Competitive Intelligence
Most stores set their labor rate on instinct and a rumor about what the dealer across town is doing. We shop your actual market, store by store, and hand you what they really charge and how they really treat a caller.
Included in Advantage, $499 per store per month.
The Problem
Benchmark tools compare you to an anonymized peer group somewhere else in the country. That is useful for a board slide and useless on the day you have to decide whether your alignment price is leaving money on the table or driving customers to the independent two miles away.
Your market is a specific list of stores with specific prices. That is the only comparison that changes what you do on Monday.
What We Collect
We build your competitor set from the dealers and independents actually around you, by address. You see which store charges what, not an anonymized peer group percentile that no one in your market has ever heard of.
Customer pay, warranty, EV, heavy duty and light duty are collected separately for every competitor. A single blended rate hides the thing you actually need, which is where you sit on the specific work you are trying to price.
The same twelve services are priced at every store in your market, so the comparison holds from survey to survey and market to market. It is the basket Fairchild has refined across 30+ markets, and your store can add or drop items on top of it.
Price is not the only thing a customer is shopping. Every competitor is graded on how quickly the phone gets answered, how they greet a caller, and how long they keep them waiting. That is the part of the comparison a rate sheet never shows you.
Why the same twelve, everywhere
The basket is not assembled fresh for each market. It was distilled from years of Fairchild survey work across more than thirty markets, and it is the same twelve services in every one of them. That is what makes the results comparable: your position this quarter against last, and your market against a market three states away.
A one-off price check tells you what a competitor charges today. A standardised basket run the same way every time tells you whether you are drifting.
How It Works
The dealers and independents actually around your store, named and located, rather than an anonymized peer group somewhere else in the country. You can add or remove any of them.
The twelve-service basket is priced at every store, five labor rates are collected separately, and each competitor is graded on how they answer and handle a caller. Your people do not spend a day on the phone.
Competitor by competitor and service by service, against your own current pricing, with the gaps flagged in both directions. Priced too high on alignments and too low on flushes is the normal result, not an unusual one.
The same survey records competitor warranty rates, which is groundwork for your next manufacturer rate submission. Pricing decisions stop being a once-a-year argument and become something you can point at.
Why It Sits Next To Warranty
Every competitor survey records the warranty rate alongside customer pay. That matters because a manufacturer rate submission is argued out of what retail work actually goes for in your market. Knowing where you sit is not just a pricing exercise. It is groundwork for the next filing.
We will walk you through a real survey and show you where a store like yours sits on rate and on price.