Strong customer experience in automotive service starts with the culture inside the shop, not with pricing or promotions, according to an industry coach and shop owner.
Shops cannot expect customers to be happier than their own staff, noted Alysa Beech, a customer experience strategist with Beech Consulting and co-owner of Upper James Autopro in Hamilton, Ontario.
“We can never expect your customers to be happier than your staff,” she said at the Tirecraft 2026 Conference. “If you have staff that radiate exhaustion and contempt and apathy, do you think you’re going to have customers that are singing your praise from the mountaintops? No, you’re not.”
Beech said her shop’s customer experience work began with a full-team commitment. The business sent its entire staff, including technicians and apprentices, through a customer experience training program.
“During this time together, we created a number of things,” she said, such as a service vision statement that Beech described as a “north star” for how staff should interact with customers. They also created pillars of service that set standards for technical expertise, hospitality and going above and beyond.
“This was an incredible unifying team-building activity where we all got to come together to create something that we all stood behind and we all believed in,” Beech said. “It wasn’t us as owners mandating something talk down. We built it together.”
She said the shared language and values allowed staff to hold each other accountable and gave the shop “a floor plan [and] a road map” for how to move forward.
To sustain that culture, Beech said shops need to focus on three elements: Autonomy, purpose and mastery.
She argued that uncertainty, which her team identified as a major pain point for customers, also harms employees when they feel left in the dark.
“Uncertainty causes anxiety. It paralyzes people. It causes them to act irrationally,” she observed.
Beech said her shop responded by putting structure around internal communication, just as it did with client updates.
“People going to work every day need to feel that their voices are heard and that they have a voice first of all, but that their voices are heard,” she said.
Having some control over one’s work is “a core principle” in creating a culture of motivation.
She urged shops to build a regular cadence of team meetings, whether daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly.
“Regular meetings need to take place,” she said. “The specific contents of the meeting are less important than your commitment to them.”
Beech suggested meetings could cover training, numbers or roundtable discussions on pain points, but said the key is to start, even on a small scale.
“If somebody was starting a fitness journey and you told them, ‘If you’re not willing to go to the gym six days a week and be there for an hour giving 100 per cent it’s not even worth trying,’ that’s crazy,” she said. “Just do one. Just try it out. Just get that ball moving.”
On purpose, Beech said shops need a clear “why” that goes beyond fixing cars. She referenced Starbucks founder Howard Schultz as saying, “We are not in the coffee business serving people. We are in the people business serving coffee,” and applied it to automotive.
“We are not in the automotive business serving people. We are in the people business, and we just happen to fix cars,” she said. “If you believe that at your core, then I promise you, it changes how we go about our days.”
Mastery, the third element, comes from training that helps employees feel elite in their roles, Beech said. That includes technical training for technicians and front counter training for advisors so both groups can perform with confidence.
“When you give your employees that sense of autonomy, when you give them a sense of purpose and when they have a sense of mastery over what you do, what they do, that’s an incredible culture you’re brewing,” she said. “That’s a culture of motivation. They get things done, take things on. You’re all on the same page.”
Image credit: Depositphotos.com
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