Why can't manual methods keep up in auto repair shops?

Without real-time reporting tools, inventory counts and gross profit can’t necessarily be trusted and will always provide an out-of-date view of your business at best. ... manually calculating daily, weekly, or monthly metrics can quickly become a headache with much larger room for human error.

What business goals does Tekmetric's shop management product help achieve?

A bird’s eye view of the shop gives shop owners the power to tailor their business plan and strategy by: - Adjusting parts and labor matrices to maximize margins - Extending or removing a running promotion - Deciding to add more people to the team - Knowing when it’s the right time to expand the business with new bays or by opening a new location

What capabilities does Tekmetric Marketing provide?

Standardize your inspection first. Set one default DVI template so every vehicle at every location gets the same thorough treatment. Align pricing and canned jobs so the same repair costs the same across shops. Connect customer history so any location can recognize and serve a returning customer. Standardize communication so approvals, estimates, and updates feel the same everywhere.

Introducing Tekmetric Marketing: Keep Customers Coming Back, Automatically

Tekmetric Marketing is a new automated tool introduced by Tekmetric designed to help automotive shops retain customers by personalizing marketing efforts and driving repeat business, as highlighted in their September 2025 blog post by Matt Lerner.

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Join 1,000+ industry leaders at Tektonic 2027. Early bird pricing is now open.

See how Metro Motor grew their average repair order to $800 across 19 shops with Tekmetric

Under the Lift: Stories from the Automotive Frontier (New Episode)

Tekmetric Community

Introducing Tekmetric Marketing: Keep Customers Coming Back, Automatically

Matt Lerner

September 30, 2025

Read time: 4 min

Play / PAUSE audio blog

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More Cars. Higher ARO. Steady Repeat Business.

Every repair order holds untapped potential. A declined brake job today can turn into tomorrow’s revenue. A routine oil change can become the start of a long-term relationship.

Tekmetric Marketing makes sure those opportunities don’t slip away. Customers can schedule online 24/7, filling bays while you sleep. Automated reminders cut down on no-shows and keep the calendar steady. Follow-ups on declined jobs and maintenance turn “not today” into approved work. Seasonal campaigns help you bring customers back when business slows.

And if your shop doesn’t have a website, Tekmetric can build one for you, giving customers one more way to find you, book online, and keep your bays full.

As Ryan Froats of Yorktown Auto Care put it:

“As an independently-owned shop, dedicating resources towards outreach and follow-up can be challenging. Tekmetric Marketing allows me to communicate with my customer base in a variety of ways, without tying up hours of my work week.”

That’s the difference between a full schedule and an empty bay. Between a one-time job and a loyal customer.

Turn Great Service Into Lasting Loyalty

Great service doesn’t stop when the car leaves the bay. Tekmetric Marketing makes it really easy to keep the relationship going. Post-visit follow-ups that check in with customers after service, showing you care and helping you catch issues early. Review requests that boost your reputation on Google, making it easier for new customers to find and trust you. Private feedback that gives you valuable insights to improve service and address concerns before they go public

Together, these touchpoints build trust, strengthen relationships, and turn satisfied customers into loyal advocates.

One Platform. No Missed Messages.

Because Tekmetric Marketing lives inside Tekmetric, all customer communication flows through one platform – from estimates and approvals to reminders, follow-ups, and promotions. No more bouncing between systems or wondering what’s been sent. Everything is tied to the customer profile, making communication clear, consistent, and professional.

Tekmetric Marketing also works in sync with your shop’s calendar, repair orders, and payments. Bookings instantly block off availability. Reminders align with scheduled work. Everything just works without syncing headaches or double entry.

And here’s the best part: Tekmetric Marketing is designed for busy shop owners and front office staff. It’s easy to set up, runs automatically in the background, and helps you grow your business without adding more to your to-do list – or requiring a marketing degree.

As Corey Hansen of Hansen Auto Repair shared:

“It’s so convenient having everything in one place, right inside Tekmetric. I already have Tekmetric open for managing the shop and invoicing, so I don’t have to switch tabs or log into something else to engage with my customers. Having it all together just makes things faster—and for me, saving time is huge.”

Auto Repair. Done Right.

Tekmetric has always been the all-in-one platform that helps shops run better — from managing repairs to taking payments. Now, with Tekmetric Marketing, it’s also the platform that helps you grow faster, keep customers loyal, and deliver a better experience at every turn.

Turn every visit into the next one. With Tekmetric Marketing, it happens automatically.

👉 Ready to grow your automotive business? [Book a personalized Tekmetric Demo Here]

FAQ

Prasanth Chilukuri understands the challenges that shop owners face each day with gaps in their efficiency and margins, which is why he co-founded Tekmetric with Sunil Patel in 2016.

Vehicle Service Pros published some of Prasanth’s tips for strategically growing an auto repair business with a shop management system like Tekmetric.

You can access his full piece here , or check out some of the highlights below.

Balance Is Key to Making Better-Informed Business Decisions

Shop owners make countless daily decisions that affect their customers, their team, and their business.

Making good business decisions is essential to keeping everyone happy and keeping the lights on in the shop, but how do you know what the right decision is?

According to Prasanth, the key to any successful business is finding the right balance between soft skills like intuition or relationship-building and hard skills like data analysis.

Both types of skills are important, but knowing when to employ each one is the trick to making better-informed decisions and growing your business.

Intuition is useful when shop owners have to make split-second decisions and often goes hand in hand with interpersonal skills. The auto repair industry isn’t just about cars, after all; it’s about people, too.

By learning how to pick up on cues and anticipate the needs of customers, employees, and vendors, shop owners can foster long-lasting relationships that grow alongside their business.

Of course, there’s only one way to know whether your shop is truly turning a profit: look at the numbers and analyze the results. Data can support any hunches you have about the health of your business, for better or for worse, so you can plan accordingly.

But if your shop is still tied to manual methods, gathering key information about parts usage and labor costs is probably not easy or convenient.

Why Manual Methods Just Can’t Keep Up

A shop management system might not be able to make business decisions for you, but it can help shop owners make sense of their key metrics and data. According to Prasanth, looking at the cold, hard facts is essential to boost the efficiency and profitability of the shop.

The science of data might seem contrary to the art of intuition at first, but they’re more related than you might think. As Prasanth describes, data can add support to a shop owner’s intuition or observations and reveal key information that can’t necessarily be gathered from conversations with customers and employees.

Unfortunately, trying to sort through the shop’s data by hand can be exhausting and often means missing family dinners to crunch the numbers after hours. And manually calculating daily, weekly, or monthly metrics can quickly become a headache with much larger room for human error.

Without real-time reporting tools, inventory counts and gross profit can’t necessarily be trusted and will always provide an out-of-date view of your business at best.

Being tied to manual processes for data collection also means being tied to the shop and losing out on valuable face-to-face time with the customers supporting the business.

As a result, shop owners are often left making the difficult decision between nurturing their intuition and building relationships, or focusing on the data and shop profitability when both are essential to the long-term success of the business. With Tekmetric, you can do both.

Get the Full Picture With Tekmetric

Tekmetric is a shop management system that comes fully equipped with business reporting tools within a repair orders software suite.

Tekmetric tracks key performance indicators like employee efficiency, parts usage, and profitability ‘round the clock so shop owners can focus on the more high-level aspects of their business.

Real-time reports are always available with numbers that are already calculated and organized.

A bird’s eye view of the shop gives shop owners the power to tailor their business plan and strategy by:

Adjusting parts and labor matrices to maximize margins
Extending or removing a running promotion
Deciding to add more people to the team
Knowing when it’s the right time to expand the business with new bays or by opening a new location

Thought Leadership

Scaling Your Auto Repair Business With Real-Time Reports

March 24, 2022

Read time: 4 min

A customer trusts your shop. They've been coming for years. They know the waiting room. They trust the advisor who always explains things clearly. They never worry about the estimate.

Then they move across town, stop into your newest location, and it is a different experience altogether. The inspection isn't the same. There are pricing discrepancies among shops. And, perhaps worst of all, an advisor might have no idea they're dealing with a loyal customer.

That's the hidden cost of growth. Every location that is added is another chance for the customer experience to shift, and customers notice changes fast. For multi-shop operators, a consistent customer experience isn't a branding nicety. It's the thing that lets a customer trust the name on the building instead of the people inside it.

Consistency for customers: A consistent customer experience across locations means every shop delivers the same inspection process, pricing logic, communication, and recognition of a returning customer, regardless of which location they visit. It's achieved by standardizing workflows and centralizing customer data on one platform, rather than relying on each location to run things its own way.

Why consistency gets harder with every location you add

At one shop, consistency is almost automatic. You set the tone, you know the regulars, and your team absorbs your standards by working next to you. None of that scales. At three or five or 10 locations, the owner can't be everywhere, tribal knowledge doesn't transfer, and each shop starts developing its own way of doing things.

The drift is rarely dramatic. It's a technician at one location skipping a courtesy inspection step. It's one advisor quoting brakes $40 higher than another. It's a returning customer being treated like a stranger because their history lives at a different store. Individually small. Collectively, they add up to customers who can't predict what they'll get, and unpredictability is the opposite of trust.

The four places customer experience breaks first

When experience drifts across locations, it almost always starts in the same four places. Fix these and you've fixed most of the problem.

1. The inspection

The digital vehicle inspection (DVI) is where customers form their opinion of your shop. It's the moment they see what's wrong with photos and video instead of taking your word for it. If one location runs a thorough inspection with images and another does a quick once-over, customers get two completely different impressions of how careful your brand is. Standardizing the inspection is the single highest-leverage consistency move a multi-shop operator (MSO) can make. See how a strong DVI strategy drives approvals and trust.

2. Pricing and the menu of jobs

Nothing erodes trust faster than a customer discovering the same repair costs more at one of your locations than another. When labor rates, parts pricing, and common ("canned") jobs are set independently at each shop, that gap is inevitable. Consistent pricing logic across locations keeps a customer from feeling penalized for walking into the wrong door.

3. Customer history and recognition

Customers expect the businesses they frequent to remember them. Every major retailer can see what you bought and where, no matter which store you walk into. Auto repair customers have the same expectation now. If a loyal customer's records are trapped at the location where they were created, your newest shop can't see the declined brake job from last spring or the maintenance that's now due. Shared history is what lets any location pick up the relationship where the last one left off. Learn how Shared Customer History works.

4. Communication

How you reach customers, texts for approvals, inspection links, status updates, sets the tone for the whole visit. If one location texts photos and estimates within minutes and another still calls and describes problems over the phone, customers experience two different service standards under one brand. Consistent communication templates and channels keep the voice of your business the same everywhere.

How multi-shop software makes consistency the default

Here's the shift: consistency shouldn't depend on every location choosing to do the right thing. It should be built into the system they all work in. That's what a true multi-shop platform does. It turns your standards into settings, so the right way is simply the way the software works.

With Tekmetric Multi-Shop, operators standardize DVIs, canned jobs, pricing, and discounts across every location from one place, so a repair order opened at any shop starts from the same playbook.

Shared Customer History connects customers across shops, so any location can view a customer's full history, declined jobs, past service, contact info, without re-entering it or treating them like a first-timer.

And because everything runs on one login with a portfolio-wide dashboard, owners see how each location is actually performing in real time, not just revenue, but the operational habits that shape the customer experience. When a location starts to drift, you can see it and coach it before customers feel it.

Why it matters: Standardization isn't about making every shop identical for its own sake. It's about making a promise to customers, the same care, the same clarity, the same recognition, that holds no matter which of your locations they choose. That promise is what turns multiple shops into one trusted brand.

What it looks like when it works

Leroy Ingram, who runs Ooroo Auto Care, put the visibility side of it plainly:

"Now I can look at everybody at a glance. I can be in a different state, different city and know exactly what's going on in each location all the time. That's not something I had before."

— Leroy Ingram, Ooroo Auto Care

That's the operational backbone of consistency: when an owner can see every location clearly, standards stop being a hope and start being something you can actually manage.

Where to start

You don't have to fix everything at once. If you're feeling the drift, start with the highest-impact standard and work down.

Standardize your inspection first. Set one default DVI template so every vehicle at every location gets the same thorough treatment.
Align pricing and canned jobs so the same repair costs the same across shops.
Connect customer history so any location can recognize and serve a returning customer.
Standardize communication so approvals, estimates, and updates feel the same everywhere.

Do those four things and you'll close most of the customer experience gaps between your best location and your newest one.

Customer Experience

How to Deliver a Consistent Auto Repair Customer Experience Across Every Location

September 1, 2026

Read time: 6 min

When you started your auto repair business, you probably had to make some big investments, including property, equipment, and employees. Now, to take your shop even further, you might be considering investing in a shop management system.

A shop management system can quickly transform your shop. An ideal system helps you create more efficient workflows and keep track of critical metrics so you can make savvier business decisions.

However, the idea of transformation can cause some doubts. You might be worried that your team might not even like using the shop management system, that adjusting to change will take too long, and that the software ultimately won’t end up paying for itself.

To eliminate doubts, it’s important to find the shop management system that will:

Transform your shop with little hassle, as quickly as possible
Inspire your team to work more efficiently
Grow your business’ profitability so that the investment is more than worthwhile
Free up your time

So, what’s the best software for auto repair shop owners? And what features should you look for? Here’s what you should be considering as a shop owner.