How Tekmetric’s Digital Vehicle Inspection Report Can Widen Your Auto Repair Shop Profit Margin

Get a more complete view of how your team can use a digital vehicle inspection report to drive higher ROI.

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“One of the main ways we have been able to earn the trust of our customers is through the digital vehicle inspection. With every digital vehicle inspection, we will always send pictures along with it. Why? Because you can’t lie through pictures. They know exactly what’s happening…‍

‍If the digital vehicle inspection becomes more standardized in the auto repair industry, there will be a lot more trust.”

- Mark Darragh, Owner of Sphere Motorsports

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‍I had a five-year-loyal customer that had never bought anything but oil changes with us. For five years, we’d tell him he had a bad oil leak. Fast forward to using DVIs for the first time, I asked him if he would be the guinea pig for our new DVI system through Tekmetric.

Once we did the full inspection on his vehicle—with all of the pictures, findings, and pricings—we sent it to him via text message. He was sitting on the couch, and he's reading it. He looked up at me and goes, "Wow. Do it all!"

- Mike Collins, Collins Auto Care

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The digital vehicle inspection (DVI) has transformed the customer experience for auto repair shops. Thanks to DVIs, shops can send a point-by-point inspection report complete with pictures and videos of the technician’s findings right to customers’ phones or other devices. Service advisors still discuss findings with customers, but now, the customer has gotten to read any notes made by the technician, examine any possible repair work with their own eyes, and see all repairs color-coded using a simple red-yellow-green system to better understand immediate repair needs versus those that can wait until later. 

Even if a customer isn’t car-savvy, a DVI gives the technician and service advisor a visual aide they can then use to more effectively explain what repairs are needed, and the impact that those repairs might have on the customer’s vehicle and finances. Customers can quickly check off which repairs they want to proceed with, and which repairs they want to hold off on for the time being. 

DVIs yield several immediate and important benefits for your shop. They help you build trust with your customers, adapt to the busy schedules of people who bring their cars in, sell more work, and enhance the efficiency of your shop. Every day, more and more shops are using DVIs to explain repairs and get authorizations, making them a new auto repair shop industry standard.

Now that DVIs are becoming an industry standard, the next step is for shops to examine how they can maximize DVIs to drive the best possible ROI. When performed properly and consistently, digital vehicle inspections always lead to a return on investment. If your shop isn’t getting ROI from your DVIs, it doesn’t mean you should stop running them. It just means that you may need to adjust your approach. 

Digital Vehicle Inspection Reporting: Getting Even More Out of Your DVIs

To get the most of your digital vehicle inspections, you need to be able to track and measure their impact on key metrics, such as Average Repair Order (ARO) and Close Ratio, so that you know how your DVIs are performing in the first place. 

An advanced digital vehicle inspection report that’s embedded into your shop management system gives you a complete overview of your shop’s metrics. It shows you how your shop’s approach either enhances or undermines the performance of your DVIs.

Key Digital Vehicle Inspection Report Capabilities

Your digital vehicle inspection report should track key metrics that measure the quality of your inspections, and key metrics that measure the impact that your digital vehicle inspections are making on your business performance.

Key DVI reporting metrics that measure the quality of your inspections include:

• Total number of digital vehicle inspections performed
• Total number of digital vehicle inspections completed 
• Overall digital vehicle inspection completion rate
• Average amount of time spent on each digital vehicle inspection
• Percentage of digital vehicle inspections that were sent to customers
• Percentage of digital vehicle inspections opened by customers
• Average number of picture, video, and other file attachments sent per digital vehicle inspection
• Average number of findings per inspection

Key DVI reporting metrics that measure your business performance include:

• Total number of repair orders (ROs)
• Number of ROs with a digital vehicle inspection
• ARO on repair orders with a digital vehicle inspection
• ARO on repair orders without a digital vehicle inspection
• Close Ratio on repair orders with a digital vehicle inspection
• Close Ratio on repair orders without a digital vehicle inspection
• ARO graphed out by number of attachments per digital vehicle inspection
• Close Ratio graphed out by number of attachments per digital vehicle inspection

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Your digital vehicle inspection report should be able to display these metrics for not only your shop(s) as a whole, but also for individual technicians and service writers, providing a macro view of your inspection quality and business performance as well as the individual impact of each member of your team.

Advantages of Digital Vehicle Inspection Reporting

Digital vehicle inspection reporting makes the most out of DVIs—one of your shop’s most efficient and effective methods of connecting with your customers and doing higher quality work. When you can measure the impact of your DVIs, you can make improvements that lead to tangible increases in your auto repair shop profit margin.

Advanced reporting features lead to several new strategic possibilities that can pay off later: more targeted training for your staff, a better experience for your customers, and more time for shop owners and other shop leaders.

Improve Team Performance

Digital vehicle inspection reports are a window into team performance, showing you what each technician and service advisor is doing well and what they could be doing better.

For instance, you might see that some technicians have a higher inspection completion rate than others, or that not all DVIs are being sent to customers. Truthfully, your shop’s inspection completion rate and your percentage of DVIs sent to customers should both be 100%. Unless there are rare, extenuating circumstances, there is no reason to start a digital vehicle inspection but not complete it, or to complete a digital vehicle inspection but not send it to the customer.

Digital vehicle inspection reports let you pull up the individual rates for service advisors and technicians to see who might be below 100%. If you see that DVIs are either not being completed or not being sent, that’s your cue to step in, coach, and find ways to help your team improve. You could gently remind your team members to make sure they send each inspection to the customer. Or, you can examine ways to build reminders into your shop’s process so that team members are more likely to remember to send DVIs to customers. Achieving a perfect DVI send rate can lead to a huge increase in your ARO. If running off a few flyers reminding people to send DVIs to customers and posting them in key locations around your shop(s) gets you to a 100% send rate, that’s well worth the investment. 

A digital vehicle inspection report also shows you both the average number of findings per inspection and time per inspection for your shop(s), and the average number of findings per inspection and time spent per inspection. If a particular technician is taking longer than average completing DVIs, but averages a lower number of findings per inspection, you might be able to coach them on how to increase efficiency while also performing more thorough inspections. On the other hand, if one of your technicians is averaging less findings per inspection than other technicians, but also averages a lower number of findings per inspection than other technicians, there is a chance that the technician is pencil whipping (moving too hastily through the inspection process). In that case, you can show them how to take their time and improve their results. Of course, the number of findings and time spent per inspection will depend on the specific issues each car has. There’s always a chance the majority of vehicles assigned to a particular technician will have fewer or more issues than the vehicles assigned to other technicians on your team. Nevertheless, a digital vehicle inspection report will give you a starting point to determine what’s going on. 

Enhance the Customer Experience

By attaching photos, videos, and other files to your inspections, your team can show customers exactly what’s going on with their vehicles. However, you should be careful about how much information you are sending to your customers. Too little information and customers will feel left in the dark; too much information and they’ll feel overwhelmed. 

If a car has multiple issues and the technician attaches only one photo, the customer probably won’t get the complete picture of the repair. But if the technician attaches 100 images, the customer will experience information overload. There’s an optimal average number of DVI attachments that’ll lead to the best ARO and Close Ratio for your shop(s). The number of attachments will vary by shop—you might have customers who have a “more the merrier” attitude about photos, videos, and other files, or you might have customers who have a “less is more” mentality.

Digital vehicle inspection reports display a graph that tracks what range of attachments yield the highest ARO and Close Ratio for your shop. A DVI report shows the average number of inspections in increments of five so you can measure how different numbers of attachments lead to different results. For example, you might find that when an inspection has 16-20 attachments, it leads to an ARO that is higher than if the inspection had only 1-5 attachments, 5-10, 10-15, etc. Once you’ve discovered what number of attachments creates the best results, you can make it part of your process to always optimize your inspections by attaching the right number.

To fully maximize performance, be sure to track ARO and Close Ratio by number of attachments over time. You might find that, for various reasons, more attachments yield better results during one business quarter than another. 

Also keep in mind that while an inspection report will give you an idea of the sweet spot for attachments per inspection at your shop, you might still find outliers. Some situations may simply call for fewer or more attachments than what’s suggested by the data. Your  report may show that inspections with 10-15 attachments on average tend to yield a higher ARO and Close Ratio. But if a car comes in and has only one small issue, you may not need 10 photos to show the customer what’s going on. Or, if a car comes in and has multiple issues, you may need to take more than 15 photos to fully show what the issues are. Treat the data as guidance, and follow the rules that work best for you.

Save Time—and Money! 

As a business owner, the more time you save, the more time you can invest back into growing your business, mentoring your team, and creating memories with your friends and family. The more time your team can save, the more time they can focus on other aspects of their jobs that drive ROI for your shop, such as building strong customer relationships, following up on declined jobs, or brainstorming new marketing initiatives.

A built-in digital vehicle inspection report saves time for you and your team because you won’t have to use an extra system or set up clunky, technical workarounds to measure the results of your DVIs. While integrations with third-party tools have their place, built-in DVIs can save time because they cut back on the need to learn separate systems, pay different bills, and deal with two different support teams. 

Built-in DVI reports also make it easier for you to switch between different reports that show you how your shops perform. Tekmetric already offers a suite of real-time reports, including financial reports, employee reports, customer reports, and parts reports that enable shop owners to dive into their metrics across different areas of their business. Tekmetric’s Inspection Report is the latest addition to our existing suite.

Additionally, a built-in digital vehicle inspection report saves you money. You won’t have to pay between $50 to $200 extra per month just to access that capability. 

Make Better Decisions and Widen Your Auto Repair Shop Profit Margin 

When you know your numbers, you can make better training decisions, provide a better customer experience, and more effectively codify various rules and processes into your shop’s workflow. As the latest advancement in tracking metrics for auto repair shops, Tekmetric’s digital vehicle inspection report gives you another perspective on your data so that you can make more strategic business decisions.  

If you’re a Tekmetric user, chances are that you’re already diligently tracking your shop’s various other metrics across multiple reports. You already know how the data can point you in the right direction. By working Tekmetric’s Digital Vehicle Inspection Report into the mix, you can fine-tune your shop even further.