Dinosaur-old.
When asked to describe Central Car Care’s old POS and marketing system, that’s what Meagan Mora said: “It was dinosaur-old.”
“Nothing was interconnected, nothing gelled,” she says.
When the shop switched to KUKUI, everything changed—Central Car Care ditched the POS system and upgraded its marketing and communication tools with everything KUKUI had to offer. Out with the dinosaur-old, in with the ultramodern.
“We’ve had KUKUI for almost two years,” she says, “and once we really got it going, we synergized the systems about May of 2019 and everything really started to click.”
Started to click is as general as dinosaur-old is specific, so here are the numbers and data behind Mora’s words. From April 2019 when the new, KUKUI-designed website launched:
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Text Reviews Increase by over 400% from 40 reviews in 2019 to 220+ reviews today, increasing the average rating from 3.9 to 4.6
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Car Count Increase by 17%
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New Customer Count Increase by 26.5%
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Website Traffic Increase by 30.27%
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ROI on Google Ads Increase by 309%
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Net, Post-tax Revenue Increase by 27%
Though Paul Mora, Meagan’s father, owns Central Car Care, Meagan is the primary KUKUI user and self-proclaimed “Jill of All Trades” (except car repair) within the shop’s walls. That makes her head of advertising, payroll, marketing, “and all of the shop’s numbers,” she says.
She actually stumbled upon KUKUI from an article in Ratchet+Wrench.
“My dad is a little more old school and wrung his hands a bit,” she says, “but I told him, ‘You have no choice; we’re doing this.’ ” The results speak for themselves.
Evolve Your Shop Through Data
The largest challenge Central Car Care faced was simply getting customers through the door. With so many options in the Phoenix metro area (Central Car Care is located about ten miles north of downtown), it was hard to make a mark and stand out from the crowd. Mora knows the quality of work her family’s shop accomplishes, but that doesn’t mean people just magically find the shop every day and drop $440—their ARO—up from $373 the year before.
“Once they see us, we’re able to keep them and they return,” she says.
That’s where the increase in text reviews has been crucial. Mora says that many new customers cite the reviews as the main reason they enter the shop in the first place.
“Ten reviews isn’t enough to judge competitors’ shops by,” she says. “In this day and age, that’s really important. We’ve increased our new customer count by 26.5 percent from October 2019 through September 2020 opposed to the year before, and I’m confident it’s because of KUKUI and the text review system.”
And unlike the old—nay, dinosaur-old—POS system, KUKUI presents all relevant shop information in a crisp, simple format via the KUKUI Dashboard and matching phone app.
“I usually have the Dashboard open at all times,” Mora says.
“The system provides a once-per-day email overview of everything simply to review and summarize where we are. It also records phone calls, which we use as a training opportunity.”
The dedicated KUKUI customer service representative for Central Car Care recently informed Mora that their call conversion of customers is about 22 percent, roughly twice the industry average. But Mora isn’t surprised: “My goal is to get people into the shop because my family and our team can handle it from there. That’s my mission.”
When she’s not checking the Dashboard on the company computer, she can always draw it up on her phone. “I can verify anything and everything instantly,” she says, “and if I need to do so after hours, I can.” She finds it easy to make and confirm appointments via her mobile as well. “Everyone wins,” she adds.
With seven total staff and a record breaking year for revenue pushing $1.18 million, Mora is confident Kukui has been the difference between what was, what can, and what will be.
“We’re really big on family; our customers are like our family, too. And KUKUI helps them get there. KUKUI is great, we can definitely see the before-and-after difference, and we’re excited about it.”
Unlike the dinosaurs—those rumbling sauropods of old, and their contemporary shop management counterparts—whose time is long gone.
To learn more about how KUKUI can help your shop evolve, click here or visit KUKUI.com.
