My garage has been around for 14 years, we’ve got so many loyal regular customers that we’ve never really had any issues. We don’t do much advertising or marketing; the majority of our business comes from repeat customers or through word of mouth. But I wasn’t satisfied, I wanted to take the company further and stared to ask myself what would happen if these loyal customers suddenly disappeared? We would be out of business because we wouldn’t have any work coming in.
So, I started looking at how I could improve the company and I kept on hearing about Tekmetricauto shop software. What I do know is that a lot of the big garages use some sort of software to streamline their business, and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is part of the reason for their success. So, I contacted Tekmetric who gave me loads of information, when I asked how much it was going to cost, I was told nothing! The software was free for the rest of 2018, I took them up on the offer straight away, I’ve been using the software for four months and I’m super impressed, here’s why.
Better Appointment Scheduling
I thought I had it all figured out until I started using the auto shop software. We used the old-fashioned system of diary and pen to book our appointments. If the customer booked instore they would get a little card with the time and date on it. Three days before the appointment we would give them a curtesy call as a reminder, we were either told they couldn’t make it, to rebook, or that they would be there. Very rarely did we have a no-show.
The auto shop software provides you with an open calendar where you can see what slots are available. Once you’ve grabbed the slot, if it’s a new customer you have to enter their details, but if it’s an existing customer the system will automatically enter their details. Another excellent feature is that it will immediately send the date and time of the appointment to the customer, and automatically send a reminder a few days before.
This system has shaved hours off our weeks! Not only is it much quicker to book appointments we’ve also saved money on our phone bill because we are not making so many calls to customers.
Stock Reminders
We’ve got a good system going when it comes to our stock, we always make sure that we never run out. But the auto shop software has superseded our expectations, the system is synched with the cash register, so each time an item is sold, it’s logged. When we are running low on a product, it will automatically send us a reminder so that we can immediately make an order. The days of manual stock counts are over.
There are so many excellent features to this software, I wish I could tell you about all of them. Apart from streamlining all our business processes, what it’s done is given me the time to focus on making my dream of expanding the garage a reality.
