With a complete view of how all your shops are performing and access to the tools needed to make changes quickly, shop management systems help run your shop with smooth and agile business operations, provide a consistent experience for customers, and ultimately maximize revenue and support your shop's growth.
Features such as unified reporting across all your shops and shared customer history work to create seamless processes for managing your business as a centralized organization.
Shop management systems with built-in Multi-Shop functionality remove information silos, making it easy for owners to manage all of their locations as a unified business organization.
Tekmetric Multi-Shop makes it easy to monitor, view, and update all of your shop locations from anywhere at any time. By removing the information silos that exist in other solutions, owners can make the best decisions with a complete view of their business' performance.
With a Multi-Shop capable platform, owners and managers can easily access and review important metrics across all locations, including revenue, car count, average repair order, rejected work, approved work, and so much more.
The power is truly in the flexibility and centralization of all your shops’ data. Owners can even drill down on specific shop locations or compare different aspects of their business with a complete bird’s-eye view.
With so many customers, individual repairs, estimates, digital vehicle inspections, and not to mention all of the data collecting and reporting options available in a shop management system, it's critical to ensure your information is organized properly.
Even just having multiple customer histories between different locations can throw off your financial reports or parts inventory management by adding in redundancies. Shops that are still writing things down manually on pen and paper, or trying to force other software solutions to work for their business, are leaving a lot of potential on the table. A better handle on all your data makes it easier to manage your business, and even shows you the opportunities to increase your average repair order value.
That's why shop owners with multiple locations should really consider using a multi-shop management platform that creates consistent, unified data processes. With the same collection and reporting processes, the same values being measured and all of the results in the same place, you can easily figure out what's happening where, and why.
The digital experience has become standard, and customers have developed new expectations for continuity of care. Like being able to return an item they bought online in a store, at any location. We expect that the store will have a view into what we bought, where and when we bought it, and how much we paid for it.
With Shared Customer History in Tekmetric, shops can provide that exact same level of continuity between locations. For example, one shop using Tekmetric Multi-Shop has two specific locations: one focused on repair work, and the other specializing more in vintage and performance upgrades.
With shared customer history, the performance shop can see exactly what repairs and maintenance the customer had done, or even declined, to provide better service and recommendations for their planned upgrades or repair work.
One of the best aspects of a shop management system is the ability to create quick, seamless and efficient workflows for your entire team. Service Writers will love the ability to build estimates and apply canned jobs with just a few clicks. Technicians will love the ability to view their schedules and upcoming work to plan out their day. Owners will love the ability to organize all their data into unified reports.
And, of course, with the right Multi-Shop management system, owners, managers and service writers can gain access to all these powerful workflow tools across multiple locations. And that can be tailored down to locations they specifically focus on, or a more birds-eye view for a complete picture.
For example, Service Writers can configure or apply different canned jobs across multiple locations, or create a consistent digital vehicle inspection process at every location to ensure the same level of detailed analysis and care is provided to every repair order.
When managing multiple shops, it's not uncommon to have different locations serving different clients, different cars, or have a different focus all together.
Depending on these market differences across your shops, owners can configure and tailor offers or discounts in some shops but not others. Owners and managers also have the ability to tailor and configure different payment methods, like text-to-pay, and build different experiences around them.
For example, one shop owner allows for customers to drop off and pick up their vehicles, even when the shop is closed. Meanwhile their other locations are more walk-in based and don't provide this flexibility. Owners can configure one shop to allow text-to-pay functionality, while the other shop offers pay-as-you-go options for walk-ins that didn't expect such a high repair bill.
With a personalized experience, customers feel like your shop is there to truly support them. Better experiences lead to happier customers, happier customers lead to repeat business, and repeat business of course leads to increased revenue.
And when managing multiple shop locations, it's critical to have the right tools and processes in place to create a unified experience. Gain back time, make better decisions, and maximize your margins at every shop with powerful tools and reports from an auto repair shop management system.
Repair shop management has many moving parts that require a collaborative environment. There's a lot of information to share, whether that's service advisors getting information from customers or providing updates to them, or even technicians and service advisors discussing the repair process of that customer's vehicle.
Without clear communication, you'll be playing a game of telephone, with details changing or getting lost, causing repairs to fall short, or forcing service advisors to pick up the phone and bug customers throughout the day. None of that is ideal.
That's why clear and effective communication is the key to providing great service in pretty much every industry, especially auto repair.
The better your team can communicate with your guests, the more at ease your guests will feel about their repairs, and the more likely they are to walk out of your shop happy and willing to come back to your shop the next time they need a repair.
In turn, your team will feel even more energized and incentivized to provide great customer service. Win-win!
The Auto Repair Industry is experiencing a number of changes. From larger economic shifts to a growing technician shortage, its now more crucial than ever to set your shop up for growth.
Often in moments of chaos there are windows of opportunity.
After every economic decline, no matter how steep—the housing crisis, the dot-com bust, even the Great Depression—the world has managed to come back.
Times of economic downturn are difficult, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. As far as the virus is concerned, economists are even speaking of a “V” curve. Meaning just as fast as our economy slowed down, it may pick up that quickly too.
In other words, have hope. There are opportunities during slow periods to adjust how you operate and how you service your guests.
These opportunities can help you navigate a tricky economy and prepare your shop for when business picks up again. This may be an unprecedented time in human history, but it’s also an open window for innovation.
What you do now will have a big impact on the future of your business.
If less cars than usual are rolling into your shop for repairs, you now have some time to work on streamlining your process, being more efficient, eliminating waste (of both time and materials), and improving your marketing and guest experience.
How should shop owners approach this situation? In a way, the same way you might approach business at any other time: finding ways to innovate and improve.
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In today’s auto repair industry, data can play a key role in a shop’s ability to repair a vehicle more efficiently and accurately. Traditionally, repair information was documented informally, often by hand on paper. Today, this information can be captured and processed electronically, leading to a significant acceleration of the repair process – and a more positive customer experience.
The transformative power of data extends beyond streamlining individual repairs. In fact, by strategically analyzing your shop’s data over time, you can also use the information to grow your shop. However, to maximize the impact of data, it’s important to know what kind of data is most effective to use in your shop. Some of the more evergreen data – performance over time – is useful in your long-term strategy, while others, such as real-time performance metrics, are more helpful in making short-term tweaks to promote better performance. In this blog, we’ll discuss how you can distinguish between evergreen and real-time data and where you can use both to grow your shop.
Before you can decide how to use data, it’s important to understand the difference between evergreen data and real-time data. Real-time data is live data that is available as soon as it is generated. It allows you to manage your shop and respond to situations instantaneously as they happen. On the other hand, evergreen data is used in hindsight, after a timeframe has ended. Most shops use this type of data to reflect after the repairs are complete.
Both forms of data have their uses. Real-time data allows you to respond to situations as they happen in a way that helps support your business. Evergreen data helps you track long-term trends and their effects on your shop. With Tekmetric, you can leverage both types to keep your shop running smoothly. When you leverage data strategically in all forms, you can optimize your shop’s operations and processes, create an excellent customer experience and prime your business for growth.
Real-time data enables immediate visibility into what is happening with your shop at any given time. From inventory to customer communication to repair progress, you can review different buckets within your shop and respond as the day progresses. This capability allows you to make decisions on the fly without having to wait until the end of the day, week or month to know which parts need to be ordered or how many repairs you have completed. Strategically, real-time data can be used for short-term decisions that have long-term effects, ultimately becoming an integral piece to growing the shop’s bottom line.
Examples of how you can use real-time data might include:
In addition to real-time data, you can leverage evergreen data by analyzing trends and your shop’s data for predictive forecasting. One of evergreen data’s biggest advantages is that it captures a period of time without the need for constant refreshing. This can help you review your shop’s performance over longer periods – year-over-year, month-to-month or quarterly – so you can implement long-term solutions to promote growth.
Examples of using evergreen data include:
Time is money. Evergreen and real-time data allow you to manage your shop’s time and resources in the most efficient manner to generate profit while providing an excellent customer experience. To grow your shop, ensure you are using both forms of data to your advantage. Combining evergreen data’s longevity with real-time data can lead you to a multi-faceted business strategy, creating a customer-centric approach that ultimately generates more cash flow, profit and growth.
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Thought Leadership
Shop Management
July 25, 2024
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