The latest release allows configuring reference images and default captions for images and notes without forcing the tech to inspect in a specific order. This not only saves the tech and Service Advisor tons of repetitive actions, but it also creates an industry-first.
Episode Transcript
*This transcript was generated using Artificial Intelligence. Errors may occur. If you notice an error, please contact [email protected].
Bill Connor (00:06):
So good morning, good afternoon. I’m Bill Connor and you’ve reached the Digital Shop Talk Radio. Today I have Edgar Reyes from Schertz Auto Service in Texas. He’s the manager there at that location and he has joined us again on this very special topic. Plus we have Uwe AutoVitals, very own Chief Innovation Officer. Today we’re discussing how the latest release of the tablet and so on allows configuration of reference images to fall caption and image caption and notes without forcing the technician to have to enter them manually for each topic as they do ’em. So this not only saves the technician and service advisor tons of repetitive action, it also creates an industry first. So this is something that we’ve had available for a while and now we’ve actually modified it to make it available to even more folks. Our panelists is going to share with you what is their process and their shop, how it’s been evolving over time.
(01:03):
And the digital shop part of it is providing transparency and convenience to the motorists, but we also have it in a way that we really want to save the staff time when they’re doing the inspection, make it consistent and increase the approval rates all at the same time. So that’s a pretty tall topic to go and get done, and it requires teamwork in the shop to provide really great results. You’ll take away some tips today from digital shops just like yours, and as always, you’ll learn from our great panelists that are operating shops just like yours. So if you wouldn’t mind, why don’t you go ahead and get started on this important topic and then we’ll start getting Edgar to go ahead and weigh in here.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (01:43):
Sure. It’s not only close to Bill’s heart, it’s also to mine because over the years we really identified, I would say three main hurdles for a shop to be successful with a digital inspection, more successful than just sending some pictures and those hurdles where and are we don’t have enough time to do the inspection or the other way around. The inspection takes too much time. Customers see technician lingo in the inspection sheet and don’t really know what to do with it because they’re not experts. And last but not least, depending on the time pressure in the shop, the inspection could look different. In other words, there was no consistency and not only across different technicians, even the same technician, if there was time pressure in the shop, cars had to go through the inspection, looked different, less information than when that was not the case.
(03:14):
And what we are discussing today is also, so I should say, and that led us to do what, what’s called guided inspection where we took it all the way to a process and Edgar was going to talk about it, how he applied it in his shop, where the technician is forced to go through a certain procedure. No, you cannot skip items, you cannot jump items and then come back and the guided implementation. And so with this release, we have taken that constraint away that you have to go through the inspection in a certain order. So we give the sharp more freedom and still benefit from all the nice things we’re going to talk about, like captions generated automatically notes, reference images for the tech. And so today we want to talk about how that looks and why it’s so beneficial without turning that into a training session. It’s really focused on the benefits and have Edgar who has implemented it, you tell us how long ago what his experience was, right? So the goal of this podcast is to make you excited about those features and you take the first step because you want to save time and you want to increase the approval rate because no matter how busy your shop are, the quality of the inspection is always going to be top. That’s the promise.
Bill Connor (05:23):
I think, there’s one other important constraint that we’ve taken away by separating it, and that is they no longer have to complete the whole inspection sheet in the guided mode before they can start using it.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (05:37):
So we take away the forced order of topics just to make it easier to ease into a new quality of inspection. But let’s talk about it. Edgar, when you came across it, what were you thinking of using it? And there’s no secret anymore. It takes quite a bit of preparation time.
Edgar Reyes (06:14):
Absolutely. So I’d like to start off by giving a little bit of contrast of what we were seeing before the preparation and then what we’re seeing after the implementation of guided and all the features. So before we had obviously our inspection sheet laid out, technicians were able to go through and mark separate topics as in their own conditions and take pictures, and we had to rely on our technicians being able to remember everything that every picture that we considered mandatory at the time for them to actually remember to take a picture of those items, whether they’re good or bad. In addition to that, sometimes the technician may be looking at something and market a certain condition that we’d like to see an image for, but then he gets pulled away or he gets distracted or something happens and he doesn’t take a picture for it.
(07:15):
So then at that point we’re battling something where yes, the speed of the inspections will come along when you implement these things, but at the same time it’s creating a reminder for your technician. There’s always something there that’ll help your technician be like, okay, so since I selected this condition, I have to take a picture and this is what it expected to look like. So when guided came out, we were looking at it at the time it was all together. If you wanted to use the pre-populated notes and conditions and the reference image you had to use guided, we weren’t very happy about that, but we decided, Hey, the benefit of all these other features offsets the possibility of guided being a bad thing because obviously our shop had never used guided before. We understood what it was there for, but we just didn’t know what it was going to look like in practice.
(08:19):
So obviously you don’t want to make that jump right away, and it was a little bit scary. So we didn’t really want to jump in until we sort of knew what we were stepping into. And then one day we decided, you know what? We just have to try it and see how it goes. So we started the process of getting everybody unguided and the setting up of the pre-populated notes, captions, reference images, anything on any settings on your inspection sheet, it takes time. It really does take time because for every single condition that you have, you have to make some notes, make some captions, add a default picture, and then set your settings to what condition you want it to pre-populate on the inspection sheet where it’s going to land on your prioritization list, if it’s going to be an area of concern, future concern, whatever the case may be.
(09:21):
And you have several different conditions that are fairly specific to what’s going on and your captions and your notes have to reflect that. So it did take a long time. It was John and I who took that on and I think it took us an entire weekend. We didn’t want to work on it while the shop was operating, so it was him and I Saturday, Sunday, all day, and by the time we were done, we were zombies. It was a little hard to walk, but when we started using guided, when we turned guided on and we started seeing how these pre-populated nodes, conditions and captions, how the quality of the image was being impacted, man, was it worth it? It was worth it. You have no idea to start off with technicians don’t have to enter a condition. Then go and make notes as to what’s going on, then take a picture, then add a caption, and if for whatever reason your technicians are not doing that and your advisors or someone in production is handling that, then you take that task away from them where they don’t have to make notes and captions for everything that is in that inspection sheet.
(10:46):
In addition to that, like I mentioned, the quality of the pictures are amazing. We took some great reference photos and we just laid it out. I mean, when the camera opens for the technician, they can see right then and there what that image is expected to look like, how far, how close, what information we want. It’s all right there. They literally have an example on their screen before they take this image, so the quality of the image improves. The technicians don’t have to stop and make notes and captions. Your advisors or your production team doesn’t have to stop and make notes and captions for every single image. It’s already there. If anything, you might need to tweak it every now and then. If there’s something that’s really, really odd, but that rarely happens, it makes it so
Bill Connor (11:39):
You and John pretty much were like chefs. You went into kitchen, you decided what the recipe was going to be. You build it into your inspection sheet, and now everybody that is in your restaurant, so to say, all they have to do is press a few buttons. Now they’ve got the same formula that you’ve designed for the success.
Edgar Reyes (11:57):
Absolutely, yes, yes. So I’m glad you bring that up. So I know before the conversation of being hit by the bus has happened to where, yeah, we have people who if for whatever reason I get hit by a bus tomorrow or tonight going home and then I have to come, someone else has to take over my role tomorrow and be in production, we can make that transition a lot easier because they don’t have to be extremely familiar with building the notes, building the captions, or even really what the standard for the images are because the technicians have that. We have provided so much clarity for our team just based on building this inspection sheet to what it is now that they rarely have any questions. Everything’s pretty self-explanatory, and something that I’d like to add to what Uwe was saying about the three things that all these features we’re looking to improve, which were speed language, the technical language between technician and customer and the consistency of your inspection sheets is we’ve noticed how easy it is for our onboarding process. When I have a new technician, before I had all these features available, it was hard to explain exactly what I was looking for because there were so many variables.
(13:45):
So we have a really good SOP written up for our vehicle health inspection. However, like I said, there’s so many variables that you can’t, that SOP would be endless if I sat there and wrote out everything that we ran into and what we expect to be done. But by building this inspection sheet with all these features with, again, the reference images is probably one of the biggest ones in my opinion. We’re able to onboard these new technicians who have never worked in our shop, who have never worked with a digital inspection platform, and they’re doing our inspections in probably just about as fast a time as one of our more seasoned techs, someone who’s been playing with this inspection sheet for years. So it’s amazing to have that tool for you. It is really the potential for what you can do with your inspection sheet is pretty much endless at this point.
(14:53):
Then the main thing that we really joined or jumped on, the bandwagon on guided for, which gave us the ability to get all these features was actually we were really interested in the carryforward inspection process. Just because having an inspection that is pretty much already built for you on a car that was just here six months ago, then your technician goes through and just rechecks, okay, yes, this is still good, this is still good, this is still good. Oh, you know what? This went from being a minor leak to now it’s leaking fairly severely. We want to move this up from areas of future concern or areas of concern to areas of immediate concern. We can do that. So Carry Forward was a huge selling point for us jumping on this, but in doing that, we discovered the endless potential that we have with all these features being available to us now that they’ve been separated.
(15:52):
I know a lot of people didn’t really like the carry forward idea. Some people didn’t really like the guided idea, which in my opinion, guided is a must have in shops. Again, for the onboarding process, at the very least you have to have it for your onboarding process. Not only that, but it removes so many taps from your technician tablets. You have to think about it. If you’re at a point where your shop is very efficient and you’re just looking to squeeze that couple extra minutes or extra hour out of a technician doing this on your tablet, a lot can take up a lot of time. A lot of tabs equals a lot of time. When you’re able to just tap once on the condition, then hit next and everything happens, you have a pre-populated notes, pre-populated captions, the camera automatically opens for you. You take your picture, you move on to your next topic, and everything happens exactly that way. It’s amazing. You can save so much time, you can squeeze so much more productivity because your technicians save, even if it is those extra minute or two per inspection, think about how much that adds up to throughout the day of someone who’s doing 4, 5, 6, 7, 10 inspections a day and how it adds up throughout the year, how it adds up to what that technician is now able to do with that free time. You
Bill Connor (17:22):
Talked about your service or your technicians helping on the onboarding process. Did you go ahead and help with advisor onboarding also so they have a consistent look to the end user customer right from when you bring ’em in? Can you talk about that a little bit? Did it aid the service writers and getting a consistent story and look for the customer? Also?
Edgar Reyes (17:43):
It did help with the service advisor and it helped them. It helped in two ways. Number one, a service advisor is not someone that necessarily knows a lot about cars. It’s someone who can deal with people very well. So when you get someone that doesn’t know a lot about cars trying to sell something that they don’t know about and having that, like Uwe mentioned, having that translation happen already between your technical lingo and your service advisor, what is actually going to be presented to the customer and explain within your default notes helps tremendously because that service advisor now knows that if something’s being recommended on those notes, it explains why, what caused it and what needs to be repaired. So it’s a little bit of a quick little mini lesson within that inspection and with the onboarding on new advisors. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. It helped us too because a lot of the having consistency and having every technician send in a very consistent similar looking inspection helps the advisor build the confidence to have those conversations with the customer. It educates them with those notes and captions that are already into the inspection sheet, and it just helps them sort of breeze through that inspection a little bit easier and a little bit faster and be able to help get them to focus on other things that they may need help on
Bill Connor (19:22):
To help when the notes are into the inspection sheet, when they come into service writer, they don’t have to approve ’em anymore because if they’re building the inspection sheet and they’re not edited, basically they’re deemed ready for the customer. So it takes some time away from that too,
Edgar Reyes (19:36):
Right? Absolutely, and it goes back to where the tapping with our technicians on their screen is no different inside with how many clicks do you need to do to get through an inspection sheet. When we’re able to have all of those notes and captions already approved, they’re default. We’ve checked the spelling, we’ve checked the grammatic, the grammatical errors, we’ve checked for, make sure that the things that are in there are right and they make sense, they’ve been proven over time, then we don’t need to read each and every single one of them. We can just automatically approve them, save a lot of time, save a lot of clicks, and get our service advisors on the phone with the customer, which is the end goal, right? The end goal is to make sure that you can have that conversation with that customer as quickly as possible. It’s been proven that the faster you have answers for your customer, the more likely they are to approve of any work. So any time saving, whether it is for the technician, advisor, production, whatever the case may be, is huge and it has a huge impact.
Bill Connor (20:51):
You have all those notes pre-populated and they’re going to the customer and the customer is being educated based on the content you send on ’em. Are they arriving to the shop for the service writer? Are they more prepared to engage or is your goal to go ahead and just get them to go ahead and ask questions about what they’re seeing?
Edgar Reyes (21:12):
Absolutely. So I mean, it really varies by customer, depending on what kind of customer they are, A lot of customers will look through that report, they’ll look through it for 20, 30 minutes. They’ll spend a lot of time on that report. They’ll read everything. They’ll look at every image, every video, everything, and when you call them, they’re like, Nope, I already know what I want. I just want pricing on X, Y, Z and get it done. Or you have the customer who will ignore the report until you give ’em a call and they actually view it and you go through it together and then you explain to them everything that’s going on. In some cases, you’re reading off the notes, you’re literally reading off the notes, and once you get through that, there might be a little bit of education that the advisor may have to do, but all the information is in that report already, so there’s no, oh, well let me put you on hold and ask my technician really quick. That is non-existent. You just have the answers right there. You have everything you need right in front of you. You’re going through it with the customer and you’re just ready to go. Of course, those customers are more engaged in what’s going on with their vehicle when they get such a report that’s very thorough in the notes in the captions that has really good images, they’re a lot more engaged because they, you’re walking them through their vehicle and everything that’s going on with their vehicle without them even having to leave their house.
Bill Connor (22:45):
Is there any worries about providing them too much information where you might think that you’re overwhelming ’em every now and then we hear that from people that we’re onboarding, do I really want to go and give all this information to my customer? What’s your thoughts on that?
Edgar Reyes (23:00):
So yes, I agree with that. You can make, because if you have two paragraphs for every single condition you have, you’re going to make that report extremely long and eventually you’re going to get the customer to be disengaged. It all depends on what kind of clientele you have and you have to play to who you have coming into your shop is my number one thing. But yes, I do think that there is such thing as too much information and you need to find that balance with your notes and captions. You want to make sure that you’re not cluttered with too much technical language in there is something that the customer is not understand, but you also don’t want to provide super small details that are going to be pretty much a break lesson on how the whole break system operates just to tell you that your brake fluid is good to go.
(24:00):
It doesn’t make sense. You have to find a balance. You have to find what works and what doesn’t. With your notes a little bit is trial and error. We made that mistake. We had a couple of notes that were a little bit too long and this inspection being a hundred percent editable and customizable is amazing because you find something that’s not working, something that, Hey, you know what? This is not working the way I expected. You can switch it and in a matter of minutes you’re ready to go. Now with something new, something fresh, something better,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (24:35):
I would like to chime in because that’s one of the most important things, right? Yes, you have digital inspection. Yes, you can put a lot of notes in there, but a layman looking at it can feel what? I need to read this, it’s going to take an hour so they won’t read at all, but there’s another, Edgar mentioned it being digital gives you the chance to edit it, and from my perspective, there are two things I would like to point out. Number one, people appreciate the existence of the existence of the information. They not necessarily read it all, but they say the shop took care of explaining it and if I want to read it, I can. There’s an appreciation for the effort by the shop to explain or educate what’s going on. And the second thing is how you structure the nodes helps you tremendously. If the nodes is always structured in a way at the top, this is the need to know and the rest is nice to know so to speak. Then you can really train your customers. If you don’t have much time, just read the first line or whatever it’s or bolded or something like that. So we are going to look at a few notes and maybe check it out. What I’m trying to say is you have the ability to have the customer focus on the first line of the notes, and that is all what’s needed.
(26:36):
So let’s look at the notes. I don’t know, Bill is now the time. I don’t want to interrupt you, Edgar, but it’s now the time to look at real stuff.
Bill Connor (26:47):
Now is definitely the time to look at the real stuff and like I said, I think what Google or what Uwe is alluding to is that we can become the Google for their own personal vehicle based on the exact condition of their vehicle at a fixed point in time. And so that’s what we’ve done and now the customer is going to get to decide how much of that information that they look at. I’m assuming that you could see an inspection sheet and because we have a lot of people that go ahead and listen to the podcast later on rather than see it, I would just want to make sure we go ahead and verbally go ahead and put some descriptions in here.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (27:29):
You have too many screens.
Edgar Reyes (27:31):
Yeah, I know.
Bill Connor (27:34):
Now what did we see?
Edgar Reyes (27:36):
There we go.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (27:37):
That looks great.
Bill Connor (27:39):
Awesome. So what we’re looking at here is an example of an inspection sheet that is a version way above just a red, yellow, green check mark that we used to see in the past, but this is what goes out to shops pretty customers pretty often. You can see here that they’re looking at the cabin air filter, the condition that they’ve tapped on says the cabin air filter is dirty and the recommended action is to go ahead and replace the cabin air filter. They’ve got some more information up in the top here to go ahead and if they want to tap on it, see a video, then we’ve got a nice little picture over here and when I tap on it, I guess I should go over here and tap on it. Basically there’s the cabin air filter with an arrow point to it. This is pretty common until people go ahead and start either using guided or go ahead and putting some guidance in the inspection sheet, and we’re really depending on the customer to know a lot more about their vehicle than what they really have to. Does that kind of make sense? And then we’ve got another one here where it’s on antifreeze. The cooling system fails protection level. They recommend to go ahead and do a cooling system exchange.
(28:54):
And then we’ve got the
Edgar Reyes (28:56):
Replace
Bill Connor (28:57):
Coolant protection
Edgar Reyes (28:58):
To that. To your point, I mean if I’m a customer, I look at that coolant flush picture. I have no idea what that says. I have no idea what that means. It just shows in red. I don’t know why, how or what. So
Uwe Kleinschmidt (29:10):
It relies on the service advisor to walk me through it.
Bill Connor (29:18):
So let’s go ahead and move a little bit differently and let’s go over and I’m going to expand this section here and I’m going to go through the first one here. And you can see that they’re inspecting the warning lights, the check engine lights on, we’ve got the warning light is on. We’ve got a nice little story over here in the notes area that says, check engine light comes on onboard. Diagnostic was detected in malfunction in one of your systems pretty much saying your vehicle’s computer has determined there’s a failure, not the technician. And then we go over and we tap on the picture and now we can see that they’ve got a circled up here. They’ve got the mileage on here and they’ve got a story right here where the customer is looking at the picture. It says the check engine light is on, which indicates vehicle emissions are over where they need to recommended additional time to test and inspect, and the mileage is displayed also.
(30:10):
So if you’re a customer looking at this, there is really much question here, what the light means, what needs to be done about it, and really why you should go ahead and part with your money. We’ll go down and we’re going to look at a similar one here where we’ve got brake fluid. The corrosion level is over a hundred. It’s saying that it needs a flush. We’ve got a note here that says the fluid is very corrosive. We come over to the picture and now we’ve got a good description on the picture itself. And in the past, I’ve had so many people tell me, well, it’s in the note area here. I don’t need to put it on the picture. And my contention is, as far as the customer’s concerned, we’re asking them to go and remember what they’ve read and then come over and correlate it to the picture. So
Uwe Kleinschmidt (30:59):
This, oh, it’s even worse if you on a smartphone and the overwhelming majority uses a smartphone, this picture is going to fill your screen and there’s no place to look at anything else. And then you close it out and then you don’t remember anymore what was in the picture. But the notes should explain it. It should really be on the image. This is, we used to say our job is to make the customer’s thumb to stop the scrolling. And the only way to do that is have interesting pictures, interesting in the sense of educating and not make it hard to find out what the picture means.
Bill Connor (31:50):
So let’s talk about what it took for the technician to actually produce this and for the service writer to deal with it. The technician,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (31:57):
I just want to, for the audience make very clear in case it’s not clear none of this, what you see here in notes and image captions has been tied by the technician at the time of the inspection. It’s all pre-configured and based on the condition, so selecting the condition, pop auto-populates the notes and the image cap you could now ask, so how do I make sure that the technician actually takes an image where the caption actually fits? This is where the reference image comes in, and this is what Bill is about to show us.
Bill Connor (32:49):
So here I want to make sure that like Uwe said, all the technician has done on the inspection sheet, they’re looking at the brake fluid, they see a condition, they tap on it, it automatically puts the correct action or job on it. It automatically adds the notes. They see a reference image and it’s automatically going to go ahead and show them what it’s supposed to look like and pre-populate the notes form on the service advisor. And the things here, if the technician doesn’t modify these notes, the service writer doesn’t have to edit the notes. They might go ahead and put a circle on the picture, but if there’s an arrow there, they may not even have to do that. So this is fully prepared form and ready to go. That kind make sense?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (33:38):
It does to me.
Edgar Reyes (33:40):
And to add to what you’re saying, Bill, is that sometimes the best person to put arrows or any kind of markings on a picture would be the technician. He knows what he’s trying to put out, he understands what he’s trying to point out to the customer. So being able to show that to our customer and when our technician is going through that inspection sheet, automatically be able to make that arrow pop up for him in the screen without him having to do an extra tap. It’s just an awesome tool that AutoVitals provides as well.
Bill Connor (34:13):
And so right now, because this guided mode has been split, what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and just open a repair order and I’m going to go into a inspection and I’m going to go down here and just find a topic we can go and play with. So I’m going to go down to windshield wipers and I’m going to tap on a condition here that says beam style blade is chattering. You can see that it’s already selected a job. You can see that this is lit up green now. So if I tap on this, you can see the notes already been populated where the technician doesn’t have to do anything
Uwe Kleinschmidt (34:49):
But could add other notes, right? If that’s needed,
Bill Connor (34:53):
Absolutely. They can add other notes or they can add, they might put a note here, one wiper blade’s 20 inches and the other one’s 24, or this customer has got an aerodynamic blade on it, that’s aftermarket equipment, whatever. And then when they go to take the picture on here, it’s going to show them a reference of what it is that they should be looking for when they go and tap the picture. And they come down in here, the note area here. Now you can see that the notes have been pre-populated here also. So again, what we’ve tried to do is go ahead and take all the things that really build consistency on the fully guided inspection and make them available in the non guided mode. Also,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (35:45):
Edgar, do you have a sense of how often a technician needs to add a node or will add a node?
Edgar Reyes (35:56):
I am very confident with saying never
(36:02):
Anything that is on our inspection report is very well noted and we have very a lot of conditions within the topics that we have in there, and it’s for that purpose to make sure that our technicians don’t have to go back and spend the extra time. I’d rather spend the time myself setting up a new condition with notes, captions and everything to make sure that when they come across something like that, it’s not something that they need to keep adding notes, captions and anything like that. It is time consuming for the technician and at the end of the day, if I can prevent them from having to spend an extra few minutes making notes, I’ll do it.
Bill Connor (36:45):
So did they come to you and say, I need this condition added, this is what the pictures should look like, this is the job I expect, and then you go ahead and add it yourself, but they participate or you just dream the stuff up on your own?
Edgar Reyes (37:00):
Yeah, no, most of all the conditions that are, so it takes a little bit of the two sides. Sometimes the technicians will see something that they’re running into but not make a correlation that it’s something that is being repeatedly a similar condition across the board. So I would, since I review most of the inspection sheets, I can make that correlation. I can add the item at that time. However, on Slack, which is our method of communication for all the entire company, we actually have a VHI AutoVitals channel in which if any of our technicians, advisors, anybody in our team thinks of a way that we can improve our inspection, whether it be by adding a condition, adding a topic, adding a subject, changing the order of anything that’s in the inspection sheet already, they can go in there, we can discuss it as a group and we can make the changes that we feel are best for the shops.
Bill Connor (38:02):
And so in your case, being a multi shop environment, you make all your changes at one location and it just propagates to the other store?
Edgar Reyes (38:09):
Absolutely. Yeah. You want consistency not just within your shop but across the company, right? So we do a shared inspection. The other shop just gets the updates as they are being made on the one inspection sheet from our original shop.
Bill Connor (38:26):
So Edgar, a question has come in that you could probably talk about a little bit. It says, is this setup captions, et cetera, are they done in the inspection setting and is this available in guided or not?
Edgar Reyes (38:39):
Yes and yes, and I believe that that is a really big talking point about today’s show and if you’re asking the question, I feel like we definitely didn’t explain that well enough. So the setup, it is available in the inspection settings, the guided, is this available without guided? Yes, it is. And that is what this was just shown, and I think we had a new release today. There was the previous release to this is the one that made it available for us to have the guided and all these features separated. You can actually opt in to do guided or not, or you can just set up your default notes and captions without being unguided, which I have a question, why would you not want to be guided? It’s such an amazing tool.
Bill Connor (39:36):
That sounds like a challenge.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (39:39):
I know you’re not supposed to answer a question with another question, but go experience proud technicians responded to guided, you are limiting me and you are putting me in a narrow path. I want to do the inspection the way I want was in no such discussion.
Edgar Reyes (40:12):
So I think there was a little bit of a discussion that was similar to that when we first started and we had guided, we joined with guided and the concern was more so that they want the freedom to make whatever notes they want to make it specific to that vehicle and make it a little bit more personal. I can completely understand that concern and that issue that the technicians have, which goes along the lines of what you were saying where maybe to some extent they did feel like we were limiting them on sharing the knowledge with the customer. However, after having our technicians do a couple of them on guided and seeing what notes are being populated and getting a lot of feedback on them when we are building the notes on if they select a certain condition, what exactly is it that they feel the notes should be worded like it makes it a lot easier for them to get on board with that.
(41:19):
It takes a lot of feedback from your team. If you have someone who was a technician in the past building these inspections, it’s awesome. It makes everything so much faster and easier. But if you have someone who is strictly advisor back from sales background in sales and doesn’t have the technical knowledge to build these notes, you definitely want input from your technicians and that’s where you buy the get your buy-in from your team on why these notes and default notes are will work. And you’re not necessarily limiting them because they can go back and edit them, but they are such great and on point notes that they don’t need to.
Bill Connor (42:00):
We’ve got two questions that come in that I’d like to go ahead and address. One is that where do you add the picture? And in the settings there you can add it there. And then along that goes with that. Some people say, well, where do I get the reference image from? And the best place to get them from is when a inspection is done by a technician and you’ve got a great picture, just hit the button and download it and then put it in there. And then the next thing is was asked is that they wanted to clarify that this is just a reference image that the technician cannot use these and that is correct. They’ll be taking their own picture based on best practice that was already defined by the shop.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (42:39):
Yeah, let me talk about this because that seems from a perspective of let’s make it even easier the next step, how do populated pictures that will violate the integrity of the inspection? Because it’s not that car, it’s not the customer’s vehicle, but the inspection suggests to the customer that is what your vehicle looks like. And we don’t want to violate any inspection report integrity.
Edgar Reyes (43:21):
And I just wanted,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (43:22):
Can we go back to, go ahead Edgar.
Edgar Reyes (43:26):
I just want to clarify one of the questions that came through from Jenna on the how do you upload the reference picture If Bill, you can share your screen so we can show where that button is for upload the image on that screen right below the picture on choose file. You click on that, it opens your file manager for you to be able to select the image that you want uploaded into there, and that will be the reference image that will populate for that condition.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (44:02):
Thank you, Edgar.
Bill Connor (44:04):
And again, now that it’s been separated, there’s a huge advantage to going ahead and working on and building this a little bit of time over time rather than having to build and complete the whole inspection sheet. Before you can start using it,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (44:22):
I would like to cover two things that we are running out of time. One is we have to answer Edgar’s question, why would you not do guided? And the second thing, Edgar, I would love you to give a recommendation for everybody who is interested in doing it. Are you recommending the pizza weekend and becoming a zombie or are there other ways of in smaller steps or I mean, what’s your recommendation of
Edgar Reyes (45:06):
So absolutely, I do believe there are smaller steps you can take and break this up into a smaller task and not be a zombie after working an entire weekend. However, at the time John and I said, Hey, we’re going to do this. We’re going to do it 100% and we’re going to go from zero to 100 in a matter of a weekend. So we took it upon ourselves to make that happen, but you don’t necessarily need to do that. If you were to break it down into smaller tasks, I would focus on things that you know want on every single inspection, which would be your list of mandatory pictures. For example, for us, some of our mandatory pictures are we take fluid samples of everything and it’s included in a fluid tray. There’s a fluid tray condition, and I would pre-populate notes, captions and put a reference image on that.
(45:57):
Same thing with our battery tests. We take pictures of our battery terminals, the registration sticker, oil change reminder sticker, and I would start off with basically just everything that you expect to see in every single inspection. Those would be your main ones to tackle because if you’re going to see ’em in every single inspection, you want to make sure that those are done right and they’re done to the standard that you expect every single time. Then from there, you just prioritize based on what you see. In my opinion, I would prioritize it based on what you see used more often that way the things that are constantly in your inspection report that you have that information, you have that standard that you are able to build your inspection sheet to provide amazing quality to all of your customers. So it’d be a matter of prioritizing what is used the most and taking it from there. And I would definitely suggest starting with the things that are mandatory on every single inspection,
Bill Connor (47:01):
Would you wait to go ahead and start using this until you had a reference image or would you get the text in there and then add the reference images as you discover and come along them?
Edgar Reyes (47:11):
So there’s a couple of different ways, in my opinion. I have, we have a production team who handles all the inspection, editing, and estimate building. So we’re able to, as we go find these good pictures, the pictures that we have already shown to be good quality and what we expect to see in every inspection. So you can just go back through inspections you’ve done in the past, which is what we did, and get the reference images from old inspections or you’re absolutely right, you don’t necessarily have to have the reference image to when you set this up. I think it would be best if you did, but that’s just my opinion and you can definitely gather them as you go. Like I said, it doesn’t take long to add that reference image and it doesn’t take long to bleed down onto your team. So yeah,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (48:14):
I would also say there is a slide risk that the nodes, the captions don’t match the picture if you don’t upload them together,
Edgar Reyes (48:28):
Right, right. Yeah. If you have a default note or a default caption and your image is way off base from what you’re showing, then your notes and captions don’t make sense and then instead of creating trust and creating a good quality inspection, you end up shooting yourself in the food because a customer might catch it and be like, Hey, this doesn’t add up. What else doesn’t add up?
(49:02):
Oh yeah, absolutely. Yes. For those of you who don’t know, the question just came in of do we have multiple images depending on the caption slash condition? Yes. For example, if I have a condition on the wiper blades and we have one that’s labeled wiper blades are streaking and I have a reference image of a torn wiper blade, it doesn’t provide any value to our technician. So depending on the condition that is being selected, you definitely want to have a reference image that’ll match that condition. So being able to do that for each and every condition is an awesome tool and you have to be able to make sure that you match what you are describing in the notes to what you’re actually taking a picture of. And having different reference images will provide you the best results on your inspection sheets.
Bill Connor (50:00):
So an example might be is I just finished up an inspection sheet that I was working on. It had 50 different topics on it. It had 253 different conditions on it. So it has 253 different condition notes, caption notes, and also 253 different image reference images,
Edgar Reyes (50:23):
And that’s where the time consuming part kicks in. But you don’t have to be crazy and do it all in one weekend. It’s okay. You can keep your sanity. I guess
Bill Connor (50:33):
Zombie mode is not required.
(50:35):
It used to be required because you used to have to have your inspection sheet completely filled out in guided mode before you could efficiently use guided. So right now I can think of a lot of excuses for a shop not to use either the guided mode or the reference images and notes in the regular inspection, but I can’t think of one single valid reason why they shouldn’t do it, especially when you look at things in the eyes of the end user consumer. We want to educate them and then let them come to us and we’re putting in a position to buy rather than having to go ahead and wave arms and sell to ’em.
Edgar Reyes (51:20):
Yep. I saw a comment there come up that says that pizza isn’t enough. You’re right, you need a lot of Red Bulls too. I’m just kidding.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (51:34):
But it pays off, right? I mean, is there any, let’s say quantitative benefit, you could, I mean at least guesstimate Edgar,
Bill Connor (51:51):
Your return on investment for zombie mode. What did you get in return for yourself and the staff?
Edgar Reyes (51:57):
My time for editing and inspection, and because I save so much time in editing and inspection, I save a lot of time in building estimates, which turns into having answers for every single one of my customers faster. And the quality in the inspection itself is a lot better. What that translates to is our customers have a very high sense of trust in our shop, in our advisors, in our technicians, they come in, they are very well informed because the notes and captions and images on our inspection sheet are so thorough and so high in quality that at the end of the day it can easily result and has resulted in higher approvals, higher ARO, bigger sales and better efficiency in the shop. The technicians.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (53:03):
Can you quantify it a little bit? I mean, how fast is the inspection? Do you even have an approval rate increase? You can quantify. I mean if you don’t, it’s not make stuff up, but from your experience over time.
Edgar Reyes (53:20):
So I don’t have numbers for ARO number, even approval. However, for our inspection time, we were somewhere we were before we were probably about 35 minutes per inspection. Now we’re down to about 15 to 20 minutes depending on the vehicle and the condition of the vehicle’s in 15 to 20 minutes per inspection. So we’re saving a lot of time on inspection. Wow, that’s
Bill Connor (53:47):
Amazing. And so you’re saving that on a technician end. Is there savings time-wise on the service advisor end also, how about your editing time?
Edgar Reyes (53:55):
So it’s more so on the advisors, not so much. We have a production team that takes care of the editing and estimate build. So that’s where we’re seeing the time savings and yes, you’re absolutely right. We’re going from editing an inspection in before we were probably spending about 10 minutes editing each inspection and now it really takes about five minutes. So we’ve been able to cut the editing, the inspection sheet in half the time it takes to edit that inspection sheet in half just by having all these pre-populated notes, captions and having them be approved when they come through.
Bill Connor (54:37):
Amazing. You got about three minutes left. You want go ahead and give your top three things that a shop should go ahead and start doing this afternoon?
Edgar Reyes (54:48):
Absolutely. It’s hard to pick just three. There’s a lot that I think a
Bill Connor (54:54):
Lot before you got three minutes, however many you can get in there.
Edgar Reyes (54:57):
I feel like there’s a lot that we can start doing to get the ball rolling, but if I had to pick my top three, I have to say you have to start building these notes, captions, and reference images into your inspection sheet. We were saying earlier, since you don’t have to have the guided feature married to this, you don’t have to make big changes, but the quality and the time it’s going to take for you to make those notes is going to completely offset in the long run. The amount of time that you technicians spend making those notes, making those captions, I would suggest that you start gathering, building a small file of all the reference images that you’d like to have on the inspection report. It’s going to save a lot of time when it comes time to actually jump in, dive into the deep end and getting all of that done.
(56:01):
When you have all the reference images already in there already saved somewhere in a file, it’s great. And start gathering the notes that your technicians make already. If there’s notes that as your technicians go through their inspection, they’re constantly making a note, maybe you want to think about saving that note and having it somewhere so that when you do start building your pre-populated notes and conditions, they’re all ready to go. You have something to go based off of and you can do something as simple as copy and paste. And probably the last thing is you really need to start thinking about guided and how you can utilize it more so than just on your inspection sheet. It’s going to save a lot of time for your tech, but it’s going to make your onboarding process a lot easier. Keep that in mind too.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (56:51):
Good.
Bill Connor (56:52):
Awesome. So Edgar, I’d like to sincerely thank you for joining us today. You shared a lot of really great information and you guys got some really good operation. So you’re basically setting the goal up there. Pretty good for everybody, but it’s easily doable following your process for sure. I’d like to thank you for joining us today. I’d like to go ahead and encourage those of us that are listening in to share this podcast with others out there in the marketplace. Maybe you’ve got another shop owner around you that’s struggling a little bit. You don’t have to give them all your secrets, but again, we want to help go ahead and lift the industry up as a whole so we don’t have a lot of low price leaders in your particular trade area. So once again, I’d like to go ahead and thank everybody you can find us on by [email protected] slash radio. Join us live where you can ask your questions live or go ahead and look for us on your favorite podcast platform by searching for the digital shoptalk radio and listen in. And if you go to AutoVitals.com/radio, there’s a whole warehouse full of prior episodes in there for some really sharp shop owners. So once again, go out there and make some money and while your customers thank you.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (58:07):
Thank you. Thanks Edgar.
Edgar Reyes (58:09):
Absolutely. Thank you guys. Awesome
Bill Connor (58:11):
Job. Thank you.