A dozen honours in as many years isn’t bad going by anyone’s standards – that’s how many category wins Autoglass has notched up in the windscreen repair and replacement provider category of the BusinessCar Awards.
The company has plenty going on in the corporate sector at the moment, but it’s also worth bearing in mind that it’s arguably the most well-known windscreen specialist around, which hasn’t done it any harm in the eyes of business customers.
Managing director Matthew Mycock freely admits that a part of the award win is down to the company’s branding and well-known status: “That’s part of it. There is a bit of brand recognition, but customers’ expectations of us don’t stand still.”
Despite the company’s back catalogue of popularity with BusinessCar readers, he also admitted that the firm had recognised the need to up its game in the fleet stakes: “When I came in it wasn’t a sector we had paid enough attention to. I don’t honestly think we’d really stopped and thought about the complexities of fleet and lease, therefore I don’t think our approach to them or our proposition was particularly compelling. But there’s real growth potential there – the fleet market has a complexity and some unique characteristics, which, unless we changed the way we operated, we weren’t going to get close to.
“Time is a massive issue - their interest is in getting the car back on the road as quickly as possible. I don’t think we’d really understood that previously. We changed what we do and the way we operate – we can now get to those cars quicker and deliver the service they’re after.”
Staffing was one of the big changes for the fleet side of the business and what allowed Autoglass to get back into bed with that sector. Mycock explains: “The best thing we did was actually put people in the business specifically on this sector who understood it and could get to grips with it.
“It’s only a small team of five people but they’ve done a great job at getting the whole business closer to this sector.”
The changes have obviously paid off, because the company now has a series of tie-ups with heavy hitters in the leasing industry. Mycock continues: “Now we’re in a position where we’ve got seven out of the 10 top [leasing] companies. We’ve doubled our customer base over the last year and we’ve still got ambitions.
“We’ve recently announced that we’ve joined up with [insurance firm] QBE and Inchcape, but that’s not enough for us. We want to do more and there’ll be a few more in the pipeline in the coming months.”
The firm’s ambitions for the corporate sector appear to be limitless, but its increasing presence in fleet has led it to change the way it conducts its consumer and insurance business.
“[Fleet is] changing the way we’re operating the core business. There are some very sharp operators in that sector and it’s made us think differently about how we deal with the insurance motorist in terms of speed and service.
“Our ambition is that we want to own the biggest 50 [leasing] companies. I think that’s a hell of a challenge given where we started, but we’re very focussed on doing it.”
Mycock reckons that the prevention rather than cure approach is one of the ways to tap into more corporate business. The company operates a ‘repair first’ philosophy, which he says has gone down well with businesses.
“If we can repair it we’ll repair it. For customers, we save them money fundamentally. We do fleet chip checks, so if we find damage we’ll report it and hopefully we’ll get permission to repair that before it turns into a more expensive replacement job.”
In tune with the current climate, the firm is also rolling out measures to be able fit and repair screens more adeptly in wet weather, which poses big problems for screen repair outfits.
“We do about 90% of our business mobile and if it rains, you can’t fit,” says Mycock. “You’ve got a big hole where the screen was that’s letting in water, but there’s also the bond we use – if that gets wet then it won’t work. We found that when heavy rain hit, we were having to reschedule, which isn’t great, so we’ve developed two van mounting solutions, which we lovingly call the ‘Vanbrella’.
“It sits in a box on the [van’s] roof and it’s like a wing, which deploys in about 30 seconds. Basically, you can get up to a Ford Transit under this thing and it gives sufficient coverage to make sure the technician, the glass, the car and all the consumables stay dry.
“We’re rolling out 200 over the next couple of months. We’ve got another solution that is similar but comes out from the side. By the back end of the year we’ll have about 400 vans fitted with this and the same again next year.”
