So when you're wondering what's going on with that SUV sitting in your shop's pickup lot for the last two weeks, you can see if it is awaiting customer approval or if parts are still on the way.
Within Tekmetric, Repair Orders flow through your Job Board, visually representing your shop's overall workflow in three columns: “Estimates,” “Work-In-Progress” and “Completed.”
The idea is for service advisors, general managers, shop owners, and even Technicians, to gain a birds-eye view of everything happening in your shop with just a quick glance. Everyone is responsible for their tasks, every step of the process is accounted for, and it can all easily be tracked and managed in a simplified workflow.
We also understand that some shops may want a little extra flexibility, and maybe there’s some extra level of detail you would like represented visually on your job board. That’s where Tekmetric’s RO Labels come in.
What Are Repair Order Labels?
Going one step further beyond these columns, Tekmetric enables shops to apply "RO Labels" to repair orders within each column. These repair order labels are little tags that can be applied to help add a little extra detail and visibility to your job board, providing even more clarity into your shop’s workflow.
So, for example, in the "in progress" column, shops can create labels like "waiting on parts," or "need to call customer" to provide very specific updates without requiring viewers to dig into the notes within that repair order, or even worse, try to decipher the scribbles a tech wrote on a notepad.
Repair Order Labels Make Shop Management a Breeze
The biggest benefits of Tekmetric's RO labels are easy to see:
Customizable Job Board: Tailor your job board to meet specific task requirements, providing a personalized approach to workflow management.
Visual Workflow: Transform your job board into a visual representation for intuitive progress tracking with custom RO labels.
Swift Progress Tracking: Easily monitor vehicle progress with RO labels for a quick status snapshot.
Improved Communication: Enhance shop-wide communication and efficiency with quick, at-a-glance information provided by RO labels.
This provides service advisors and general managers with an instant view of their entire shop’s workflow, illustrating where every single repair order is within the repair process. This clarity and visibility enable managers to react in real time and make decisions on the fly, while providing the best possible experience for customer.
With constant up-to-date readings, you can tune your shop like an ECU tunes an engine, making on-the-fly, calculated decisions for the best performance. And when customers call-in wondering where their vehicle is in the repair process, service advisors can instantly identify the vehicle, the most recent status update, and take the stress out of those tedious customer interactions.
Flexibility for Your Shop's Operations
We know that not all auto repair shops run the same, and that's why Tekmetric provides the option of flexibility your team needs to create the perfect solution.
But don't worry, that doesn't mean you'll build everything alone!
With RO Labels shops can create and color code their labels based on each column in their workflow.
That way you can find the best way to represent data for quick and easy identification. And you're not stuck using a standardized language for your labels either, shops have the freedom to customize labels to be specific to how your shop works and refer to each step of the process.
This is particularly important for shops that use a physical job board in their shop, enabling greater cohesion between your digital and physical counterparts. Taking the workflow one step further, shops can even choose to view their job board by each label in RO Label view, making it easier to drill down on the specific step in the process you’re looking to analyze.
Going back to our scenario from before: wondering why that SUV has been sitting for two weeks, unsure if that’s because the customer needs to be updated, or parts are on their way.
Instead of tracking down the last technician to see what their status is, or digging into spreadsheets and parts order forms, just quickly glance at the job board, and look for the right color!
Optimize Your Shop’s Workflow for a Seamless Customer Journey
The right tools for the job make everything easier. RO labels are just one of the tools part of the complete Tekmetric system that provides increased visibility and clarity into your shop's workflow.
With an instant view on the status of a repair, service advisors can update customers in real-time, and work to manage the repair process in a way that creates not only a seamless workflow for your technicians but a simplified and convenient process for your customers.
When thinking about how to run an auto repair shop, we might start by thinking about a well-managed football team. The different players know what they’re responsible for, show up to accomplish their jobs, put their best effort into everything they do, and perform their best as a team. Players have each others’ backs both on the field and off the field. They can think on the fly, and move as a unit toward the end zone.
How do your players work together? When mechanic shops assemble the right team, devise the right strategy, and run the right plays, they can win, too. Service advisors can stay informed about what’s going on with every repair order at any given moment in time, switch easily between tasks even when the shop is busy, and provide excellent customer service. Technicians are able to focus on their work and spend more time turning wrenches. And customers? They’ll get their cars back fast and drive away with a good impression of your shop.
Shop owners who think more deeply about how to manage a mechanic shop are rewarded for their efforts. Well-managed shops see exponential returns. Stellar team performance leads to customer satisfaction and repeat business. The more successful your shop, the more you can invest back into your team, continuing the cycle of success for all involved.
Effective customer communication is crucial in the auto repair industry, no matter how big or small your shop may be. In fact, customer communication is at the heart of the most successful shops. However, there’s more to it than just writing a repair order or making a phone call and leveraging effective strategies for communicating can make the difference in a shop’s level of success. In this guide, we will go over qualities of great customer communication and how you can leverage digital tools like your auto repair shop management system to be a better communicator. Together, these assets can help you enhance customer loyalty and grow your shop’s bottom line.
Good communication in your shop is characterized by:
An efficient and accurate workflow
Understanding and fulfilling customer needs
Creating trust and driving safety by educating customers on their vehicles
Maximizing and Streamlining Your Workflow
Good communication starts internally. Streamlining communication between your service writers and technicians is key to ensuring the customer’s needs are met in the most efficient way possible. To master this, encourage your team to leverage internal tools like your shop management system to streamline internal conversations. This can help create a more efficient communication process, allowing you to both maintain a continuous workflow and enhance your overall customer experience. Some of Tekmetric’s features to streamline workflow include:
Job Board. Within Tekmetric, internal and external notes can minimize the back-and-forth during a repair process. For example, internal-facing notes on a job board allow for immediate communication between your technicians and service advisors with just the click of a button. Additionally, job boards also have customizable statuses that share the state of a repair at a glance – no more chasing down a technician after your day off for a progress update. Together, these features streamline your shop’s internal communications, driving efficiency and allowing smoother behind-the-scenes operations for everyone.
Inventory and Ordering. To help streamline the ordering process, Tekmetric includes a feature that allows the technician to find the parts that they need for the vehicle, rather than going through a service advisor. By empowering the technician to review labor times, order the correct parts and note their needs internally, this feature can reduce communication bottlenecks and enhance communication – from the technician to the service advisor, and eventually to the customer.
Meeting Customers Where They Are
The best way to reach a customer is whichever method they prefer. Some may prefer email or phone, but many people are on-the-go and also appreciate text updates. In fact, 81% of Americans text regularly, with 90% of text messages opened within the first three minutes since it was sent. Because of this, Tekmetric has built-in, two-way texting to help you make your customer experience more convenient. Whether sharing repair updates or enabling a parent to make a payment for their college student from states away, texting enables customers to reach your shop for important matters without inconveniencing themselves. This includes features like:
Two-way texting. With two-way texting, customers no longer have to deal with phone tag hassles and can reach the shop at the tip of their fingertips. This capability gives the customer more autonomy in the repair process, allowing a convenient way for them to ask questions, view photos or video and approve repairs.
Text-to-pay. Payment is the final touchpoint you have with a customer. The text-to-pay feature makes this process virtually painless. Customers can pay from their office, in the evenings at home or even from miles away if they are traveling. By offering this option, you can simplify the payment process, and the customer can pick up their vehicle sooner – resulting in a happier customer and more efficiency in your shop.
Facilitating A Culture of Trust, Safety and Education
In the auto repair industry, shops have a responsibility to ensure the safety of their customers’ vehicles. Utilizing digital tools in your shop can demonstrate your commitment to vehicle owner safety, as well as help you facilitate a culture of trust that seeks to educate the average customer about the health of their car. Some tools might include:
Digital vehicle inspections. DVIs provide two key qualities your customer highly values: information and benefits. A complete DVI with photos, video and clear notes gives customers the autonomy to examine the repairs your technician proposes and decide which recommendations they want to approve. It benefits your shop too: when you share eight photos or more, your ARO can actually increase because the media allows the customer to see where the vehicle needs repairs with their own eyes. With two-way texting, you can send photos directly to the customer’s phone as well, enhancing both the convenience and the level of trust they have in your shop.
MotoVisuals integration. One of the responsibilities of the service writer is to educate the vehicle owner on why the repair is needed for their car. With Tekmetric’s MotoVisuals integration, you can share clear, easy-to-understand animations and videos with voiceovers that talk about why a repair is important. This helps drive the vehicle owner’s confidence in the repair, creating a culture of education that ultimately drives trust and loyalty and keeps your customers coming back for more.
The Bottom Line?
Ultimately, communication is a strategic business tool that can drive efficiency and enhance your shop’s performance. By prioritizing clear, consistent and personalized interactions, you can build lasting relationships, enhance customer satisfaction and elevate your shop’s performance. Embracing digital tools and strategies like Tekmetric can empower you to optimize your communication efforts and achieve sustained growth. This commitment to maintaining a customer-first mentality is reflected in your ability to communicate both with your team and your customers and, when done effectively, can increase customer retention and lead to more profit for your shop.
Adjusting your pricing on parts to make a profit is pretty straightforward. But when it comes to labor times for auto repair shops…that’s where things can get a bit tricky. Yes, you need competitive labor rates, but you also need to keep those rates reasonable so you don’t scare off your customers with sky-high prices.
3 ways your shop can make more money on labor:
By using a labor matrix
By creating custom labor rates
By applying a labor guide markup
Before we dive into the differences between these three methods for setting the best labor times at your shop, here’s a quick refresher on the one thing these methods have in common: the labor guide.
What is a Labor Guide?
A labor guide is like the gospel of labor times for auto repair shops. It tells you how long, on average, it takes to complete different types of repair work. Remember that the times listed in auto repair labor guides are averages, so it’s best to treat them as a starting point.
Factors That Can Affect Labor Times for Auto Repair Shops
Let’s take a look at some of the factors to consider when determining how much to mark up (or mark down) your shop’s labor rates.
Age of Vehicle
Older vehicles are often trickier to fix, especially because finding parts for them can require a time-consuming hunt across parts suppliers. You can make up for the time spent hunting down uncommon parts by charging more for all repairs involving vehicles over a certain age.
Geographic Location
Some areas lead to different types of repair challenges that can affect the time it takes for repairs. For example, shops in Syracuse, New York—the snowiest city in America—might find themselves working with cars that have rust, which can significantly add to the time it takes to remove or even clean certain parts.
Experience of Technician
Chances are, you’re already paying experienced technicians a higher base salary or hourly rate. However, certain situations might call for cranking up those numbers, like if you really need to put their skills to the test for a tricky repair for a client who wants it done ASAP.
Customer Needs
You can offer customers who need their cars back fast a “Pro Tech” rate, where your tech wraps up the job in record time. When you’re asking techs to complete a job faster than the time on the labor guide, and still do a good job, the customer is getting special service. Be sure to let customers know that speediness comes with a surcharge.
Relationship With Customers
It’s a good idea to consider giving loyal customers a special rate as a token of appreciation. With that said, industry leaders advise sticking to your labor rates as much as possible, because if it becomes a habit, you risk financially harming your business.
How to Choose a Reliable Labor Guide
A reliable auto repair labor guide is foundational for your shop when you’re setting labor rates, so you’ll want to use a labor guide that stays up-to-date with the latest labor times in the industry. Just like many people use online directories instead of the Yellow Pages, many auto repair shops use digital labor guides that are constantly updated with the latest labor times.
When seeking out a digital labor guide, look for one that:
Offers consistent, comprehensive data on labor times from industry leaders, so you can set accurate labor rates that will keep your shop profitable
Adds labor times for new vehicles and jobs periodically, so your shop’s pricing can stay competitive
Integrates with your auto repair shop management software, so you don’t have to dig through multiple systems
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