Wash On Wheels does A LOT of car washing for auto dealerships in the Denver metro area.
Car Washing In The Winter At Auto Dealerships
Our crews wash tens of thousands of cars each year. In the process of all that car washing, a few scratches happen. The vast majority of those scratches are so slight they’re invisible to the naked eye. But we usually have a few scratches each year we have to fix.
Before you think “Really? I don’t want that happening to MY cars!”, keep in mind our percentage of scratched cars to washed cars is less than 1/10th of 1% – and those scratches don’t all happen to one customer, but are spread across several customers. Also, we guarantee our work and – for our regular clients – this includes fixing any scratches we cause.
We are very familiar with the appearance of any scratches caused by car washing. Almost all of them happen when our pressure washing hose rubs the lower corner fenders of cars. In the past 7 years the only other cause of a scratch on a car was from a pressure hose popping right next to a car, flinging up in the air and falling down on the hood of the car. Even though that was a freak incident, we still paid to take care of the scratch and shallow ding caused by it.
Most of the hose scratches are shallow enough for us to simply buff out with special compounds. Our Service Manager has many years experience fixing the fender scratches we cause and has narrowed down the formula and process for fixing scratches. If we can’t fix the scratches, we pay to have the car repaired.
We recently got a phone call from one of our used car dealers to look at a bunch of scratches on their cars. When our Quality Manager looked at the scratches, he know right away they weren’t from the work our crews do. The scratches were all over the cars from the roof to the sides, but there was no specific pattern to the scratches – they didn’t follow the pattern a chamois or hose would make.
All of our crews do their car washing the same way every time. It’s part of what makes them efficient.
But these scratches were obviously caused by different things. Our customer assumed they were caused by us because the scratches showed up after our wash. Our Quality Manager explained why each scratch didn’t fit the pattern of our work in any way. Only one small scratch out of 7 could possible have been caused by a chamois with a small rock stuck in it – but again, we haven’t actually seen that happen before.
But since we were the last ones known to touch the cars, we agreed with our client we would buff out the scratches and take it from there. After buffing the scratches so they didn’t show up as much or at all, our customer, who now understood most of the scratches couldn’t have been ours to begin with, was happy we did everything we could to fix the situation for him.
We understand perceptions and feelings have as much to do with ‘issues’ as facts. By explaining the facts to address the issue and taking action to alleviate the emotions of the issue, we made our weekly client happy with a couple hours of attention from us.
Related pages and articles
- Car Washing
- Pressure Washing Cars And Trucks At 33 Degrees!
- Car Washing At Auto Dealers – Before The Snowstorm?? (washonwheels.net)
- Washing Cars In Icy Conditions For Auto Dealers – Video | car washing (washonwheels.net)
- Pressure Washing And The Changing Winter Forecasts | car washing (washonwheels.net)
- Pressure Washing Is More Efficient With Custom Made Soap (washonwheels.net)
