You have established yourself as a reliable and reputable automotive repair shop. Your customers recommend you, you have a good BBB rating, and your work is nearly faultless. How can you take your shop to the next level, moving from a good repair shop to an excellent repair shop? These three practices can help move you in that direction.

Finish a Job Excellently

Your customers have no complaints about your work, mechanically speaking. However, occasionally you’ll have a customer frustrated about the aesthetic condition of their interior. Maybe a mechanic wasn’t paying attention and got some grease or oil on one of the seats. For this, and other reasons, consider instituting a quick and inexpensive routine before calling a customer about a completed job. You can wipe down any surfaces with wholesale cleaning cloths, ensure that radio presets weren’t adjusted, or leave a mint on the dashboard. Nothing fancy, just something to let your customers know you care.

Engage the Community

Make an effort to be involved in your community. You can do small things, such as attending local car shows, or big things like sponsoring a high school baseball team. You can also look into joining or starting a small business community association and consider joining the local chamber of commerce.

Build a Relationship

Customers like to feel known, it’s one of the many reasons that small business are still successful. Make an effort to have anyone in a customer-facing position learn at minimum the names and vehicles of your more regular customers. Building these relationships will likely naturally benefit your image in the community and on marketing platforms.

At the end of the day, the difference between an excellent and an exceptional auto shop has more to do with how you engage people than how you work on cars. Your repair skills can take you to excellent; you need people skills to take you the next level.