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The list of service advisor responsibilities can seem endless. You might find yourself being pulled in many directions at once. You have to be there for customers, technicians, the shop owner, and even other service advisors. But it’s important to remember that you’re not alone.

Traditionally, there are four pillars to an auto repair shop that all support one another: the shop owner, technicians, customers, and service advisors. The integrity of the shop depends on each of these pillars in different ways. The shop owner needs to make the right calls and put the right systems in place for technicians and service advisors to do their jobs. Technicians must stay focused on their repairs and be diligent to catch all vehicle issues. And loyal customers keep the lights on.

As a service advisor, you’re uniquely positioned to support the other three pillars of the shop. By working with technicians, you can help customers better understand what needs to be repaired and why. By working directly with customers, you can gain a deeper understanding of what the shop does right and what the shop can do better. With a clear perspective of all facets of the shop, you’re one of the best people to advise the shop owner on ways to transform their business.

Whether you’re just getting started with your career or you’ve been a service advisor for a while now, the good news is that this is a career path that encourages ongoing learning and development. Being intentional about how you support the other three pillars of the shop—and remembering how they support you—can help you achieve balance and improve the quality of your job.

Expanding your business into multiple locations is exciting but can come with challenges. One of these challenges being, the ability to manage data and reports across all of your shops.

To simplify this process, Tekmetric has developed Multi-Shop, our most powerful set of tools and reports to easily manage multiple shops through custom shop comparison reporting, organization-level reports and centralized data management.

Multi-Shop allows you to gain back time, make better business decisions and maximize your margins. 

“Receipts.” We all know the literal meaning of this term—those pieces of paper or emails/texts a retailer sends you as proof of purchase, in case you want to exchange or return an item down the road.

In a casual sense, “receipts” also mean “proof” in the event of a dispute. For example, if your dog could talk and claimed he definitely did not steal the pizza from the picnic table, you could show him “receipts,” which could be a photo your astonished friend snapped of him while he was dragging the pizza away. Busted!

Ok, but in all seriousness, as a business owner, you interact with receipts in two ways:

1. You give receipts to your customers once their repair work is finished
2. You get receipts when you purchase items for your shop (like parts)
   

Even though receipts exist in practically every industry, there’s a huge difference between the receipts customers get from an auto repair shop versus the receipts they’d get from a restaurant or clothing store.

Look at it this way: you don’t go to a restaurant and get an estimate for how much your food will cost. You see the prices on the menu, order, and then pay at the end. But in the auto repair world, we have to scope out the work with an inspection and estimate. That’s where the shop and the customer come to an understanding of the repair work that will occur, and get a preview of the cost, before any work gets done.

Without a solid inspection and estimate process, there can be a higher risk of misunderstandings and miscommunications, which can diminish customer loyalty and lead to credit card chargebacks. For example, a customer could misunderstand the severity of the need for a repair and decline it when they get their estimate, and leave a negative online review that their car still has issues. Or, a customer could say they don’t want a particular repair, but a service advisor misunderstands them. The repair happens, and the customer is upset when they get the final bill because they’d communicated that they didn’t want the repair.

That’s why estimates and receipts are extra important in our industry—they protect shops and customers. They give your customers peace of mind; they have a record of what repair work they got done on which day, and how much they paid. And in the event of a customer claiming a certain repair didn’t happen on a particular day, you could pull up your copy of the estimate and the receipt and set the record straight. You won’t have to deal with a frustrating back-and-forth process that can stretch out for days.

But beyond literal receipts, there are other elements of safeguarding your business. After all, protecting your business isn’t just about protecting it from financial and legal standpoints, although those are two important areas. You also have to think about things like your team’s productivity, employee management, healthy margins, and more. Auto shop management software is a great core tool that can help you safeguard your shop from multiple angles.