Multi-Point Inspections: Your Shop’s Storytelling Tool
Multi-Point Inspections: Your Shop’s Storytelling Tool
Think of the multi-point inspection feature of Mobile ManagerPro as your gateway to an illustrative story detailing your customer’s overall vehicle condition.
Just like a good book, every story needs a beginning, a conflict and a resolution. Vehicle inspections are no different. To craft and share a thorough story, technicians must first check the vehicle’s main systems, identify any problems and offer solutions.
This process is made even easier with Mobile ManagerPro’s digital multi-point inspections, which are fully customizable in the Report Pro automotive software solution included in ProPack. Both ManagerPro and ProPack are add-on solutions that integrate with the Manager SE shop management system.
Color-coded inspections provide sections for technician notes and recommendations. The notes section is really the go-to place for mentioning problems and the recommendations area is the place to offer vehicle fixes.
Vague notes with codes that make no sense to customers, or the inclusion of unspecific problems and either no recommendations, or unclear service recommendations will most likely result in customers closing the book on what could be much-needed repairs. Failing to build the plot of your story, i.e. illustrating why repairs are needed to properly maintain a vehicle, lessens the likelihood that the customer will read to the end and further reduces the probability that they will authorize repairs.
With tablet-powered Mobile ManagerPro, vagueness can go in the direction of pencil-and-paper multi-point inspection sheets — into thin air. The digitally completed forms describe the condition of everything from brakes to suspension, alignment, tires and more, using easy-to-understand color coding. Green means good, yellow is for instances where repairs may be needed soon and red is for issues warranting a fix now.
In terms of visualizing the necessity of recommended services, the best auto repair shop storytellers take multiple photos of the customers’ vehicle conditions to further illustrate the metal-to-metal brakes, fluid leaks, or bulging tires and how any of these or other service scenarios can be remedied. Best practices suggest that technicians should take between five and seven photos during every inspection.
The application empowers technicians to text the photos, along with completed digital inspections, to customers.
While for the most part people would rather text than talk these days, it’s important for customers to have all the pertinent vehicle-related information literally at their fingertips. Not every customer will take the time to phone a shop for more details after thumbing through an incomplete or unclear inspection form.
Research has shown that technicians overwhelmingly complete the notes and recommendations fields only when the field in question receives a red rating, warranting immediate action. This approach does not capture the vehicle’s entire story and gives the impression that the shop sends only bad news.
We suggest making every effort to be consistent in sharing customers’ vehicle stories: the good, the bad and the ugly.
For more tips on getting the most from Mobile ManagerPro, check out the handy How-to Guide here.