The Goldmine in Your Client's Service Bay: Turning Repair Orders into New Sales

Agencies will spend fortunes on securing new leads while sitting right on top of an untapped gold mine: the service bay. Within the service bay are extremely valuable prospects for clients, but they are left unused as most agencies do not know how to unlock them.

Fortunately, we’ve outlined an accessible playbook on how to unlock the service bay and transform repair orders into direct sales, without the high costs or workload. Keep on reading to learn more.

Why Service Customers Are Your Best Leads

When it comes to high ROI sales, there’s nothing better than using pre-existing datasets to identify customers on the hunt for a new vehicle. It saves you time, money, and most importantly, it’s convenient because dealerships already have data from their service record history to leverage these customers.

Here is why service customers convert at a higher rate:

1. Service customers are the most trustworthy audience base. Since the record history indicates they had service done previously, they have established themselves as existing and paying customers familiar with the dealership. This makes them more likely to trust your dealership when shopping for a new vehicle.
2. Service customers come at just the right time. The moment customers enter the service bay is the perfect window of opportunity to secure a sale. To elaborate, a customer arriving for service has already self-selected themselves for a particular demographic: they are facing repair costs on an aging vehicle, which indicate a preexisting inclination to purchase a new vehicle— which means a potential sale for you!
3. Service customers already have a rich dataset to leverage. Service customers establish themselves in your datasets, providing a rich assortment of information that will only help you cultivate sales. This information includes the exact vehicle model, make, mileage, and repair history for each particular customer, which is all recorded in the service bay.

But how do you start using this data to actually benefit you? Below, we’ve outlined a step-by-step process to turn service customers into sales.

A 3-Step “Service to Sales” Playbook

1. Unify the data.

Depending on your current data management practices, your online and offline customer data might be in separate locations. When it comes to converting service customers into sales, having this disparity will cost you time, money, and energy— which can add up.

By using a customer data platform (CDP), you can unify this data in a central location, streamlining integral customer information and thus the conversion process. To learn more about connecting online and offline customer data, check out our guide on how to unify online and offline data.

Unifying the data creates a centralized view that connects your offline service records with online signals. This makes it easier to leverage service and repair order data to secure sales without getting lost in the complexity of the DMS.

1. Find the “Gold” aka Your Segments

Now that your data is centralized, it’s time to start mining for gold. In the case of service customers, there are 3 types of segments to focus on in particular:

• The Positive Equity Segment: Sometimes a vehicle is worth more than what a customer owes on their loan, making a low loan-to-value ratio. When this occurs, trading in that vehicle for a newer model is a lucrative option for many customers as they can apply the equity towards the purchase, reducing the final cost.
• The Break-Fix Segment: For customers who are facing a costly repair on their vehicle that may be more expensive than the value of the vehicle itself, which makes purchasing a newer vehicle a much more attractive option.
• The End-Of-Life Segment: This segment describes customers with older vehicles that do not necessarily require urgent repairs per se, but are declining in reliability thanks to their advanced age. As a vehicle ages, the need for consistent repairs increases, making them less reliable, and incentivizing owners to upgrade to a newer vehicle.

This process of connecting data to your customer base is part of identity resolution.

Once you’ve decided which segment you are going to pursue, it’s time to move onto the next step.

1. Activate the segments

Now, we need to put these segments into action. Specially-tailored offers for specific segments will drive engagement further, helping you lock into your customer base. To personalize for service customers, creating “trade-in” and/or “upgrade” offers is a great way to target these segments.

To learn more about creating and successfully launching special offers, read our guide on igniting sales with special offers.

How Ignite Automates the Strategy

Completing this process manually for each customer will quickly turn into a mountain of a task. But with Ignite, you can automate this strategy of converting service orders into sales. Ignite accomplishes this with 3 methods:

• Solving data silos. By connecting directly to the DMS, Ignite eliminates the need to manually convert each service customer to a sale. The DMS helps centralize and streamline essential customer information, such as service model, repair history, and vehicle information, which makes it easier to automate the conversion process.
• Simplifying segments. Thanks to Ignite’s audience builder, finding your 3 “golden” segment groups is easy.  Through formatting your audiences into an accessible, filterable format, you can locate critical segments such as your “break-fix” and “positive equity” customers in a quick, frictionless process.
• Enabling one-click activation. Once your targeted segments have been identified, Ignite pushes them directly to Meta and Google Ads within a single click, eliminating the traditional process of manually exporting lists and formatting data. This makes launching ad campaigns for your service customers quick and easy, reducing the time it takes to move from the service bay into an actionable sale. Learn more about how one-click activation works here.

Stop Walking Past Your Best Leads

The service bay is a data center, not a cost center. Used effectively, it can be an agency’s highest-ROI sales funnel, turning service orders into sales through using personalized offers.

Agencies often miss the goldmine of opportunity within the service bay, but that doesn’t have to be you. See how Ignite connects to your clients’ DMS data by signing up for a free demo today.