While it’s important to focus on customer service and providing reliable repair work, your shop’s entire repair process, from beginning to end, should be consistent. If your shop has stellar processes for greeting customers, writing estimates, selling work, and completing work, you can stick the landing with a solid check out process.
If done the right way, your shop’s invoicing process will enhance the efficiency in your shop while leaving a positive, lasting impression on customers.
The invoices your shop hands out are a representation of how transparent your shop is. Your customers will gain visibility into exactly what they’re paying for. And the more they can understand an invoice, the more they can answer the question we’ve all asked ourselves when we’re customers, “Okay, what am I paying for?”
So, why not end on a strong note? Make your shop’s customers feel more at ease with easy-to-understand invoices.
Here are four ways to simplify your shop's invoicing process.
1. Standardize Your Invoicing Process
A steadfast workflow should carry through from the moment your customer’s walk in to the moment they drive away. If your shop is using an on-premise auto repair shop invoice software, then you’re stuck at the main computer unable to leverage tablets or phones for greater flexibility. Having the ability to move around the shop is a huge advantage in the auto repair world.
By investing in one cloud-based shop management system, every one of your shop’s processes can be synchronized so that you don’t have to rely on several different programs or a separate disparate auto repair shop invoice software.
Click Into A Repair Order and Send an Invoice
When your shop’s technicians have finished all approved repair work, your service advisor should be able to see the work on a digital system. And with a shop management system that includes a built-in invoice feature, your service advisors should be able to send the invoice directly to your customer from that same interface.
2. Eliminate Tedious Tasks
By simplifying the movement of information from the estimate to the invoice, you can set your team up for success. With traditional methods, a lot of your team’s time is spent doing repetitive tasks, moving information over from one form to another.
When that information is first put into a digital system, it can be auto-populated for you and save your technicians, service advisors, and customers time.
Default Inspections
With default inspections, shops can set a default inspection template that will be automatically applied to every vehicle that comes into your shop.
Service advisors won’t have to spend time searching for your shop’s standard inspection every time they build a new repair order. Plus, technicians will have a standardized inspection to work off of, ensuring that every vehicle is thoroughly inspected to the same standard with the same level of care.
This not only saves both your service advisors and technicians time, but it also helps to improve the accuracy of your inspection reports while delivering an exceptional customer experience, built on a foundation of trust.
Send And Receive Payments Instantly
With the right auto repair shop invoice software, your entire payment process should be easy—from calculating the balance due, sending it off to your customer, and collecting the payment.
Why force customers to pay you right at the time and point of sale? We're living in the future, and we're already paying for pizzas over the phone. Modern shop management platforms give your shop advanced tools like text-to-pay or buy now, pay later options so you can get paid instantly and easily.
3. Meet Customer Expectations
71% of customers have said that they genuinely want a consistent experience with a business, but only 29% say they get it.
And when it comes to auto repair shops, unfortunately, most customers don't have the best expectations. Cars are expensive, complicated, and noisy, and there's a lot going on under the hood that most people don't understand.
That's why it's so important for your auto repair shop to build that trust with your customers, to help them feel that your company is offering them truthful recommendations, not just upsells for a quick buck.
To build that trust with your customers, each aspect of their appointment should be consistent and dependable, down to how their invoice is presented.
Provide Your Customers With Options
Part of providing a noteworthy customer experience is giving them options. You’ll want to look for a shop management system that lets you see if customers are in the shop or have stepped away so that your team knows whether they should send them the invoice or talk to them in the lobby.
You should be able to send the invoice over text or through email. And if they want a paper copy, you should be able to print it straight from the software.
Show Future Service Recommendations
Another part of building trust with your customers is helping them remember when it may be time for maintenance work or an upcoming repair.
During the inspection process, a technician may find a budding issue like a belt or brake pads that are starting to wear thin.
While these findings may not require immediate attention, the service advisor should still be able to review these findings with the customer and give them the option to decline and save for a follow up.
Protect Your Business
With a built-in invoicing system, you can protect your bottom line, your margins, and your data. And like we mentioned before, with buy now, pay later options, your shop will even be protected from potential chargeback fraud.
Give your customers a modern experience
The right invoicing system will improve your shop’s workflow, save your team time, enhance your customers’ experience, and provide you with peace of mind.
Investing in an invoicing system is important, so you’ll want to make sure it’s a long-term fit for your business with the right foundation. That's why its critical to look for the right cloud-based shop management system.
Remember spring and summer of 2020? A lot of us are probably trying to forget and move forward, and we feel you. It was a scary time period for everyone, including the automotive repair industry.
Last April, auto shop owners were wondering, are my customers going to come into the shop? If people stay inside, are they going to drive less? If they drive less, are they still going to come into the shop as frequently? What if other industries are affected, and people have less money for repairs?
We were nervous like everyone else. But anyone who knows Tekmetric knows that we’re committed to driving the auto repair industry forward; we wanted to answer these questions and put Auto Repair Professionals’ minds at ease.
We also wanted to enable shops to not only endure the pandemic but also grow and come out stronger than ever before.
Strength in Numbers
If there’s one thing that makes us feel confident, empowered, and like we know what’s going on, it’s numbers. (Tracking shop performance and providing insights is kind of our thing).
We’ve seen the power of metrics in shops across America, and we know that customers, service advisors, technicians, and the entire auto repair industry benefit when auto shop owners can make informed decisions.
So we launched the TM-500 Index. The TM-500 tracks the Average Repair Order and Car Count of five hundred auto repair shops located across the United States. But data don’t mean squat if it ain’t easy to read. The TM-500 let’s users sort data by time and region so they can quickly explore trends.
Want to know the ARO and Car Count between the months of June and November of 2020? Simply set the time period “by month,” and the TM-500 will generate an easy-to-read graph.
Want to know if shops in midwest states had a higher or lower Car Count than southwest states last summer? Simply set the time period you want to observe, and hover over different regions on a map of the United States to learn how they performed.
Just as the Tekmetric system for auto repair shop management gives shop owners better insights into their shops, the TM-500 gives Auto Repair Professionals better insights into their industry.
But knowing is only half the battle.
A Catalyst for Digital Transformation
The auto repair industry has lagged behind almost every other service industry in how we utilize technology. Almost anyone with a smartphone can order a pizza, sushi, enchiladas, or any other food they want and track it while it’s being delivered to their door.
Meanwhile, someone paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a new transmission still has to go in-person and deal with a half-legible piece of paper that feels greasier than the pizza and enchiladas put together!
But we get it. People are sometimes reluctant to change. For many auto shop owners, however, the COVID-19 pandemic was the “now or never” moment to fully digitize their shops.
In 2020, Tekmetric prioritized the rollout of several features we had been working on to help shops provide their customers with the experience they’ve come to expect in almost every other part of their lives. In April of 2020, we rolled out Text-to-Pay, allowing shops to invoice and collect payment via text message.
In November of 2020, we rolled out True Two-Way Texting to make it easy for service advisors and customers to communicate throughout the entire repair process.
Combined, these two features enabled Tekmetric users to provide a completely touchless experience to their customers without sacrificing the quality of their work or customer service.
Much like in other industries, customers who bring their cars in for repairs appreciate the extra service and transparency of a more enhanced, digitally assisted customer experience.
As we watched many shops grow by using Tekmessage and Tekmerchant, we kept an eye on the overall performance of the TM-500. We were able to see when shops began to bounce back in summer after an early slump, and developed other understandings about where the industry was headed.
Over time, we have added new metrics to the TM-500 such as state-by-state Labor Margin, Parts Margin, Effective Labor Rate, and Car Count to gain a more complete picture of these high-performing shops.
What Have We Learned Since the Onset of the Pandemic?
When making conclusions about where the industry is going, we like to be informed by both quantitative and qualitative data.
The numbers give us a factual look at what’s gone up or down, and talking to people in the industry helps us make correlations between how certain behaviors, processes, and principles affect these trends.
Between the data we gathered from the TM-500 and the feedback we were able to gather from talking to auto shop owners, here’s what we have learned.
At Tekmetric, we’ve been busy creating the most requested feature by users: true two-way texting. We’re excited to announce that this November, you and your guests will be able to communicate with each other in a seamless, hassle-free way.
Send and Receive Texts Directly in Tekmetric
Once your shop sets up two-way texting within Tekmetric, your team and customers will be able to have instant, harmonious digital conversations.
On your end, the Tekmessage interface will have a similar look and feel to social media messaging services (such as Facebook Messenger).
Your customers, however, will see the conversations as regular text messages on their phones.
To use Tekmessage, simply click the messaging icon in the top right corner of your shop’s header within Tekmetric. Doing so will open the Tekmessage sidebar, where you’ll be able to see a full list of conversations with guests, send and receive texts, and search conversations.
Cars are expensive, complicated machinery that most of us happen to rely on every day. And while we've probably spent a larger portion of our lives driving than we want to realize, the inner workings of their vehicle remain unintuitive to most of us.
That's exactly why your shop exists! To help your customers take care of the costly, sometimes difficult repairs so they can get back to their lives, whether that’s bringing the kids to soccer practice or getting to work on time!
Independent auto repair shops can overcome that skepticism from customers. After all, anything is possible with the right tools for the job. When that comes to customer service, independent auto repair shops can start using those tools with a modern shop-management system.
One that makes the often painful, expensive process, of getting their car fixed as simple, easy, and painless as possible.
More specifically, with Tekmetric, shops can show customers what's wrong with Digital Vehicle Inspections, and even help them cover the unexpected cost of a necessary repair with checkout options like Buy Now, Pay Later.
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