The True Value of an Effective Digital Inspection

The phrase “Lost in Translation” is one that no longer applies to auto repair centers that are masters of the Digital Vehicle Inspection (DVI). In this week’s episode, we are going to show you:

• Why customers prefer buying after receiving a DVI instead of being sold to over the phone
• Metrics and milestones to prove how effective the DVI process can be
• Techniques for staff buy-in because when techs and SAs are in lockstep, almost any goal is insurmountable
• Quick wins for your shop to capture the value of DVI from Day 1

Episode Transcript

*This transcript was generated using Artificial Intelligence. Errors may occur. If you notice an error, please contact [email protected].

Tom Dorsey (00:00:01):
I can’t hold it back much longer. Good morning and good afternoon. Welcome to this week’s edition of The Digital Shop Talk Radio. I’m Tom Dorsey, and of course, as always, I’m joined by my founder and co-host with the most Uwe Kleinschmidt, my co-host in the second chair, Bill Connor. Welcome, gentlemen.
Travis Sallee (00:00:21):
Good morning.
Tom Dorsey (00:00:22):
Say hello. Hello. Welcome.
Travis Sallee (00:00:24):
Better be careful calling us, gentlemen. Yeah,
Tom Dorsey (00:00:26):
Yeah, that’s why I missed your cue and really excited actually to welcome this guy, Travis Sallee from Loren’s Auto Repair in Kalispell, Montana. Welcome, Travis. Thanks for coming on, buddy.
Travis Sallee (00:00:40):
Thanks for having me.
Tom Dorsey (00:00:42):
Yeah, yeah, I’ve been hoping to get you in here for quite some time actually, because more I met you. I usually just get to hang out a little bit with you around conference time and stuff, but you always impressed me, man. Thank you. I’ve always wanted to get you in here because you got really kind of an amazing story, at least from what I hear, right. Is let me ask you this, just how did you come into automotive? Tell us a little bit about yourself and how’d you find yourself running an auto shop? Well,
Travis Sallee (00:01:08):
Growing up I watched my dad busting his knuckles coming home late to dinner, grease under the fingernails, all that stuff. And from the time I was a kid, my mother just drilled it into me, don’t become an automotive technician. And so I listened and I went to school and did other things. I went to school for accounting and worked in information technology, and it was in 2010, my parents were running the shop. Loren is my dad, and he was still in the middle of the recession here. It was kind of tough. My dad was at retirement age and he just wanted some help and we were living in Seattle at the time, living in the city and took our opportunity to come home to where I grew up and help out the family business and get a chance to raise our kids in kind of small town America. So that’s how I ended up in automotive. Never was a technician, but here we are running the shop. So
Tom Dorsey (00:02:10):
No, that’s great. I mean, that’s inspirational, right? It’s go home and help the family business. I mean, it’s a pretty large sacrifice. You had your own thing going on it, I mean, right in the heart of it, right in the Seattle area, and now here you are, but of course now you’re applying that knowledge, that dedication and that commitment, right?
(00:02:30):
I mean, you’re just a success story. So it’s fantastic and I’m really glad to have you on and what we’re talking about today, folks, we’re going to be talking about the value of those digital inspections, how to take that digital inspection from, let’s say, if you wanted to compare it to something, a paper-based checklist to a digital inspection story. U and I were talking a little bit before the show and it’s really, we were thinking about just even the name, right? It’s hard to even want to call a digital inspection an inspection because it gets compared to the way you did stuff before when it was just pick a color and check a box. And so much more than that. We almost wanted rename it a story or a novel, right? Digital inspection story. And so Travis, tell us a little bit about how you approached that in your shop, really taking it from kind of that before it was like, here’s just a piece of paper. You probably didn’t even give it to the customer. It was just some random thing
Travis Sallee (00:03:32):
That No, we gave em to the customer. The paper inspection. Yeah, we did paper inspections for a long time. One of the things my dad did well was he embraced technology and he always wanted to raise the standard within our industry. So he was an early adopter to paper inspections, but with paper inspections, an inspection report couldn’t come out of the shop without greasy fingerprints and being dirty, showing the penmanship of the technician, the misspelled words. They only have a little box that’s very tiny to write in, so they can’t tell stories. And so we would photocopy those and give ’em to customers. But yeah, definitely lack in the presentation and our ability to communicate effectively. There’s no pictures that have accompanied that.
Tom Dorsey (00:04:22):
Yeah, and that’s really how you get it done right, is you got to take that extra time to tell that story and it starts at the technician. And we’re going to be talking about that today. Really our big three takeaways that we want to talk about today are exactly that, is how do you tell that story through the inspection sheet? How do you get that technician and that service advisor to work as that cohesive team? And then how do you give that kind of wow factor to the customer that keeps them loyal, telling their friends and coming back to your business without even thinking about it, without even really comparing you to anybody else? Because why would I? And that’s really the key to that. And so we want to take that, this is the third episode in our 10 part segment in this journey of building those fundamentals.
(00:05:09):
And we really want to help folks that are listening in today get started with those, really starting to tell that story through their digital inspection instead of just using it as a way to record information. Right. Bill Uwe, let’s go ahead and jump right in. If we could, we want to get into a little bit on the how here right out of the gate, because this is pretty in depth topic that we have today, Travis, and if we’d like to work it with you and have you work us through it. Oh, and one other thing I want to say before we get into that is that anybody thank you for registering for all you folks that have registered for the podcast. If you haven’t, go get registered because not only will you get the notifications when the show’s going to start, but we send out the recording so you don’t even have to go hunt for it.
(00:05:57):
So if you don’t have time business first, you got to cut away. You can’t see the whole show and all this knowledge that Travis is about to drop on us, then you can always get that link right in your inbox and watch it when you’re home or whatever time it works best for you. So let’s kick it off, gentlemen, if we could with talking about consistency, I really want to kind of go there from the very beginning is because we put a lot of work into building out our inspection program, or you should be and you should be editing and auditing it kind of constantly. It’s like a living document almost that evolves with your business, with the market, with the customer needs, the vehicle types and all that good stuff. But we still have to apply it consistently each and every time across the board. How do you, Travis in your shop, what’s kind of the important benchmarks for your technicians starting out, getting a consistent and how much input? This is another question I have for you. How much input do they have in creating those inspection documents?
Travis Sallee (00:07:03):
They have a ton of input. They always have. We had a 45 point inspection from, I don’t know where it came from back when my dad created it and it had been edited and that’s what we used as a kind of starting point with the digital inspections. But there’s so much more in the digital inspections with the conditions, the dropdowns, the what do you want the customer to do about this? And that’s where the technicians have been invaluable as far as trying to refine those things. So yeah, since the AutoVitals convention, we have made a ton of changes to our inspection report. We thought it was pretty good. We talked with other shop owners, heard how they were doing it. When we came back, we probably went through half a dozen inspection reports that different shops shared with us and we saw what they were doing, what was working, and we completely revamped our inspection report just since the convention. And so some of those things were easier to put in. But since then in our shop meetings, we’ve been trying to put a little bit of the polish on it and refine some of the finer points and make it more workable. Because when you have a list of dropdowns for a technician, it’s great that they’re there, but if they’re hard to find, they’re in the wrong order, they don’t really tell the story, it’s not a usable tool. And so you got to keep tweaking those so that they’re dialed in.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:08:37):
Is there a specific inspection topic you can illustrate that how you overhold it,
Travis Sallee (00:08:43):
A specific topic? Everything’s been overhauled, but part of it is just making sure that the common things that we’re going to see that they’re listed there because why make the technician go type a custom comment if it’s the same condition, same recommendation every time the headlight is cracked or is holding moisture, what are we going to do about it? Why should they have to retype that every single time and take up their time when it could easily be a selectable dropdown?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:09:16):
So is it fair to assume, I see Bill smiling while you were talking about extending the list of conditions because he has been hammering this since I know him. Is it fair to say that the paper inspection was a checklist as Tom said, and now with the digital, we have so much more opportunity to tell the story and educate the motorist, but we want to avoid that the technician has to invest unreasonably more time and now we are trying to look for ways how to do that. So as you said, it makes no sense to have the technician type it five times a day if it would really fit in a dropdown and all they need to tap, right?
Travis Sallee (00:10:10):
Absolutely. Save that time for when it really matters, and you’ve really got to tell the story in a
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:10:18):
Unit. And so I would like to Bill talk about it, but one thing I would like to add is, Dustin, if you could advance to the next slide because here you see there was a typical tablet-based inspection, paper turn, digital, yellow, red, green done. And what we really want to create is kind of an instruction to the tech and service advisor to create a consistent customer education. And here you see in this picture, we also made a change away from the dropdown because the moment you really do everything and add a lot of conditions, you lose oversight. You have to scroll up and down in the dropdown list. So what we did in the new version, as you are using it now, all the conditions are right there to just tap. And the other thing I would like to point out is I put down there basically the process a technician should go through with every topic.
(00:11:35):
So you select a condition, sometimes you add a measurement, you select a recommended service to fix the condition. You add a node, you take a picture. Ideally you have something as a reference talking about consistency, that the same problem always looks the same. And then you color and move the arrow. Color means yellow when it’s future attention red, when it’s immediate attention green if it’s a good thing, and move the arrow to pointing to the problem. That’s a lot of stuff to do if you do it for consistency on one topic only. And so Dustin, if you could advance, so what we try to do,
Tom Dorsey (00:12:24):
Tony’s asking, will the action be displayed the same way?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:12:28):
Yes, the action will be displayed the same way. We have another slide further down, but no, no, can you go back? So what you now see in gray here will be done automatically in the new system. So if you set up the inspection sheet in a way as it’s allows us to do it now the full configuration, all the tech needs to do is tap the condition, take a picture, and move the arrow. That’s it. Because we are now adding notes out automatically
Tom Dorsey (00:13:13):
And Travis’s point, those notes will be canned. And that doesn’t mean that you can’t personalize ’em, right? And that you can’t add your canned message library. So just don’t have the text do it. Let the text select the canned message. And in the new release, matter of fact, they’ll select a condition and it’ll automatically put the notes. They don’t even have to go in and figure out what notes they want. It’s just there. Once the service writer gets it, now the service writer can go in and just put a cursor in there and edit and say, dear Sam, and personalize it and put in specific make and model type information if necessary once they get it to the counter. So it’s efficiency of effort,
(00:13:58):
Which breeds that consistency that we were talking about because that’s the key to consistency. It has to be easy guys. If it’s not, then you’ll get inconsistency. If it’s as simple as click, tap, tap, tap, almost mindless, Uwe turned me onto this awesome podcast the other day talking about nudging right through the software. And that’s really what we’re really incorporating here is it just kind of bumps you along to the next step. Do this now take the picture, now do this, make it look like this. Here’s what it’s supposed to say. And now the service writer can think of, that’s the rough draft. The technician is the author and he’s out there writing his rough draft. Now you’re sending it to the editor and we’re getting it ready for publishing your novel, your story that you’re telling digitally.
Bill Connor (00:14:46):
So what Travis said is really kind of good because basically if you start from the beginning, you said start with an inspection that’s got good bones, choose that one that’s got solid information in it, and then work with your staff to go ahead and modify it to fit your personality. So again, when I’m building an inspection sheet or when I’m working with somebody, I said, look, if you’re looking at this topic, Mr. Technician, what job would you expect a result? And I get it over on the action side and I’ll ask him to say, well, what condition would cause the customer to open their wallet? And they’ll tell you. And then it’s the service writer’s job to translate that to human and they’re going to put that as the condition. And then the next thing they’re going to do is if they’re working on our new platform, is they’re going to go ahead and put the appropriate notes that would be on the image and in the customer notes. So now they’ve got a fully automated process. So start with good bones and then work with your staff to go ahead and improve the bone structure, so to say.
Tom Dorsey (00:15:42):
Yeah, that’s a great point because think of yourself, you’re almost like a content publisher. We harp about that stuff when it comes to websites and how do you do marketing stuff, but really it’s generating content and that’s really what you’re doing through the digital inspection story is generating content. And then the content needs to be engaging, meaning the customer needs to understand what it is and how to do it and click button here and do this thing. And then they’ll do that and that sets ’em up. That puts the ball right on top of the T, right Travis for you to just swing away. And really it takes it from a sales effort to just, an education effort is setting expectations, it’s going to cost as much. Your car will be ready about this time, this is the expectation that you have. And then it’s just make a plan and get that signature.
Bill Connor (00:16:32):
The beauty of the involvement of the whole staff though is everybody gets something they need. The technician defines the job, which is their build hours. The service writer gets to go ahead and understand what would do that. They translate it into human and then it goes to the customer and the customer benefits because they have all the educational content provided by one place. They don’t have to phone a friend or Google or anything else. So again, as I’ve said before, any good system has something in it for everybody. And for the technicians and service writers, when they work together, they all take ownership of it. It’s their creation. They’ve created their own Frankenstein.
Travis Sallee (00:17:08):
One thing that really helped us, so we made a ton of changes right after the conference, massive changes. And so we ended up having to pay the technicians a little extra for a period of time because every time they got an inspection, it was brand new and they were having to wade through this. And then we landed on what we wanted our standard to be. And I kept asking for input, what do we need to change? What do we need to refine? And I wasn’t getting the input from the technicians. And what I was finding was when they’re doing an inspection, they’re in production mode. So they may think about something, oh, that needs to be reworded, that needs to be changed, but they’re moving on to the next item and then they’re done with the inspection and it’s like they don’t remember what it was.
(00:17:49):
One of the tools that really helped us to refine the finer points was being able to export. I dunno if you can see that, but being able to export the inspection report with all of the conditions, all of the actions, and I ended up printing this out and handing it out at one of our shop meetings because then when they have downtime, they can go and they can flip through this and say, oh, this is a duplicate. This is out of order. This needs to be at the top because this is what I’m selecting 90% of the time. And so they can do it on their own time, they can write notes and then they can hand this to me, or we have Mark who does most of our editing of the inspections. They can hand this and then they can get that put into practice.
(00:18:37):
It makes it so much easier. That’s where I think we made some of our big leaps and bounds was putting the paper version of what’s in the computer in their hands. So this is 30 pages when it’s all printed out, that’s a lot to digest and keep in your head and remember what order was this, and you can make this more workable and flow for the technician, which is going to speed them up. So if you give ’em what they need and want, they’re going to be happier. They’re going to give you better inspections and it’s going to be easier for them.
Bill Connor (00:19:11):
So there’s a kind of simpler method that we use in our shop and that might help others, is that when the technician wanted to go ahead and have a new action added to the inspection seat, we would tell them to put an asterisk in front of it. If they wanted a condition, we’d tell them to put a two asterisk in front of it. And then what we do, if the service riders seen that, they would just go ahead and write down the RO number and we would go ahead and pull that up and use that as a discussion in our meeting. So rather than waiting, it was kind of like just in time learning, when they seen a need, they would have a really good way to do it.
Travis Sallee (00:19:45):
Love it.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:19:46):
I love Travis’s approach.
Travis Sallee (00:19:51):
Although yeah, I know it’s paper. I knew who would that
Bill Connor (00:19:54):
I was
Tom Dorsey (00:19:54):
Allergic to it.
Travis Sallee (00:19:55):
I
Tom Dorsey (00:19:55):
Know get a vaccine before he can even speak about it. But
Travis Sallee (00:19:59):
I wanted to email ’em the PDF, but it’s like
Tom Dorsey (00:20:04):
They
Bill Connor (00:20:04):
Can’t write on it as easy.
Tom Dorsey (00:20:05):
Exactly. But you know what we need to do is we need to tell people because now there’s a whole bunch of light bulbs just went off. And so how do they export that report? If you could just give a little bit of a quick walkthrough and then we’ll throw it up later or post it up in Facebook or something like that. Some step-by-step on how to do it. But if you can just let folks know how to export and print out that report. That’d be
Travis Sallee (00:20:32):
So it’s from my shop. When you get the drop or the navigation on the left side of the menu, you go down to inspections. Once that comes up, you have to scroll down to the lower right. There’s a big red button that says configure inspection sheet. Once you’ve clicked on that, it’s at the top. I have to find it. But
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:20:51):
Export pdf, DF,
Travis Sallee (00:20:53):
Export as PDF. There’s two options. One will just give you kind of the highlights and one will give you all the detail. And that’s the money right there.
Tom Dorsey (00:21:02):
That is the money. And that’s brilliant idea, right? Because exactly that is Then you can even talk about it because this is really how you improve. 30 pages is a lot. It seems like a lot. And what that, that’s probably, I don’t know, 50 point, maybe 45 point inspection. If you’ve got a bigger one than that, it’s probably going to be more pages. But you can really start to consolidate and whittle that stuff down. But more importantly, we can talk about the order. I can visualize the order and I can say, this really should be here instead. And then in that shop meeting, then your techs can come together and have a consensus. There might be a guy who says, no, that’s crazy. We shouldn’t do it that way. We need to do it this way. But then you hammer all that stuff out, what you end up with is right back to consistency because now everybody agreed and they’re pulling the rope the same way and you’re more efficient. Absolutely. Brilliant idea. Travis.
Travis Sallee (00:21:52):
Thank you.
Tom Dorsey (00:21:53):
Thank you for sharing that, buddy.
Travis Sallee (00:21:54):
Yeah.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:21:55):
Travis, I have a question. Did you follow the urge to increase the number of topics at any point in time or
Travis Sallee (00:22:03):
Yes. Well, after the convention, our inspection grew and we had a pretty thorough inspection. I don’t even know how many points it is. It’s a lot more. We renamed, it used to be a 45 point inspection, now it’s vehicle health and maintenance inspection. So we dropped the number of points off there, but it’s a lot more.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:22:26):
And was there some resistance by the techs implying more
Travis Sallee (00:22:31):
Work? No, no, no, because my techs understand. My techs are all flat rate and they understand that it’s about finding the work, right? Legitimate things. The more they can find and sell on a single vehicle, the less times they’re pulling vehicles in and out, racking vehicles up, re racking vehicles, and if they can dig in on one vehicle, that’s where they’re going to make their best time. And they’ve all been happy to give input because it impacts their day-to-day operations, how many inspections a day or a week are they doing? How many times are they looking at this stuff? If they can tweak that and make it the way they want it, hey, more power to ’em.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:23:16):
Yes,
Tom Dorsey (00:23:17):
100%. And so a big part of that is getting that educational content into the inspection story, right? Because we’re talking about freeing up time. We’re talking about letting your service advisor be his best self, right? Is to apply his focus where it’s going to get the best bang for the buck. Not over here leaving messages and chasing folks on the phone and doing all this kind of stuff that we tend to do, but really editing and preparing that story and then having those educational conversations with the customer that convert them into sold hours, right? That’s where you want ’em spending the bulk of his time. So how do you guys, Travis, how do you incorporate that? What’s the process where your service advisor, your technicians are working together maybe do they have to go sell the group on adding in some additional content? Have they come to you and asked you, Hey, we should shoot our own YouTube video right here in the shop and use that as some educational content, those kind of ideas. How do you blossom those and then how do you bake ’em into the cake?
Travis Sallee (00:24:29):
Yeah, mark is my lead service advisor. He’s an adopter of technology. He’s come up with ideas and he’s got things he wants to do for shooting custom videos. We just haven’t got to that point yet. But my two service advisors, Chad and Mark, they’re both great. They’re constantly talking about this and if they find something that they want to put in there, they might run out in the shop and ask a question of a tech or two, but they may just put it in there and see what kind of feedback they get. Yeah,
Tom Dorsey (00:25:01):
Sure, sure.
Travis Sallee (00:25:03):
Right. Make sure they’re paying attention in the back.
Tom Dorsey (00:25:05):
Exactly.
Travis Sallee (00:25:07):
Yeah. But one of the other things as far as just embracing, leveraging the technology, when we printed this thing out, we could identify which of the recommendations weren’t mapped to a canned job and the more canned jobs we can have where it’s automating it and less customization by the service advisor, it’s speed in the front counter up as well. So if they can spend less time on the technical part of just building the estimates and getting it prepared and more time actually talking to the customer and communicating, helping them understand and the more power for them.
Tom Dorsey (00:25:46):
Yes. Yes, exactly. Hey, I think we have a slight, because I want to also ask you kind of about it’s, it’s not just about getting the feedback about how the inspection sheet should be created and what the flow around the vehicle is, but it’s also being able to contribute to request things like adding more can jobs. We just talked about adding the educational information. I think we have a slide. Can we put the slide up that shows how to add the educational content, so folks at home maybe that you’re not so comfortable editing your inspection sheets so we can show ’em how to get that done. I think it’s something like slide 11, maybe
Travis Sallee (00:26:30):
10
Tom Dorsey (00:26:32):
Or slight please. Well, this is fancy. Yeah, perfect. So you can kind of see the link is in the inspection sheet here to get to, that’s what the customer would see. That’s where that educational content’s going to be nested.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:26:57):
So if I may, Tom,
Tom Dorsey (00:27:01):
No,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:27:01):
No, you can’t. Let’s move on. Not important.
(00:27:10):
We really have to put ourselves in our consumer’s shoes when we talk about this. There is language in Travis said it and will implied that technicians are not human. So I am still questioning that a little bit, but he will have to tell us more about that. But joking aside, it’s all about getting the information on a mobile phone footprint. So you have to compress and distill and be clear. The more clear you are, the higher the chance that you get the response you’re expecting. And there’s no need of walking somebody through something because nowadays we don’t have time and we bounce off of websites immediately if they don’t have relevant information. And so you see here, color coding does its function even where the one is marked. You can even put free interest, a zero interest loan call to action in there if you wanted to. And then you see on the right hand side, that’s a topic which is complete, right? You see it’s red requires immediate attention, it’s one of two. Everything is explained pretty easily. And then you have the educational information right at the bottom. And to Tom’s point, if you could advance Dustin, please.
(00:28:58):
Oh yeah, I forgot something. In the new system, we even allow you to have your customers share an awesome inspection with their friends. And so right now we offer that through email, Facebook, Twitter, telegram, whatever that is. Never used it, but it’s one of those WhatsApp,
Tom Dorsey (00:29:24):
You’re too old,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:29:26):
We’re too old, okay,
Tom Dorsey (00:29:28):
They won’t let you.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:29:31):
And so that’s another point, right? To engage the motorist to look through it and then share it and spread how impressive and transparent the information is. Can you advance please? So that’s the place where you can edit the educational information. You click on the topic, go ahead then on the condition,
Tom Dorsey (00:30:05):
So that educational, so everybody knows and remember this, the educational content is connected to a condition. So you click the condition that you want to attach the video to and then click that pencil down there at the bottom. So just remember it’s attached to the condition, not the action, the condition.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:30:27):
And then we have pre-prepared a library of videos. I think it’s 60 something videos
Tom Dorsey (00:30:36):
On every day.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:30:37):
But if you scroll all the way down, you can add your own link. So here you see what we have prepared already, but if you have a library from BG or you have your custom videos taken, recorded in your own shop, feel free to add your own videos, whatever works.
Tom Dorsey (00:31:01):
And does it have to be a video link? Can it be a link to a landing page on my website? Can it be a link to a PDF, even like a white paper if I wanted?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:31:12):
It can be anything. You just need to be thinking again, in the shoes of a motorist. So for example, we had requests for a Facebook link, technically possible. Keep in mind your customer’s going to go to a different place and if it’s not just supporting information, they might forget to go back to the inspection sheet and all of a sudden stocks are playing some Facebook game. You
Tom Dorsey (00:31:41):
Got a candy crush because remember, and this is an important point, is that your link here, whatever you put in there, has to support the story. It has to get them to the next level of education and engagement and capturing their attention so you can convert them to the yes. So if the information might be great and you might’ve spent a lot of money developing it, whatever content you put in there, but if it isn’t kicking the ball through the goal, then you got to go back and you got to think and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be split testing that stuff out. Put a little information in here and run that for a couple of weeks or try a different format in another topic that you’re recommending on a regular basis and just test how the engagement with conversion works from those two different formats. And you’ll figure it out and you’ll figure out what’s best for your operation.
Bill Connor (00:32:34):
So really what you’re doing here is the same thing you did in the shop. You’re controlling all the content. Customer needs to make a good decision, and you’re not allowing them to escape and phone a friend, so to say.
Tom Dorsey (00:32:47):
Exactly. Yeah. And then here, once you’ve attached your video, then you’ll see that in there and you can go in and edit the notes, the educational text that the customer sees right in there. And before you’re done, once you’re all done, you just hit okay and it’s going to update right onto your inspection sheet,
Bill Connor (00:33:09):
Right?
Tom Dorsey (00:33:13):
So simple as that. And remember, we’re going to be sending out links to these recordings. So if you’re taking notes and we move too fast or something, don’t worry about it, you’ll get the recording. Also, we’ve had some requests in, some folks have been talking about new or maybe they just didn’t get some good training as they were coming on to AutoVitals. One of the best resources that you can have right now is help.AutoVitals.com. It’s going to have a ton of educational content and videos. Maybe Bill, you can speak a little bit to how we’re updating that stuff, getting in preparation of the new release and stuff like that, and give folks a little direction on where they can go find the training that they need. Also, don’t be shy about going up into the Facebook forum and hitting us up directly or giving us a call. If you feel like you don’t have all the resources that you need and you’re not at the level you want to be, squeaky wheel gets to grease. So thank you for the questions. Thank you for the comment and getting us onto that topic.
Bill Connor (00:34:14):
So right now for the existing platform, the academy is a great place to go ahead and look, but on the new platform, our goal is to have as much as we can built right into the tool. So that is going to be going forward as you go and transfer to the new platform, that is going to be your area to go ahead and have just in time learning right at your fingertips where you need it. Actually, Tony had asked the question here is what is your opinion about leaving the narrative that comes in with the videos? I believe she said, my opinion is is that in most cases we want to go ahead and if it’s there, that’s great, but maybe a nice short little sentence there and let the video go ahead and speak for it instead of giving all that full text for the customer to go ahead and scroll through
Tom Dorsey (00:35:00):
And think. Tony, also, it could be something that supports the video. It doesn’t have to be like a description, tell ’em what they’re about to watch. It could be, Hey, by the way, we’re running out. I mean you could promo stuff in there. You can get ’em into the video, they watch the video and then the text is actually either the next step, what do they do about that? Think of it in that vein. You could give them direction now, approve it or something like that. Or you can give some other incentive to help convert whether it might be a sales driver you might be running or something like that without getting too promo, too salesy in your story.
Bill Connor (00:35:41):
So a great example of how it should be done is when you go to the new platform, examine how the guided inspection seat is built and that’ll give you some great clues on how to go ahead and edit any other inspection sheet using the bones that that’s built on.
Tom Dorsey (00:35:58):
So to Bill’s point too is again, in new release, a lot of that training that you’re looking for is going to be built right onto the product. It’s going to be in the tablet, it’s going to be on the dashboard at the front counter, and the service writers will be able to just get educational links and videos and how toss right at their fingertips. Until that point, help AutoVitals.com is going to be your best friend Facebook forum’s going to be your best friend search the Facebook forum because there is a lot of user generated content that’s going to be very helpful there to you as well as AutoVitals generated content. And then of course just wrap your trainer upside the head and tell him to get to work.
Bill Connor (00:36:39):
Hey Tom, you missed one that’s really easy is hamburger menu and an academy that’s right on the menu. Thanks
Tom Dorsey (00:36:45):
Bill. Appreciate that. To reiterate that right in the TV p hamburger menu, the three black line bar button up on the top left, go down to academy, that’s a quick link to help do AutoVitals with all the training videos and stuff like that. Travis, did you have something you were going to say buddy?
Travis Sallee (00:37:03):
I don’t know. I would encourage shops to involve their team as the owner, manager, whatever you are, you don’t want to just take this tool, try to make it work and then hand it to ’em and say, use it and get me results. The more you can involve them, the more ownership they’re going to take in that they’re going to take pride in what they’re working with. And so I don’t want to encourage shop owners to involve their team as much as they can.
Tom Dorsey (00:37:30):
So coming out of your weekly meetings, so have you always been doing weekly meetings? How have your weekly meetings changed since you went fully digital and then what has been, do you have some quantified results that you can say This is what happened for my shop outside of these team meetings and you should be doing it too?
Travis Sallee (00:37:52):
So we’ve not always done weekly meetings. We had meetings but they were inconsistent. We were trying to do every other week meetings twice a month, and if for one reason, another seemed like one meeting would get canceled. And then you’re six weeks since you talked with the team. Last when we went in January to the Auto Auto conference, I went to Frank’s class about from shop meetings. To shop meetings?
Tom Dorsey (00:38:18):
Yeah, exactly.
Travis Sallee (00:38:19):
And that resonated with me. Yeah, buddy. I took 12 pages of notes at the AutoVitals conference. I, I typed ’em up on the plane coming home and that’s what I handed out to my team when I got back. But he made the case for weekly meetings and it took us a couple weeks after the conference to catch our breath. But since then we’ve done weekly meetings, we haven’t missed any. And it’s exactly as soon as we’re done here, I’m going to walk out in the shop and it’s time for our weekly meeting all just on Wednesday they’re all at noon, try to keep ’em to a half hour. And in those weekly meetings we have an agenda. We hit some of the same things every week. I think one of the powerful things for that is the team gets to see where the boss is head is at and what they’re thinking, the direction they’re going. They get asked questions, they get to be brought up to speed. And when they do that, it takes away some of that ambiguousness and the what’s going on, what’s next? What are we really doing here? I’m not sure, kind of in a holding pattern, all that stuff that kind of kills production, you get a chance to handle it. So I’ve become a believer in the weekly meeting, and so my team likes it. I feed them every week. So that’s always the benefit
Tom Dorsey (00:39:45):
You learn.
Travis Sallee (00:39:46):
That’s great. But in that, we always have a section for the AutoVitals feedback. What do we need to change? What’s working? What do we need? Some of our feature requests that I’ve put on the forum have come from that. Some of the stuff that I’m sitting in my office, something might not affect me in my day-to-day business, but I talk to a technician and I go, oh, this is really a hangup. This is wasting your time. We got to get their attention and make a recommendation. So that’s some of the stuff that has come from our weekly meetings.
Tom Dorsey (00:40:24):
And you’d be surprised because I mean I was digging around in your BCP and looking at once you guys came out of conference and just looked at what happened with the inspection picture edit rate and the A RO was up like a hundred bucks a month out or something like that. I mean it was pretty quick and it grew consistently. It stayed. That’s the thing is you can tell it’s stuck. Actually, I think we have some slides if we can maybe put those up if you’re done with this poll or after the poll. And if you folks aren’t seeing the poll, maybe it’s buried underneath, but if you can go ahead and respond on that poll, it’d be fantastic. Helps us to create more educational content for you as well as show topics and things to discuss in here to help you out. So your participation is always appreciated.
Bill Connor (00:41:14):
So is there a way that you’re getting some feedback from your service advisors on what they feel is good enough? So an example would be if every time the customer is giving certain information on a certain topic and the customer is asking a lot of questions, do your service writers report that to you and say, Hey, we need to do an update on this content. The customers aren’t able to determine on their own what this means to them.
Travis Sallee (00:41:38):
Are you talking the educational content to the
Bill Connor (00:41:40):
Customer? So if a customer is asking you the same question on the same topic over and over again, obviously something’s lost in the process. So do you use service riders provide you with some feedback saying every time I go ahead and have a customer, we recommend struts, they don’t understand it and I’m having to spend a lot of time explaining it. Do you use that the customer as your barometer of how well you’re doing?
Travis Sallee (00:42:04):
I can’t say as we have, but I like that direction. And that’s something I definitely would ask my service advisors about because it’s a way to customize it for our area and the level of knowledge that the average customer has.
Bill Connor (00:42:20):
So if we always go ahead and take what the motorist, what their reaction is and kind of build that into our plan, those are the people we’re trying to satisfy or at least get them to open their wallet and let you push some a hundred dollars bills out. So using their opinion as a gauge is something that really works.
Tom Dorsey (00:42:39):
It may not even just be, it’s not just the educational videos. It could be the canned notes, it could be the way we’re running edits or we’re annotating the pictures or we’re communicating through the text tech notes and stuff like that, or shop notes for the customer. So all of those things you really want to discuss. Nothing’s off the table when you’re having these audits because you should be auditing regularly your inspection sheet and getting that feedback. And a great place to do that is in your weekly meetings and matter of fact, and you can expedite that if you’re as brilliant as Travis and you go ahead and just print the thing out and you give ’em some homework and they put all their notes and come prepared to the meeting to have the discussion about the solution and not just kind of the, oh, figuring it all out and eating pizza for 30 minutes, you really want ’em to come with concrete results in preparation of the meeting. So a great way. I can’t thank you enough Travis for sharing that. It’s brilliant.
Travis Sallee (00:43:38):
Sure.
Tom Dorsey (00:43:40):
Oh yeah. Here what we’re seeing, this is matter of fact, January we’re coming right out of the shop conference. I mean that’s the result, right? Is really when you get a plan and when you’re in there and you engage with the other shops that are a lot of them, they didn’t just take it out of the box and it just worked for them and it didn’t work for me. They cut the trail, they did a lot of the heavy lifting, they went out and made a lot of the mistakes that we don’t want you to make. And so we really want to, that’s what the purpose of that conference is for, is to get out and let, we don’t talk much during the conference AutoVitals.
(00:44:19):
We pride ourselves on having it ran by the user, the shop owner that’s out there and he’s given real, he or she, I should say sorry, has given real world examples of what works and how to do it. And if you just do what’s successful, this is a result. And I mean that’s a hundred dollars getting up to 50% increase in a RO. But what we’re seeing here, the big takeaway is implementing that consistency for the technician. This is some technician stats, number of recommendations per vehicle almost doubled and stayed there and the inspection rate increased dramatically. Looks like it’s up good 20, 30%, but look at what it does for that a RO, because ultimately those best practices convert business that adds right back down into the bottom line and that’s really where you need to build that foundational level, right Travis for the technician from that perspective.
Travis Sallee (00:45:25):
Yeah, I want to say about the convention, this was our first AutoVitals convention in January. I didn’t go the previous year, but a couple of ’em, friends of mine in my 20 group had gone the previous year and they really turned the screws on me about getting not just me there but my two service advisors and it took a lot of planning because I wasn’t bringing just one half of the duo from the front counter. We were taking both our guys off the front counter for two days, which has never been done in our shop. So we had to plan, we had to make preparations. We brought a technician in up from the back, taught ’em enough to kind of carry it for two days so that we could go down there. But I think the benefit for my guys was it wasn’t just something that was coming filtered through me because I’ve been to gajillion trainings and they only get what I remember to tell them, but they were able to go and talk with the other shop owners, go sit in the breakouts, listen, take their own notes, find the people that were making it work or making work the way I want, go ask them questions, hold them captive for a few minutes and at the par, absolutely, it gave them a vision for what this can do if it’s used right.
(00:46:46):
And I don’t know if had I gone by myself, I don’t think we would’ve gotten that benefit out of it. So it was well worth having a couple days of a little bit uncertainty at the shop for being able to bring them down there, get ’em out of the shop, get ’em around other shops and just talk shop,
Tom Dorsey (00:47:07):
Light the fire, right, light the
Travis Sallee (00:47:08):
Fire. So they came home excited and that was part of what helped the technicians buy in was it wasn’t me the boss just telling them it was somebody that uses it, saw it, has a bigger vision for it coming back saying this is what we need to do to make it work right
Tom Dorsey (00:47:25):
Now, buddy. There’s a lot of ways to make investments in your business. This investment in your business right here will pay off. It’s evergreen if you implement these best practices and you do it consistently and you build your machine, right, because really what we’re talking about and then you just monitor, make sure that it’s full of gas, right? Make sure it’s got good maintenance on that machine and through regular auditing, you are going to reap the benefits of that forever, as long as you want to. You become your own worst enemy at that point because it ain’t going to break unless you break it. And I’ve heard so many stories of folks tell me, oh my God, I couldn’t sleep for two days and my team, we were on the plane and we were just rah one idea bouncing all these ideas off the other, they couldn’t wait for Monday, get back in and start implementing.
(00:48:15):
And that’s just one example we’ve got across the board. You get out there and you see the people that came in and implemented those best practices they learned at conference. I mean it doesn’t take long to get those numbers up there. And then you really see the ones that stuck because it stays up there, right? That’s the key. And then it’s just tweaking it and fine tuning it from there through your regular shop meetings that you’re having to improve from there. It’s just like love’s analogy is always what separates the elite sports teams from other elite players. It’s all of that fine detail. It’s half second improvements over in doing those half second improvements consistently. That gets you to that all-star status and that’s exactly what you get to do through the collaboration with other digital shops and the analysis of the data that you see here in the business control panel.
(00:49:14):
And this is a result. I mean this is actually your shop. This is Loren’s right here. This is right after conference and you could see little weak sauce on the picture edit rate, but came back and knocked it out and look at the difference a month out. We’re already seeing again a good 50% bump in that a RO that stayed solid and you can see those best practices stuck as well and the service advisor picked it up. So this really, the benefit that you’re going to see at the front counter and with the focus sign on is getting that picture edit rate up. In other words, publish in your story, make sure you’re hit and send because you got to get your book in the store, you got to have it on Amazon and they ain’t going to find it. Read your book. And then just being able to have a mechanism that allows you to make sure that you stay consistent in your production and then the rest follows, right? It makes it real simple to educate the customer. The customer becomes conditioned, they know what to expect, they know that they’re going to get the text with the pictures and they’re going to go through and they’re going to tell you what they want and it’s going to be ready at five. It becomes that easy.
Travis Sallee (00:50:25):
And my guys love watching that motorist time. They eat that up because they know the customer’s engaged with what they want ’em to be focused on, right?
Tom Dorsey (00:50:36):
There’s no better way is we all want to know that our work is received and it’s appreciated. And it’s like you said, that is the dial that says, my work is appreciated. I put in that work and it’s working, right? Yeah, it’d nothing, it’d be terrible if they just bounce out one second. Research time. That’s a good topic for a team meeting though. Yeah, Travis,
Travis Sallee (00:50:58):
Right? Absolutely. And it’s amazing. So service writers will send that and you’ll see the customer open it up and the modus research times clicking away, they end up calling in, the service writer sells the job, right? Already given approval for it. And then when they get off the phone, the customer goes back in and they’re reading the inspection report more because they want to understand, right? It just, it’s amazing how many times that happens.
Tom Dorsey (00:51:25):
Hey Lou, this poll just came in U and I think it’s teed up perfectly for you because the highest response was I’d love to see other shops inspection sheets and I think absolute can show us. And also before we move on to that, Morgan Sullivan had asked, is there a way to show a mint condition part versus the customer’s part in the inspection sheet? Travis, how do you guys add additional pictures if you want to show a comparison like that?
Travis Sallee (00:51:58):
That’s a good question. I don’t have the perfect answer for you.
Tom Dorsey (00:52:03):
So one way to do it is you can always, if it’s filter, you can just lay ’em down on the bench or take a picture of both of ’em side by side. But inside your inspection edit, there’s a little plus there’s a camera with a plus button. If you click that Morgan, that’s going to allow you to attach an image. So you can keep a min condition part in a file on your desktop and then you can just upload it. This is what a brand new brake rotor looks like. Here’s your rusty hula hoop of a brake rotor. You can layer ’em on side by side like that. Another great thing to use of course is drip trays and things that allow you to take a picture of a comparison right there. So if you got mint condition filter or you got mint condition fluid and then your dirty fluid that needs to be replaced immediately asap, then that’s a great way to show that comparison. So I hope that helps Morgan
Bill Connor (00:52:51):
And see, one of the things that we want to do is anytime we can is use something that has a tool that measures it so that way instead of a customer going to some other shop and they say, well that’s not 40%, that’s crap. You’ve got a tool that measures it, it takes all that stuff out of it and it’s not going to let that other shop go ahead and contradict your expertise, so to say. Yeah,
Tom Dorsey (00:53:12):
Keep ’em honest.
Bill Connor (00:53:13):
So any kind of tool with a measurement that you can use is going to be the best way to go and document
Tom Dorsey (00:53:21):
Micrometers, your calipers, whatever it is, your colored brake feeler, anything that’s a diag readout or on your scope, take a picture of it. There’s a lot of ways to capture that information because the other really neat thing about it too is over time with your returning customers, and of course who wouldn’t want to return after you get this type of a service experience is that you can actually start to calculate the deterioration of the component. You put three pictures together that show a different kind of 10 off here and some sixteens off over here, and then you can say, well gosh, at this current rate you’re going to be metal to metal or you’re going to be ball to here on your tires at around this time, take advantage of some sales driver or something. Now let’s get it done now. So you can really use that information, that forecasting to help you in the sale today.
Bill Connor (00:54:10):
So an inspection done today with a measurement that changes over time is one of your best retention tools. You tell the customer at the counter, not only can we see the rate of aware on subsequent visits you’re setting up for the next visit, but we can help predict when it’s going to be worn out in case you’d like the budget. That’s all about what’s in it for the customer.
Tom Dorsey (00:54:31):
Yeah, that’s fantastic. Let’s see, some inspection sheets,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:54:37):
Some inspection results. So Dustin, if you could share, I think it’s what, 13 or something? Yes. Perfect. Thank you. Before we go into those details, I actually wanted to make that a little kind of an inspection clinics. If you look at this, what do you see? What would you do differently? Chat in while we are discussing it and if there’s anything you would do differently, put it in. I also, Travis wanted to ask you, have you done, I would call it an inspection results audit where you go with the service advisors mostly through it and say, this worked well and this didn’t work so well. And here is language used, which might be technician language and here is layman’s language. So have you done some?
Travis Sallee (00:55:37):
We’ve talked a little bit about that. My service advisors have enough leeway though that if they see something like that, that they can make that change.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:55:46):
I see very much. Okay.
Travis Sallee (00:55:49):
I trust ’em to order the way they want it
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:55:55):
Because we are all kind of in the cage of our own knowledge and it’s super hard to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, especially under the time pressure. So we just fall back to what’s comfortable to us. And for some that’s technician language,
Travis Sallee (00:56:19):
Especially when they’re under pressure and phones are ringing
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:56:21):
And exactly customers standing there. And so for example, this one is so self-explanatory in awe. Every single time I see something like that and it’s under the good condition, it’s green, everything is checked. That’s the beauty of using hunter integration in this case. If you can click one more, same for the battery. So for everybody who has played with the idea of getting a hunter or integrate the existing hunter, you might have to upgrade If it’s a little outdated and the software can’t integrate, this is just a money maker right there. Here’s the next one. So this is an areas of future concern. We are in the yellow territory and everything looks really great. Educational information is added, condition is clear, is measured, notes are short and clear or no action needed at this time because it’s areas of future concern. Can you click please and he has one of those pictures, one of those four down there. Would love to get your feedback, what you would do differently if anything.
Tom Dorsey (00:57:58):
And for folks in the audience, go ahead and chat in. We’d love to have your engagement and feedback in there and we’ll answer You live on the air and probably invite you to come onto a future show. No pressure
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:58:10):
Now. Nobody answers anymore, Tom. They know how it works. Exactly.
Tom Dorsey (00:58:18):
We got you registered anyway. We know where you live.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:58:21):
Yeah. So here’s my personal observation. If you think about that, this picture is going to appear as the dominate picture on the smartphone. There’s a note missing.
Tom Dorsey (00:58:35):
Yep, John, long note,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:58:37):
Right? And here’s another best practice you might want to consider because the yellow ones are the things for the future next visit. So you might have even a recommended action which you on purpose put on the decline or deferred list because it’s not for now, but it is for next time. And you present it this way. Right? So you consciously have that recommendation, but you put it on the deferred list and tell the customer it’s future concern, not needed today, but since it is your deferred or declined list, it will show up in the service recommendations on the service reminder. Right.
Tom Dorsey (00:59:30):
Hey, real quick, I got an interesting question from Zach Peyton. He’s asking, is there ever going to be anything more than a circle in an arrow? And so follow up, I’d like to know what you would and anybody else, what more would you like to see as an automatic edit into that?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:59:47):
So it goes a little bit back to what we said in the beginning. There’s always a compromise to be made about how impactful is the message to the customer and with what effort are you going to do it. And so we found picture and errors, especially if the pictures, the errors are in different directions, which is now in the new release, you have four different directions you can just put on it. We thought that’s enough ability to do because you now can add text directly onto the picture. So you can put text right next to the error. And the moment it gets more complicated than that, you also have to keep in mind that somebody has to digest the information and everybody knows circle and error what it means, especially if it’s color coded. Right? And so I’m not sure, but again, maybe there are cases I’m not aware of where additional added symbols would help to make a case. Actually, I take that back. We added one, which is a green check mark you put
Tom Dorsey (01:00:56):
That’s right
Uwe Kleinschmidt (01:00:57):
As a fat check mark right onto your image. And that speaks by itself what it means, right?
Tom Dorsey (01:01:05):
A good job.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (01:01:07):
But those three things, right arrow with the appropriate color circle with the appropriate color and the green check mark from our opinion, is completely enough to tell the story quickly. And impactfully,
Travis Sallee (01:01:23):
I really like the idea of anytime they pull up a picture that it tells ’em the line item that you’re working on, the condition and what to do about it. So whether they’re in the right section of the report or they get down at the end where all the big pictures are, or they take a screenshot of and they send it to their dad, this is what they’re telling me, it’s right there on the picture. It makes it easy. Anytime they pull up that picture, we’re telling them what it is, what we see, what they should do about it.
Bill Connor (01:01:50):
That’s interesting. Exactly what’s built into the guided inspection sheet. Alls they have to do is add the arrow and stir the notes are already there.
Tom Dorsey (01:02:01):
Yep. Real quick, John Long said, Hey, thanks a lot for using my picture. He got on the horn and ordered an audit on the notes are added to all the pictures.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (01:02:14):
It was me, it was
Tom Dorsey (01:02:15):
See solving problems live. That’s how we roll.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (01:02:19):
Thanks John for allowing us to use your pictures. And again, this is fine tuning what we’re talking about.
Tom Dorsey (01:02:26):
You said right here, he didn’t allow you and you’ll be hearing from his attorney,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (01:02:30):
Okay, cease and desist,
Tom Dorsey (01:02:32):
Copyright going to get you
Uwe Kleinschmidt (01:02:37):
And one also very clean. But I want to make a case to you and I hope I’m going to make sense. If you look at the recommended actions, there are parts,
(01:02:54):
Right? It’s not a job. And so that has the potential of two side effects you should consider avoiding in my opinion, if you put parts on, that’s kind of an invitation to Google for them instead of focusing on the job, which needs to be done. And of course it includes a part. Does that make sense? Yeah. Your value as a shop is not in selling parts. Your value is in creating health again. And that includes do something with the pods. They’re just a means to an end. If you put the pods right in the center of the attention as a recommended action, which is seen by the motorist, you devalue kind of the job. And so I would highly recommend, think about how you phrase your canned jobs in a way. There’s a motorist on the other end of the desk and you want to crisply explain what you’re going to do.
Tom Dorsey (01:04:13):
And then so how far do you take that? Because you have that, to your point, you have to go in and edit your canned jobs in the point of sale for that text to show up the way you want it in kind of plain speak, right?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (01:04:26):
Yeah. So I don’t know,
Tom Dorsey (01:04:29):
Something like would says something like maybe you say improve braking or brake safely by doing this brake job or whatever the title would be, or save the environment by combusting your fuel more completely by getting new spark plugs. I mean, how far do you take that? No,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (01:04:53):
I would really put the job in a way that there’s no two languages needed. One for the motorist, one for the tech, right?
Bill Connor (01:05:03):
Most of the cases on that alls he had to do is add the word service after it like he did on the fuel flush and he’s done.
Tom Dorsey (01:05:09):
Oh yeah, sure. Yeah. Spark plug service.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (01:05:12):
Yeah.
Travis Sallee (01:05:14):
Yeah.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (01:05:18):
So I mean we have actually toyed with the idea of putting two namespace in, one for the tech, one for the motorist because the tech needs it crisp and clear and short. And the motorist also needs a crisp and clear and short, but in a different language.
Tom Dorsey (01:05:36):
Yeah. Well, and depending on your point of sale too, on how those candidates, if you’ve got service packages or it might take some act to Congress to get that stuff changed, especially also if you’ve got a shared kind of a network franchise point of sale, it might be standard across your network. So ask those folks about that. Oh, also, we had a question earlier I just wanted to bring up and for folks that don’t know, yeah, we are showing some images and screenshots out of the new release Bill. Maybe you can tell folks how they go about if they want to get onto the TVPX now instead of waiting for release. What do they do
Uwe Kleinschmidt (01:06:23):
Before you do? I don’t want to rude, but I have to bail because people are waiting for me already. In another meeting instance. I talked so much I extended this, so I apologize, Travis, thank you for helping us doing an awesome episode. Hopefully it’s not the last time. Okay, thanks everybody.
Bill Connor (01:06:44):
Alright.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (01:06:45):
Okay.
Bill Connor (01:06:47):
So if they’re ready to go ahead and get in a new platform, they could go ahead and let their trainer know that they’re ready and we’ll go ahead and verify that they have a qualified management system and that their metrics show that they’re actually ready to go ahead and make a change. So we’re just not going to go ahead and take anybody that wants to be over there. We’re looking for certain things and that would be a good discussion to have. There would be some other ways to go ahead and get added to that list and we’ll announce that in the Facebook forum. But it may be as simple as going ahead and downloading a new app off of the app store and putting your information in there and it will dump it in a folder for us to go and know that you’re interested. And then we’ll still go through the same criteria. Do you have the right management system? Do your metrics show that you’re ready to change and so on. And then we’ll go ahead and have a discussion and schedule a day in time for a transfer.
Tom Dorsey (01:07:45):
So if you’re interested and you’re championing at the bit and you don’t want to wait, just reach out, talk to your advisor, give your AutoVitals folks a call, and then they’ll walk you through that and take you through the next steps. It’s fantastic. Yeah, so there’s a lot of good stuff coming out and I know people are really excited to get it and we’re excited to deliver it. We just have to kind of work the throttle a little bit in the beginning here so we don’t flood out and end up stalled on the side of the road. So thank you for your interest.
Bill Connor (01:08:21):
So it seems to be a unified message from the shop owners and implementers we’ve had on here, and that’s to get rapid continuous improvement. It takes involvement of the whole team rather than somebody saying, here’s the tool, go do this. They’re saying, here’s my vision, this is what looks good in it for you, me, the shop and the customer, and now let’s go ahead and work together. So pretty much everybody we’ve had on here has all had that same philosophy. Let’s work. Here’s the vision, let’s share the vision, come on the journey with me and let’s work together
Tom Dorsey (01:08:55):
And then pay it forward. That’s what Travis is doing today, right? It is just like he said, he had some folks twisting his arm say, Hey, you should come see this thing. It’s working for us. And then here we are. Now it’s working for him and now here he is helping it work for other folks. And that’s what we’re all about. And that’s really, as a matter of fact, that’s one of our top takeaways today is really is to say, once you get the basics down and you get the fundamentals down, because that’s your first step, we really want you to have a cohesive and consistent process with your technician and your service advisor involvement. A great place to do that is through the team meetings Travis shared with us today. An amazing way really is to make it simple for them, and that’s to print out the data of the inspection sheet, how the inspection sheet is built, all the topics and conditions and so on and so forth.
(01:09:50):
And then go ahead and let ’em go red line that thing and leave some notes and then discuss that as a group and then make the edits. And then it’s really being able to consistently do those edits over time is what you really want to be able to do is give feedback, get in there and make edits. Test your educational content, pull your customer, right? Ask them, Hey, did this help you understand? Did this make sense to you? How could I be better at that? Oh, it gave me some feedback. And then incorporate that in. And where Travis is at now, he’s to be ready to take it to the next level, create his own videos and stuff, do some custom stuff, really dial it into the neighborhood, into the community, and to your customer and demographic and your operation. And again, it just really separates you from the competition from this perspective and just gives a whole different customer service experience for what folks are used to seeing.
(01:10:53):
Education is king, right? Content is king. And so you want to make sure that you have, we showed you how to go in and add that educational content, where to add your custom links. You don’t have to use the AutoVitals library stuff. A lot of you NAPA shops, you got digital service advisor that you’ve got great tools available to you. No, anything that’s a link. If it’s a link, it can go in your inspection sheet and that’s how you put it in. We showed you there. And we’ll be sending the recording so you have that documented. Tell a story. You have to think in terms of your texts or the authors and your survey. The front counter is kind of doing the editing and publishing. And the end result for that customer is to have an engaging story where it’s got a beginning and it has an end, right?
(01:11:44):
It’s got a solution, it drives them. Think of, again, it’s your sales funnel, it drives them through the funnel to convert them. If you’re putting stuff in there that distracts from that, if you’re putting stuff in there that is unclear or confusing or very technical in the way you’re communicating, it’s probably not benefiting your story. So you want to strip it down to the bear, kind of tell the most effective story possible, the best story possible. And that’s a lot of that is going to be through that really important collaboration with other shops. What’s working for them? What are they doing? Look through your inspection sheet library and look at the different inspections that are in there. Work on Facebook. Contribute on Facebook and show those inspections. And other folks, if you go in there and do a search on the forum right there, you’ll see hundreds of other people posted up their inspections for years on here and getting feedback and sharing ideas and really collaborating to improve those sheets. So go nuts. Just don’t be shy. Put your stuff up there. You’ll get a thousand eyeballs on it in 15 minutes. And so many ideas you’ll have to hit delete and go think about it for a while, take a break.
Travis Sallee (01:12:58):
And the shops don’t have to recreate the wheel all by themselves. Use your product advisor. They know who’s doing a great job, who’s got a good inspection. We had half a dozen shops share their inspection report with us. That’s kind of been my experience, is the good shops are willing to share their inspection reports. Take it, use it as a starting point, refine it from there, let your people use it or see it. What works for us in a northern climate may not work for a shop down in the southern climate. They have totally different things they’re seeing on a daily basis. But Don, don’t recreate the wheel on your own. Use the community.
Bill Connor (01:13:43):
And you don’t want to be that person that has to have your arm twisted to go ahead and do this stuff, learn from others, and remove that pain from having your arm twisted and really quickly become that person that can go ahead and have the pleasure of twisting somebody else’s arm to join you.
Travis Sallee (01:13:58):
Yeah,
Tom Dorsey (01:13:59):
That’s fantastic. And those are the results. The results are you’re probably going to put 50% on your a RO and it’s going to stay there and it’s going to stay there through the seasons, right? Because it’s not about seasonality, it’s not about promos, it’s not about having the biggest margin drop in your coupons or whatever. It’s really about peace of mind. And if you look at how folks behave through other digital consumerism, how do we shop on Amazon? How do we shop through these different things? What decisions do we make? How do we make decisions? It fits right in line with that. It’s the transparency. I can see the reviews, I can see the results. I can see what else other solutions might be available and I can say, Hey, you know what? The herd goes this way and they do this and I’m going to do it too. And then you just make it that simple. Yep, check, right?
(01:15:00):
And then just, I know what’s going to happen and you describe that for me and I know what to expect and it makes it that fast for me to make a decision. So you really see, as you see the increase in motorist research time, you probably see a significant decrease in time to approval and time to approval because they’re engaged. They know exactly what questions they want to ask your service advisors have done now hundreds of times they know exactly how to handle that situation and they convert, right? And that’s really the key. And then track that in your business control panel and share those results, right? Brag about it. Come on the show. Inspire others, because that’s the other big takeaway Travis gave us today, right? He got inspired and he went and took action and he committed and he took a risk actually because at that point he shut his shop down and brought his crew out and a big expense to him. But boy did it pay off, huh?
Travis Sallee (01:15:50):
Absolutely. Now do it again.
Tom Dorsey (01:15:52):
Yeah, buddy. So we got another digital shop conference coming up pretty soon, and then of course we’re sticking to our guns. We’re next January, we’re doing it again. So we’re looking forward to seeing everybody out there. If you haven’t been come, it’s fantastic. I mean, it’s not about, yeah, it’s going to be an awesome place in California. You get to see me and stuff and that’s all great. But now really, you get to meet Travis, you get to meet all the other John Long and Adam and Jr. And just everybody who comes together and shares these ideas, Frank Dora. And boy, you’re Go home inspired that plane can’t fly fast enough. You get some tickets coming into work the next day because it really lights a fire under you and then you just stoke it and take advantage of it. And here we are, year out buddy, almost, and well, I guess not that far, but we’re pretty far out.
Travis Sallee (01:16:40):
It’s
Tom Dorsey (01:16:41):
Still fire
Travis Sallee (01:16:42):
Going fast.
Tom Dorsey (01:16:43):
It’s going fast. I dunno, man. I’ve lost all track of time since I can’t get a haircut anymore. I finally broke down, dude. And I think, Travis, I’m going to do what you got going on. I finally broke down yesterday and did a little of the shape, but I was afraid to do the top, man. So now I just got kind of some nightmare thing happening up here. It’s all packed into my hat.
Travis Sallee (01:17:01):
Yep. I get a haircut every week,
Tom Dorsey (01:17:03):
Buddy. Well, you guys probably got barbershops open too, or Yeah, it’s hard to cut my hair through the mask in the bag, the hazmat suit to make you wear, right? Yep. But, okay, perfect. Well, thank you very much, Travis. Thank you enough for coming on. Bill, as always, I think we gave a lot of good information out and folks helping out. Dustin, what do we got on if we know yet? What are we talking about next week?
Dustin Anaas (01:17:30):
Haven’t locked in the guest yet, but we are going to be talking about quick wins that kind of transfer over to staff Buyin and Travis, you actually kind of helped pave the way for this conversation we’re have next week, so I’m sure we’re going to be referencing this episode a lot next week. But yeah, quick wins, low hanging fruit, let’s capture it and make some quick dollars and grow quickly.
Tom Dorsey (01:17:48):
Exactly. Now that you got the foundations, you’ve got an effective inspection program, now it’s time to take advantage of. And that’s really what the next week’s episode’s going to be talking about is now that it’s there, how do you leverage it, how do you get the most out of it? And we’ll be talking a lot about quick wins, shop meetings, and building that kind of team plan, and then just implementing your plan, right? Right. So tune in next week, same time, same place. Wednesday, 10:00 AM Pacific Time, 1:00 PM Eastern. Looking forward to seeing you there. Until then, take that conversation to the Facebook form. Don’t forget to get registered if you’re not already, get over to, what is it? autovitals.com/podcast. You can register there or slash dst. Actually, autovitals.com/dst is probably the fastest way for the registration page. Give us those ideas, keep that engagement going, give us some input on what you’d like to see. Great questions today. Thank you very much. And until next week, get out there and make some money.