Viewpoints Score Points Here

A piece of advice that has floated around for a long time in any given service industry is “Treat each customer as if it is your own mother standing there.” Of course, many of our mothers may remark that they hope we call our customers more often than that....

Any of INSIGHT’s CSI Stars (See page 24) will tell you that each and every customer must be treated with the same level of quality care if you want to achieve a consistently high level of customer satisfaction.

(A little commercial here: INSIGHT’s CSI survey cards are now available in Spanish, to make sure that comments from your Spanish-speaking customers can be heard and understood. Just call INSIGHT at 800.860.2744 to place an order.)

Business, perhaps more than ever before, is built on relationships. Relationship communication, even in this high-tech, electronic marvel-filled 21st century, is still between people, no matter how many machines talk to each other along the way to facilitate a service or product.

Our feature article this month gives mid-sized insurers a chance to speak. What these insurers share with INSIGHT readers about their experiences and their predictions about how the insurer - shop relationship is evolving is valuable information for our Collision Repair Industry.

To make our viewpoints more informed, ASA has launched a new government affairs website to literally place legislative information at our fingertips, (See page 9.) at www.TakingTheHill.com. Visitors to the site are able to contact their representatives by e-mail with questions and opinions.

Our TrendLine this month, concerning technician availability, continues to get a huge response from shop owners and managers each year. As an industry, we must continue to find ways to attract young people to work in collision repair. They are our future. We need to track students down, train them right, and treat them right! This is a viewpoint I am positive we all have in common.