Across the auto repair and tire industry, hiring has become a pervasive concern. With the skilled labor shortage, shop owners and existing employees are often left trying to do the job of more than one person. There are no easy answers to the problem, but one solution is to look for ways of increasing efficiencies in the shop, freeing up time so that you and your employees can focus more on customers and less on busy work. There are three places to take a hard look at in order to determine if you might be able to create time savings:
- Scheduling. When a customer wants to schedule an appointment at your shop, how much time does it take to make the appointment? Are you making most of these appointments over the phone? Let’s say that you spend four minutes on the phone scheduling that customer. A faster solution would be to allow customers to book appointments on your website. An added bonus is that customers consider this a convenient feature and are able to take action during off-hours. Just be sure you’re using a solution that features two way syncing so that you never double-book your bay and have to waste time dealing with that. Potential time savings: 4 minutes per customer.
- Work Order Creation. Here’s the typical process: in order to create a work order, you begin by manually entering in the customer’s information and then searching for the tires your customer needs. You’ve got 15 to 20 tabs open as you toggle among different distributors searching for whoever has the tires in stock and at what price. All in all, the process of completing a work order can take around 10 minutes. But what if you could search for the tires across multiple suppliers without leaving your POS system? As long as that software maintains a fast data feed, this should save you quite a bit of time. Likewise, if you’re able to add the appropriate tires to the work order in one click, and the customer information just automatically pulls over from your CRM, that’s even more efficient. Potential time savings: 8 minutes.
- Invoicing and Checking Out. Does this sound familiar to you? It’s past 5pm and you’ve got a line of customers waiting to pay for their tires or repairs. You’ve got one terminal you’re trying to process everything on, and a group of customers who are anxious about the cost of their completed repairs. At best, you’re probably spending around six minutes checking someone out in this situation. A better option would be to migrate over to more modern and sophisticated payment tools. Text or email your customer the invoice ahead of time, so they can pay before they even pick up their car. Allow customers to pay via Google or Apple pay. Use a system that pays you upfront, but accepts payment plans from customers. Put a “buy now” button on your website so that customers can purchase tires and check themselves out. Potential time savings: 4 minutes
In total, if you add up all these time saving approaches, you should be able to save about 16 minutes per customer. It doesn’t take much math to see how that could add up; for shops with 30 customers per day, that’s a time savings of 8 hours in a day - the equivalent of a full-time employee!
This holiday season, take a hard look at the software you’re using and see if you need to upgrade to something faster and easier. You should expect your software to increase your shop’s efficiency and make your life (and the lives of your employees and customers) better. It shouldn’t be slow and clunky. It shouldn’t take weeks to figure out how to use it. And you shouldn’t have to piece together your shop operations using five different software tools. Is an all-in-one solution the gift you need in 2025? It might be.
.png)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)