Running an auto repair shop is not easy, as there are many things to keep track of; from customer service, to scheduling appointments, to managing your repair jobs and inventory — it only gets harder as your business grows! To help with scaling your shop’s business, here are three quick tips to improve your store.
Tip #1 – Scheduling and Communication
It’s important to have a scheduling system in place for your auto shop. Not only does this keep your shop organized, but punctuality also improves the customer experience, and provides a sense of professionalism. Thanks to technology, it’s much easier to automate appointments using free tools like Calendly or Google Calendar.
To take it a step further, these tools also help automate appointment reminders for your customers; you can set your appointments to automatically remind your customers a day before their scheduled repair.
Tip #2 – Ditch Paper!
Many auto shops and businesses still use a manual filing system to manage their customer information, and although this works well (and free) for small business volumes, you will eventually want to upgrade to an electronic filing system.
As your business grows, and you have multiple customers coming in every hour, the time spent looking through your filing cabinets for your customer’s information, or the time spent filling out registration forms for new customers, will slowly add up.
This time is costly, especially for medium to large businesses, and it also sacrifices the customer experience — nobody wants to wait around for administrative stuff in this day and age!
With an electronic filing system, you can quickly look up your customers’ file, which may include details on their vehicle, service schedule, and more. If you’re a small business and want to take advantage of an electronic customer filing system, check out this list of free CRM software.
Suddenly all of your customer’s information, invoices, appointments, and everything else, is gone! How would that affect your business?
Tip #3 – Management solutions
As your business grows and more customers come to you for repairs, keeping track of the work done between departments gets difficult. Your administration is responsible for scheduling, appointments, and customer service, whereas your repair team is responsible for inspections and repairs; you’ll also need someone to keep track of inventory and sales. As you can imagine, there is little transparency between departments and this can lead to issues as your business grows.
What’s more, is that for smaller shops you often have a few people managing all of these daily tasks! Thankfully, small to medium shop owners can streamline their workflow with the help of technology. Auto repair management software are services that help improve your day-to-day tasks, by organizing all of your shop’s information in a single place. Our tool, AutoSoftWay, helps you oversee your sales, repair jobs, staff, customers, their vehicles, inventory, and generating invoices and estimates, all from one place — and you can start for free!
In summary
When it comes to scaling your business, technology is a lifesaver. As we can see, not only can we use free software to streamline appointments and reminders, but they also help with customer relations, reducing paperwork, and managing your business!
With our free platform, you can also manage your appointments and set up email and SMS appointment reminders, all from one place!