We’ve been talking at Reman U for quite a while about launching a Groupon promotion for our shops. You’ve probably thought about doing the same for your shops, but you’ve had some concerns.
Before we tell you why we didn’t do it, and what we are doing, we thought we’d tell you a little more about us, because most of you think we just sell remanufactured transmissions.
Our company, ETE REMAN, still owns and operates two retail centers in Milwaukee, which we call Engine & Transmission Exchange, Inc. We keep them mainly for research and development purposes, but running shops also gives us real-world experience and a credible laboratory in which to run our experiments. We figure we shouldn’t tell you what to do at YOUR shop unless we’ve tried it first at OUR shop.

Now on to Why Groupon Sucks – And Why Living Social Is Your Best Bet.

Though we’ve looked into doing an offer ever since Groupon began, we never pulled the trigger on doing a Groupon promotion because:
1) There are very few one-size-fits-all products and services in the automotive industry anymore. Every vehicle is special. Something that may take 10 minutes to do on a Honda Civic may take 2 hours to do on a Dodge Ram truck. 5 quarts of fluid for 1 car may be 5 gallons of fluid for another.
2) Groupon customers may overrun regular price and already scheduled shop work. If we add another 100 oil changes to our shop, that’s going to take many of our available shop bays. It’s also going to take many of our existing employees to do the work. And we may have work that’s already scheduled, making it tough to meet the expectations of these new customers.
3) The Groupon website doesn’t have a direct line to a salesperson if there are questions. We didn’t see a number that fit for our needs. We had some questions and we wanted to talk to a live person. The Groupon website made it hard to find a phone number to use for this purpose.
These are the 3 big reasons, however there are more reasons we haven’t tried a Groupon promotion. This Friday, we decided to move ahead anyway and try to find a way for Groupon to work for us.

Here’s what we did

We entered our information at https://www.grouponworks.com/get-featured and clicked submit. We wanted to do a deal right away.
But we couldn’t do it. Groupon told us we needed to wait for someone to contact us.
But wait: there was a customer service number to call for questions.
We called the customer service number. The customer service person let us know you can’t enter a deal until someone from Groupon contacts us, typically at least 2 weeks from the time you click submit.
We tried to get past the gatekeeper, er “customer service person.” We asked for a salesperson.

No dice.

We asked what would happen if we had a responsive email newsletter list that we’d be sharing our experiences with, and encouraging all the people on the list to also create a Groupon offer.

Still no dice.

None of it mattered. There’s no way we could do a deal the same day we signed up for Groupon.

We had one option left.

We acted like a big shot. Just like many of our customers do when the first person they talk to doesn’t give the answer they want or need.
We asked what we would happen if we were the CEO of Coca Cola and we wanted to do a Groupon deal. The customer service person laughed and said “If you were the CEO of Coca cola, you wouldn’t be calling me.”
Nice answer.
So we hung up and thought about our options. We decided our best action was to call LivingSocial, Groupon’s competition.
A live, friendly person answered the phone. He answered our questions, asked where we were from, and when he heard Milwaukee, he let us know they have a live salesperson in Milwaukee, and he gave us her email address.
So we sent her an email at 11 AM, and we went to lunch at 11:30.
At 11:50, we got a call from our local Living Social salesperson. We scheduled a meeting for Monday at lunch time.
We’re going to do a LivingSocial deal instead of Groupon.
We’ll let you know what happens.
Questions for you: Has your shop used Groupon or LivingSocial? What were your results? What questions do you have? We’ll ask the best at our meeting Monday at noon central and share the questions AND the answers next week.