturing your loyal client base, the hardest thing to gain is your customer’s trust. A 2021 survey of 1,000 consumers concluded that more than 80% consider trust a deciding factor in their buying decisions, despite the fact that only 34% trust the brands they use (HBR) With all the different options consumers have today, you want to make sure you’re doing customer success right.
The right service solution will enable your businesses to manage customer complaints, improve brand credibility, and ultimately drive business growth. A help desk solution can provide customers with the best possible service and make sure that their issues are addressed in a timely manner, ultimately resulting in delighted end users.
More than 65% of people have higher expectations for customer service today than they did three to five years ago. (Netomi)
If provided with great service, 62% of customers will recommend a brand to a friend. (Gladly)
We’ll want to make sure that the ticketing system you invest in meets your needs internally and externally, which means it provides your organization with scale that results in employee efficiency and ticket resolution, and customer visibility and satisfaction.
Make sure that your customers have visibility and a sense of control. Prove your commitment to great customer service by providing insight to your customers on their tickets.
Learn more about how you can simplify your multi-site operations!
