Drivers typically come in with an expectation of what's wrong with their car, which can make it tricky to sell maintenance work. They might think you're trying to squeeze more money out of them, or may simply have a set budget in their mind and don’t plan on spending extra.
In reality, you're simply trying to go above and beyond and provide them with the best service possible. So how do youshow that, and which tools will help you transform the way you sell maintenance?
Here’s how to build customer trust while staying true to your auto repair shop’s mission of providing optimal maintenance recommendations.
Why Selling Maintenance Work is a Challenge
According to a survey conducted by AAA, 76% of U.S. drivers said that recommending unnecessary services was the top reason they do not trust auto repair shops.
The survey also points out that ⅔ of U.S. drivers have managed to find an auto repair shop that they trust. That makes it harder for your shop to convince them to pay for an expensive yet critical repair, let alone get them to pay extra to replace filters, change oil, and refresh fluids.
Service advisors may be hesitant to sell maintenance work and only focus on the problem at hand because they don’t want to come off as pushy. And that's for good reason, as we know most customers don't view auto repair shops as a helpful service, but sometimes a pit of endless expenses.
We're here to help break that cycle, and help your shop sell even more maintenance work just by focusing on the customer experience.
Why Improving Your Shop's Customer Service Can Go a Long Way
Regular maintenance makes your customers’ lives easier and saves them money in the long run. It prevents your customers from ending up on the side of the road and prolongs their vehicles’ lifespans. But more importantly, maintenance work can be an easy win for your shop to provide a modern customer experience, with exceptional customer service.
Because digital vehicle inspections make it easy to show customers what's wrong with their car, customers will trust you more. When you provide reliable insights into your customers’ vehicles, you’re their go-to car whisperer—a trustworthy person who reminds them to check stuff out on their vehicle before anything bad happens.
Providing maintenance inspections helps shops sell more work, which usually means higher ROs and a more profitable repair shop. Also, because maintenance work helps your customers’ vehicles last longer, they’re less likely to buy a new car and instead keep bringing their current car back to your shop.
Maintenance inspections help you queue up more work for the future. Even if they decline the maintenance work, you now have a relationship. You can track those declined jobs, and the service advisor and technician can save time figuring out what all might be wrong with the vehicle and resell that work.
Modern Shop Management System Features Help Sell More Work
Of course its standard practice for shops to always check and note the mileage of vehicles both as they roll into the shop and when they roll out. And we recommend your shop keeps that up.
But we're here to help make great shops even better. Independent auto repair shops can leverage features like default inspections and canned jobs to create a standardized intake process for all vehicles that roll into their shop.
With default inspections, shops can build inspection templates to cover standardized checkpoints, which can include maintenance items based on the life or mileage of the vehicle.
For example, if the car rolls in at 62k miles, and your shop checks coolant levels at every 20k miles, your technician might recommend a coolant flush and replacement. If the work is approved approved, that canned jobs for a coolant flush can be quickly added to the repair order.
Pro-tip: be sure to include a picture of how dirty the coolant is so customers can see why it should be replaced!
Improve your Shop's Customer Service with a Standardized Process
Now, different shops servicing different vehicles may have different standardized maintenance timelines. We've seen shops create a standardized template for maintenance work based on mileage that usually includes:
Every 3,000 - 7,000 Miles
- Replace oil and oil filters, inspect various fluid levels and wipers, check tires and lights
Every 15,000 miles
- Replace air filter
Every 20,000 miles
- Inspect battery and coolant levels
Every 30,000 miles
- Replace power steering fluid, inspect coolant levels, brake pads, and suspension components, check radiator hoses and HVAC system
Every 35,000 miles
- Inspect and replace the battery
Every 40,000 miles
- Replace spark plugs and wires, inspect ignition system and suspension
Every 60,000 Miles
- Replace brake pads and fluid, inspect radiator hoses, timing belt, HVAC system, suspension components, and tires, check coolant levels, and power steering fluid levels
Auto Repair Shops Can Sell More Starts with the Best Customer Service
Selling maintenance work can be challenging due to customers’ skepticism and reluctance to spend extra money. Selling even critical repair work is hard when people don't trust auto repair shops because of bad experiences, or horror stories.
Cars are expensive, complicated, noisy, and unintuitive to most people who drive them, the exact opposite of everything consumers look for in their products and solutions.
But that's exactly why your shop exists! To help them 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!
That's why it's so critical for auto repair shops to focus on customer service, and offering customers an experience they can trust with a transparent inspection and sales process. One that makes the often painful, expensive process of getting their car fixed as simple, easy, and painless as possible.
A customer trusts your shop. They've been coming for years. They know the waiting room. They trust the advisor who always explains things clearly. They never worry about the estimate.
Then they move across town, stop into your newest location, and it is a different experience altogether. The inspection isn't the same. There are pricing discrepancies among shops. And, perhaps worst of all, an advisor might have no idea they're dealing with a loyal customer.
That's the hidden cost of growth. Every location that is added is another chance for the customer experience to shift, and customers notice changes fast. For multi-shop operators, a consistent customer experience isn't a branding nicety. It's the thing that lets a customer trust the name on the building instead of the people inside it.
Consistency for customers: A consistent customer experience across locations means every shop delivers the same inspection process, pricing logic, communication, and recognition of a returning customer, regardless of which location they visit. It's achieved by standardizing workflows and centralizing customer data on one platform, rather than relying on each location to run things its own way.
Why consistency gets harder with every location you add
At one shop, consistency is almost automatic. You set the tone, you know the regulars, and your team absorbs your standards by working next to you. None of that scales. At three or five or 10 locations, the owner can't be everywhere, tribal knowledge doesn't transfer, and each shop starts developing its own way of doing things.
The drift is rarely dramatic. It's a technician at one location skipping a courtesy inspection step. It's one advisor quoting brakes $40 higher than another. It's a returning customer being treated like a stranger because their history lives at a different store. Individually small. Collectively, they add up to customers who can't predict what they'll get, and unpredictability is the opposite of trust.
The four places customer experience breaks first
When experience drifts across locations, it almost always starts in the same four places. Fix these and you've fixed most of the problem.
1. The inspection
The digital vehicle inspection (DVI) is where customers form their opinion of your shop. It's the moment they see what's wrong with photos and video instead of taking your word for it. If one location runs a thorough inspection with images and another does a quick once-over, customers get two completely different impressions of how careful your brand is. Standardizing the inspection is the single highest-leverage consistency move a multi-shop operator (MSO) can make. See how a strong DVI strategy drives approvals and trust.
2. Pricing and the menu of jobs
Nothing erodes trust faster than a customer discovering the same repair costs more at one of your locations than another. When labor rates, parts pricing, and common ("canned") jobs are set independently at each shop, that gap is inevitable. Consistent pricing logic across locations keeps a customer from feeling penalized for walking into the wrong door.
3. Customer history and recognition
Customers expect the businesses they frequent to remember them. Every major retailer can see what you bought and where, no matter which store you walk into. Auto repair customers have the same expectation now. If a loyal customer's records are trapped at the location where they were created, your newest shop can't see the declined brake job from last spring or the maintenance that's now due. Shared history is what lets any location pick up the relationship where the last one left off. Learn how Shared Customer History works.
4. Communication
How you reach customers, texts for approvals, inspection links, status updates, sets the tone for the whole visit. If one location texts photos and estimates within minutes and another still calls and describes problems over the phone, customers experience two different service standards under one brand. Consistent communication templates and channels keep the voice of your business the same everywhere.
How multi-shop software makes consistency the default
Here's the shift: consistency shouldn't depend on every location choosing to do the right thing. It should be built into the system they all work in. That's what a true multi-shop platform does. It turns your standards into settings, so the right way is simply the way the software works.
With Tekmetric Multi-Shop, operators standardize DVIs, canned jobs, pricing, and discounts across every location from one place, so a repair order opened at any shop starts from the same playbook.
Shared Customer History connects customers across shops, so any location can view a customer's full history, declined jobs, past service, contact info, without re-entering it or treating them like a first-timer.
And because everything runs on one login with a portfolio-wide dashboard, owners see how each location is actually performing in real time, not just revenue, but the operational habits that shape the customer experience. When a location starts to drift, you can see it and coach it before customers feel it.
Why it matters: Standardization isn't about making every shop identical for its own sake. It's about making a promise to customers, the same care, the same clarity, the same recognition, that holds no matter which of your locations they choose. That promise is what turns multiple shops into one trusted brand.
What it looks like when it works
Leroy Ingram, who runs Ooroo Auto Care, put the visibility side of it plainly:
"Now I can look at everybody at a glance. I can be in a different state, different city and know exactly what's going on in each location all the time. That's not something I had before." — Leroy Ingram, Ooroo Auto Care
That's the operational backbone of consistency: when an owner can see every location clearly, standards stop being a hope and start being something you can actually manage.
Where to start
You don't have to fix everything at once. If you're feeling the drift, start with the highest-impact standard and work down.
Standardize your inspection first. Set one default DVI template so every vehicle at every location gets the same thorough treatment.
Align pricing and canned jobs so the same repair costs the same across shops.
Connect customer history so any location can recognize and serve a returning customer.
Standardize communication so approvals, estimates, and updates feel the same everywhere.
Do those four things and you'll close most of the customer experience gaps between your best location and your newest one.
As much we like to think we’ve always been at the top, no one is born a boss. Before you became an auto repair shop owner, you probably held other positions and had someone else bossing you around. Think back to those bosses, and how you felt about those jobs.
You may have had some bosses who you didn’t like. Their leadership style might have been too aggressive, or maybe they didn’t take the time to show you the ropes.
But hopefully, you had at least one boss who helped you get to where you are today. Typically, good bosses:
Strongly support your career growth by encouraging you to gain new skills
Understand when you have to take some time off or shift your work hours
Trust you to get the job done instead of micromanaging you
Show you they value your contributions to the team
Effectively communicate instructions and priorities to you
If you had a supportive boss who championed you at work, you probably went above and beyond—you knew they valued your work. Your former boss’s great leadership qualities probably set an example for you, influencing how you run your own shop today.
We’re willing to bet you’re already an excellent leader, running your own shop in a way that inspires your team, just like how your previous bosses might have inspired you. But, just like you expect your employees to grow in their roles, your employees expect you to continue growing as a leader.
By fine-tuning your leadership skills, you can bring the absolute best out of yourself and your team.
Your shop’s ability to grow, make a profit, and succeed hinges on clear and accurate invoicing.
If you’re still using pen and paper for your invoice software, you probably spend a lot of time reconciling records at the end of the day and may even have to stay late to put your books in order.
Paper means lots of copies, transposition of information, and a high probability of making mistakes. The same holds true if you’re using multiple software programs to juggle records at your shop to put together information for invoices. If you aren’t using a single, comprehensive system, there’s a good chance details will be incorrectly copied or left out.
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