Your Shop's Guide to Digital Vehicle Inspections

What is a Digital Vehicle Inspection?

A digital vehicle inspection is an inspection method for auto shops built directly into a shop management system.

Like your usual inspections, DVIs are performed by technicians on every vehicle to identify repair work usually with a tablet or phone, to record the results.

How Does a Digital Vehicle Inspection Work?

Because digital vehicle inspections are just one feature of cloud-based shop management systems, they work as a single step in your shop's workflow.

When they're assigned a repair job, technicians carry out their digital vehicle inspection right in the app, and they can even take pictures or videos to quickly attach their findings to that repair order estimate.

That estimate can then be sent directly to customers for approval through text message or email, and all of this information will be tracked by your shop management system.

The 3 Biggest Benefits of Digital Vehicle Inspections

We'll cut to the chase: digital vehicle inspections can make your shop more money. With DVIs, customers will know what's going on, they'll be more likely to approve repair orders, and you'll see your shop's average repair order skyrocket.

1. Save Time

Once the technician completes an inspection, they can send it to the service advisor to share with the customer and build a repair order. Shops can setup a default inspection, attach canned jobs, and get repairs approved in minutes. This frees them up to focus more on the customer directly, and maybe even start looking into their history with the shop and provide a personalized experience.

2. Sell More Repair Work with Transparency

It's not easy to get repair orders approved simply because it’s challenging to show customers what’s going on with their vehicles. Typically your customers don't know how cars work, and they're far too familiar with horror stories of family members or friends feeling ripped off.

This industry relies on trust: when customers can trust that your shop is doing right by them, they're be more accepting of the necessary costs, which usually results in customers approving larger repair orders.

Because technicians can include pictures, videos and even other files like repair manuals, customers can see exactly what's wrong. And when they can see what's wrong, they know why something needs to be fixed or replaced. They can trust your shop is doing necessary work.

3. Track Declined Jobs

Shop management systems with built in DVIs also provide more visibility into what’s approved and what’s declined without the service advisor having to re-enter any information.

Any job that the customer declines from the estimate (which is built from the DVI) will be sent to the “declined jobs” list on the customer’s profile. Being able to track declined jobs enables your shop to keep in touch with customers, which builds customer loyalty and even gives you an opportunity to pick up more business when times are slow.

Common Digital Vehicle Inspection Features

Thanks to tablets and smartphones, technicians can take advantage of touch screens and cameras to build out comprehensive digital vehicle inspections faster than they ever could with a pen and clipboard, while minimizing mistakes and making your shop more money.

1. Include Images, Videos or other files
   Go beyond just a simple checklist and enable techs to include pictures, videos, pdfs with diagnostic results, or even links add links to web sites with relevant info.
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2. Leverage Canned Jobs
   Add canned jobs to inspections to quickly build out repair orders for common work. Spend less time on each individual RO and quickly add in parts like BG products.
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3. Share through email or text
   Send your digital inspections right to your customers email or even text them a link so they can quickly view what's wrong and approve any work that needs to be done.

How to use a Digital Vehicle Inspection

Tekmetric makes it extremely easy to create digital vehicle inspections that are well-organized and simple for technicians to follow. Your shop can create as many different inspections as you need.

If your shop offers body work, repair work, and transmission work, you may want to create three different inspections that focus on the type of repair work specific types of customers come in for. You can set a default inspection to automatically

Tekmetric also lets you organize inspections by “groups,” which helps guide technicians through checking different areas of the vehicles. Groups can also represent different types of maintenance.

For example, your shop can create an inspection group for “scheduled maintenance” to remind technicians to check the odometer and recommend maintenance at different mile marks (3,000 mile service; 5,000 mile service; 6,000 mile service; etc.)

When you create a digital vehicle inspection in Tekmetric, you can also tie different inspection tasks to canned jobs, which makes it easier than ever for the service advisors to build an estimate and recommend work tied to the technician's findings.