fbpx

Recommendation Field at Vehicle Pick-Up

by | Jan 7, 2015 | Best Practices, Pick Up, Retention Best Practices

Certain Shop Management Systems (Mitchell 1, Mitchell Team, WinWorks, YES, NapaTracs, etc.) do not support marking jobs as declined. However, all SMS allow for you to input information into the “Recommendation Field”. If you are using an SMS that does not support declined jobs, you can use the recommendation field instead.

  • Reminders to the motorist include vehicle specific recommendations, which have been brought to the Motorist’s attention before the reminder is sent
    • during the last visit at estimate authorization
    • at vehicle pick-up
    • during a follow up call
  • Motorists are more likely to be engaged in opening the reminder email and making an appointment
  • Service Advisors can go full circle in the engagement with the motorist during and after the previous visit and prepare the next visit
  • Declined Jobs are by far the best way of educating the Motorist with personalized and vehicle specific recommendations and be able to answer the two single most asked questions
    • “Why should I do this now?”
    • “What happens if I don’t do it?”
  • Combined with additional educational videos and inspection images of the vehicle at the last visit, the service advisor can use a highly effective tool for guiding the motorist to make the best decision

  • Depending on the POS used, declined jobs have to be manually added/removed into the Recommendation Field, which is minimal effort.
  • Motorists receive reminders by email, which include vehicle specific recommendations
  • The more concrete the better the chance for an appointment to take care of the declined jobs
  • If the reminder is the last event of a series of reinforcement of the same message, the motorist is more open to make a decision.

The critical success factors for an effective retention process are:

  • Educate the motorist about the need for the proposed service recommendation
  • Personalize the motorist’s experience to increase the trust in the recommendations
  • Reinforced at the right time (it has been a while since the last touchpoint) the necessity to take care of the declined jobs might just be the last nudge to score an appointment

Our Recommendation:

There is no better way to engage the motorist than with vehicle-specific personal recommendations. If your SMS does not support the use of Declined Jobs, using the Recommendation Field instead is highly recommended.

Service Advisor’s Tasks

In Mitchell, the Service Advisor should open the RO, then click the “Vehicle” tab and “add” the declined job as a recommendation, as shown here:

Mitchell 1 recommendations

In WinWorks, the Service Advisor should open the Work Order, then click on “Recommendations”. This will open a pop-up window where he or she can ‘recommend’ the declined job:

WinWorks update recommendations

In YES, select the applicable vehicle from your list of Pending Service Orders and view the “Estimate Billing Detail”. Then right-click the job that was declined and should be made into a recommended service:

YES create recommended

A pop-up will appear to create the recommended service. Confirm the information, then click ‘save’:

YES open recommended service

In NAPA Tracs, there are two ways to add a job to the list of recommendations for that vehicle. The first way is to add it from the open RO or Sub-Estimate. The Service Advisor should first open the repair order or Sub-Estimate, then right-click on the job in the list of jobs. Then, select “Move Items to Recommended Service”:

NAPA Tracs rec serv 0

Then (1) Click on the job and make sure it is highlighted in the list, and (2) click “move”:

NAPA Tracs rec serv 0a

 

 

The second way to add to the list of recommendations is by opening the vehicle, going to the list of recommendations (shown below), and adding a new job, part or note.

NAPA recommendations

Your AutoVitals system automatically picks up declined jobs from RO Writer (see best practices regarding declined jobs). However, you can also manually add service recommendations.

To do this, open the repair order, (1) click the “Service Requests” tab on the bottom, then (2) click ‘add request’:

ro writer add rec

 

You can also use RO Writer’s checklist feature to add a date to jobs that were not performed at this visit. Our AutoVitals system will pick this up and send out Repair Reminders for that job or  include it in the Service Reminder around the date that the job should be done.

Just open the repair order, (1) click the checklist button, then (2) select the job and date of the applicable job:

RO Writer checklist

 

Latest posts by Uwe "Oova" Kleinschmidt (see all)

34.105.50.14