A photo of the dashboard with the booking
Customers attach a photo of the warning light when they book.
The daily friction
What actually goes wrong in diagnostics and auto electrics
The same afternoon, twice. The first customer arrives 15 minutes late.
Back to back
Every customer after him starts 15 minutes late
With 15 minutes of margin
The margin absorbs the delay, the next car starts on time
A warning light tells you nothing on the phone
Diagnosis and repair are not the same booking
Intermittent faults come back
Details
- A warning light tells you nothing on the phone
- “There is a light on the dashboard” could be a loose fuel cap or a failing injector. You cannot plan the time from a description, so you either block too much of the day or too little, and you only find out which once the car is already in.
- Diagnosis and repair are not the same booking
- Reading the codes and testing takes half an hour. Replacing an alternator or tracing a wiring fault takes the afternoon. When both sit under one booking, the day is planned around a length nobody knew, and every car after it waits.
- Intermittent faults come back
- The same car returns three months later with the same symptom. Which codes did you read last time, what was replaced, at what mileage? If that lives in your memory or on a printout, you start the diagnosis again from zero, and the customer pays for it twice.
How it works here
The fault on record, before you plug in
Most lost time in diagnostics comes from information in the wrong place: on the phone, on a printout, in someone's memory. Putting it with the booking and on the customer's record fixes most of it.
Details
- A photo of the dashboard with the booking
- When you turn the option on, your booking page asks for an optional photo. A customer with a warning light sends it with the booking, and you see which light it is before the car arrives, instead of guessing from a description.
- The diagnosis booked apart from the repair
- Create the diagnosis as its own short service, with its own price. Once you know the fault, the repair is booked as a separate service at its real length, so the afternoon is planned around facts rather than a guess.
- Every car's history on his record
- Each customer's cars stay on his record with make, model, year, VIN, fuel and the mileage at every visit, next to his booking history and your own notes: the codes you read, the readings you took, what you replaced. When the fault comes back, you start from there.
- The repair booked before he leaves
- The calendar shows what is free, booked and blocked for each technician. Once the diagnosis is done, you book the repair on the spot at its real length, and the customer gets a confirmation and a reminder like for any other booking.
An illustration
What booking a guess costs over a year
One technician. Twice a week, a car booked as “a warning light” turns out to need far more or far less time than the slot it got.
2h
hours lost to reshuffling the day each week
~100
hours over a year
most
of that avoidable with a photo first and the diagnosis booked apart
An illustration, not a measurement. Your own numbers depend on the jobs you take, how customers describe faults and how you split diagnosis and repair.
Questions