BOLT ON TECHNOLOGY's Mobile Manager Pro offers shops the ability to make the shop management system completely mobile. Users can write up customers at their vehicle, guaranteeing 100 percent accuracy with all information, says the company. Users also have immediate access to repair information and vehicle history for a quick and accurate diagnosis. Mobile Manager Pro can help shops constantly generate higher AROs, get more customers back more frequently and gain the level of productivity to grow business, according to the company.
The review
The automotive business is a relationship business, explains shop owner Bud Wildman of Precision Auto and Tire Center in Germantown, Maryland.
Even in business for 35 years, Wildman says it’s no small task to gain the trust of your customers. But since instating BOLT ON TECHNOLOGY’s Mobile Manager Pro shop management system into his shop five years ago, he’s noticed a substantial improvement in the time it takes to build that trust.
The Mobile Manager Pro operates on a tablet and is handled by technicians on a job, who can document and make notes of needed repairs. This system allows shops to provide customers with a 30-point electronic inspection report, including pictures.
“This accelerates the relationship-based business with our customers because they instantly can see what we’re saying that they need,” Wildman explains. “The trust-bond begins much sooner.”
When Wildman was first entertaining the idea of bringing the BOLT ON management system into his shop, he started with a trial period. For about a week he and one of his senior technicians dove head first into the system. During this period the shop was able to customize their reports in the system to its liking, based on feedback from the trial period, other technicians and even some customers.
“By the time we had finished our first week with using the tablets, all of the rest of the techs were wondering when they were going to get theirs,” Wildman recalls.
The Mobile Manager Pro trumps his shop’s previous paper system, where technicians would have to check boxes and make notes in sometimes unreadable handwriting. The system, which at Precision Auto operate on 10” Samsung tablets, offers the ability for technicians to use talk-to-text. The software even has voice-learning capability to adapt to different voices and accents.
“I’ve been in business for 35 years; probably one of the biggest improvements we’ve made in our business was going to these tablets and having this available to our customers,” Wildmand says. “It allows us to go completely paperless. It allows instantaneous information to be sent to the customer so they can review it and make decisions.”
Furthermore, Wildman says he’s a huge fan of BOLT ON TECHNOLOGY customer support, software writers and overall company culture.
“They are very aggressive. They want to listen to their customers, and they want to continue to build the best product that they can,” Wildman boosts.
In one instance, Wildman went to the company to ask about adding a feature which would allow his technicians the ability to draw on repair photos in order to illustrate and translate issues to their customers. That idea became a feature in the software.
Wildman says if there’s ever an issue, the customer support feature is user-friendly and the response time is on average only a couple of minutes.
"Very rarely do we even have to verbally talk to someone,” he says. “You just pop in your complaint on the screen and they come back and tell you who it is, what they’re doing, what they found [and] whether it’s fixed. After that there is a survey you can take to see how the service was. They’re constantly trying to improve their customer service.”
