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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
March 20, 2024
Drivers can sometimes see repairs as frivolous or not important.
Reasons for their skepticism can stem from many things: the customer can’t see what the service advisor is seeing on their end; they might not have a way to gauge the importance of the issue at hand; maybe a service advisor doesn’t communicate the problem correctly or forgets to ask the customer if they’re following along.
Tekmetric’s features empower auto repair shops to improve customer transparency, streamline communication, provide flexible payment options, and simplify the payment process.
These promote customer trust, enhance satisfaction, and ultimately help your shop close more repair orders. And that's what matters most.
Because at the end of the day, if customers feel they can trust your shop, they'll be more likely to return the next time they need something repaired.
Shop Management
Thought Leadership
August 20, 2024
The truth is that estimates tie into professionalism. When the first oral surgeon gave you an estimate for your wisdom tooth removal surgery, they helped you:
Wisdom tooth removal surgery isn’t cheap. Neither is auto repair work.
Just like a professional oral surgeon’s office explains to patients what their options are and how much they should expect to pay for procedures, a professional auto repair shop shows drivers what their repair work options are and how much they should expect to pay for repairs.
That professionalism is what helps you win over and retain more customers. If your customers are deciding between different auto repair shops, they’ll likely stick with the business that shows the most professionalism.
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