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As a shop owner I was very careful when dealing with a female customer. I took the time to try to explain her problem and our proposed solution. Selling anything not related to the original complaint was avoided unless it was a safety issue.
When a man has a bad experience with a shop he will typically keep it to himself. With a woman she will tell her friends about that bad experience and they will avoid doing business with the shop that was the source of that bad experience.
I also asked every customer how they learned about my shop and after a while I cancelled all phone book advertising when my survey showed how few new customers came there due to directory advertising. One customer (female) had some brake work done and her master cylinder failed while we were trying to bleed the system. She told me she did not have enough money to pay the additional cost but she had to have her car for her work. I took the 4 year old master off my own car and put it on her car and put a new one on mine.
She never forgot that kindness and the goodwill paid me back many times over with the new customers she sent my way.
We always offered new customers a one hour check over where we listed all of the work we recommended and prioritized the repairs, with the charge credited against any work we did. That way the customer knew the total amount of work needed and if it was more than the car was worth it was not worth fixing it all. One lady told me once she seemed to be spending too much money on repairs on a car her Dad had given her. I added all of the repair orders over a 3 year period and it averaged out to $45 a month. When she saw that amount she realized that she was driving an old car with close to 200k miles pretty cheaply.
regards
Mech
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