How Auto-Star Is Helping Our Customers Overcome Business Challenges
Introduction
Business challenges for our customers have been significant. For some, business came to a grinding halt during the lockdowns. For several years, supply chain shortages have wreaked havoc on business operations, causing headaches for owners and frustrations for customers. To add further pressure, the supply of good labor seems to have an inverse relationship to the level of customer demand.
In such a fluctuating environment, Auto-Star knows that POS providers must stay agile. Strong vendor partnerships are key in providing our customers with the support they need to thrive.
We work hard with our vendor solution providers to give our customers the support we think they need. But that wasn’t good enough for us, so we asked our customers if we were succeeding. We asked them to hold nothing back. Here is what our customers said.
What Customers say about Auto-Star
In an industry where some POS providers do not put a premium on customer service, our customers said Auto-Star excelled. We were 12 points higher than other solution providers in overall satisfaction with our customer service. According to the Retail Service Providers Association industry average for customer satisfaction was 75%, while Auto-Star returned an eye-popping 87.5%.
A key metric for solution providers in helping customers overcome business challenges is how quickly we solve problems for our customers. While no one described us as slow (we are thankful for that!), we do see some room for improvement. With 82.6% of our customers saying we solved their problems quickly, we were happy to see improvement from our previous score of 80.9% and happy still to be more than 7 points higher than the industry average of 75%.
Business is all about people, and our customers think our people are pretty great. We agree.
When we asked our customers: “On a scale of 1 to 5, how eager is your customer service representative to solve your problem?” we got a resounding 4.6. Similarly, when we asked, “How responsive have we been to your questions or concerns?” our customers responded just below a 4.5.
Eager and responsive customer representatives are great, but if they don’t know anything, they can’t be very helpful. Our customers think our reps know their stuff, rating them a 4.5 out of 5 on knowledge.
When you call customer service, it’s usually because something has gone wrong. It can be a tense, stressful experience. So we were delighted to hear that more than 60% of our surveyed customers said that their customer service experience was better than they expected, and critically, not a single respondent said their experience was worse than expected.
When we asked our customers, “Overall, are you satisfied with the customer service you receive, dissatisfied with our customer service, or neither satisfied nor dissatisfied?” the overwhelming majority, 87.5% percent of our customers, said they were satisfied. Eight percent of respondents were happy sitting on the fence with the third option, but only one single respondent of all those surveyed stated that they were dissatisfied with our customer service.
Auto-Star Hits the Mark on Products
I can hear you thinking, “Okay, okay. Auto-Star has great customer service. But do your products actually work?” Well, we are glad you asked. POS providers like Auto-Star need to offer customers quality products and solutions to help them overcome business challenges. Here’s what our customers had to say:
On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest, how well do our solutions/products meet your needs? Our customers gave us nearly 4 out of 5.
Again we asked, on the same scale, how would you rate the quality of our solutions/products? Here our customers gave us a solid 4 out of 5.
Our customers also rated us much higher than the industry average for solution providers when asked about value for money. Our solutions/products drew a 3.6 out of 5 rating from our customers.
When asked what words best describe our solutions/products, the most popular response was: Reliable, Useful, High Quality, and Good Value for the Money. Although we did have one customer respond with “Overpriced,” proving the maxim, “There is one in every crowd.” The overwhelming majority of our customers see our solutions/products as high quality and worth the price.
Auto-Star is Building Advocates
At Auto-Star, we believe our customers are our best sales force. We believe that if we help our customers overcome their business challenges, they will prove that we are the most trusted POS provider in our industry.
In our survey, 100% of respondents said they would recommend our company to a friend or colleague. And, on a scale of 0 to 10 on the likelihood of recommending us, the average response was 7.9. This means our customers were very likely to recommend us to friends and colleagues.
Not only would they recommend us to friends and colleagues, but over 90% of our customers stated they were either very likely (63.64%) or somewhat likely (27.27%) to purchase our solution and products again. We were very happy to be above the industry average of 58% for POS solution providers.
Conclusion: A Commitment to Get Better and Better
While we are thrilled that so many of our customers are happy or very happy with us as solution providers, we know we can do even better. We intend to keep working to improve our customer service and our solutions and products.
Grocery, supermarket, pharmacy, and natural health businesses can count on us to keep innovating and enhancing their POS systems to help them overcome their business challenges.
In this topsy-turvy business environment, Auto-Star remains committed to helping our customers and vendor partners to stay agile, operate efficiently, control costs, and position all of us for success in an uncertain world.
Here are some of the changes we’ve been able to make so far
UI/UX designer
Chis Faxon,
We often hear how powerful our software is but get comments that it looks old and tired. To work on creating a new and refreshed image, we are adding a new ½ time position with the creation of a User Interface / User Experience (UI/UX) Designer. The UI UX Designer helps create products with a great user experience. They are responsible for understanding what users want from the software and then designing it so that the users can execute necessary functions in an intuitive and eye-pleasing environment.
Chis Faxon studied digital design in the UK, upon finishing his degree he immigrated to Canada. Here, he has spent the last decade designing for many companies across Canada, such as Shaw, Papa John’s, and FGL sports. With a desire to take on new challenges, Chris went back to school to pursue a career in IT and, after graduating, began working in the technical service department at Auto-Star. He will now be taking on the role of UI/UX Designer to utilize his experience to improve the look and feel of Auto-Star.
Customer Success Coach
Tom Kimber,
Another common theme we found has to do with customers not knowing how to get the most benefits of the software or new modules. As a result, we are adding a ½ position of a Customer Success Coach. The Customer Success Coach will support our customers as they transition from sales prospects to active users of our products. They will be focused on building close, long-term (life sentences) client relationships.
