If you run an auto repair shop, you may wonder about the real world benefits of having a website. Many types of businesses can sell products online, but all your services need to be provided in person for obvious reasons. Are there ways that you can be better utilising your website to help improve your customers’ experience? Are there ways you can increase sales through your website? There certainly may be some things you can do, and the information below should help you generate some ideas.
Include Important Company Details
When people need to have their cars repaired, they’re generally in a hurry to find a shop that can diagnose their problem and take care of it as quickly as possible. Your home page should be designed to answer your customers’ most important questions fast. What kinds of questions will customers be asking when they arrive on your homepage, and how can you answer them? Most importantly, your customers will need to know exactly where you’re located. It may be helpful to have a map on the home page so that visitors can immediately become familiar with where you are. People will want to know when you’re open so that they know when they can come. In addition, you’ll certainly want to have your phone numbers and any other means of contact available right there on the homepage.
Reviews
Most people are very distrusting of mechanics and auto repair shops that they are not familiar with. There are unfortunate stereotypes in this industry, so it’s important to do what you can to earn the trust of your visitors. It would be extremely helpful to have a section on your website, perhaps on the home page, with reviews and testimonials from other customers. If you need to generate some reviews and testimonials for this feature, you could simply offer some form of a discount or incentive to the first few customers who do this for you. In addition, you’ll want to make it easy for future customers to leave reviews on their own. It’s relatively simple to add this feature to an auto repair shop website yourself, but you can, of course, hire a web developer to integrate this for you.
Live Chat
More and more people are becoming less comfortable with speaking to people on the phone. Many people are far more comfortable with less formal means of communication, and live chat features are a great way to accommodate these ones. Some people will be at work where it’s not possible to make a personal phone call, so providing a live chat feature will help them communicate with you where they generally would not be able to do so. Over this live chat, you would likely be answering a few very common questions. In time, you could train any of your associates to answer these questions with pre-written responses.
