What is Shared Customer History and how can it help my business?
The Shared Customer History feature within Tekmetric Multi-Shop allows you to access your customers' entire service history across all shops within your organization, no matter which shop they've been to. This feature provides the following functionality to your service advisors and other employees:
- Visibility into a customer's job history, declined jobs, and inspection history from all shops they've been to in your organization.
- Ability to quickly add declined jobs, past jobs, and past inspections from other shops onto an RO.
- Ability to search for customers/vehicles across all shops within your organization when creating a new RO or Appointment and automatically add those customers/vehicles to your current shop.
All of the above functionality translates into a more efficient and seamless check-in process for your customers. Your service advisors will never again have to switch between different Tekmetric shops in order to access a customer's complete history across shops. They'll never again accidentally try and sell work that's already been completed in another shop or have to ask the customer for their contact information, even though the customer has previously provided it to another shop. Provide the best customer experience possible with Shared Customer History!
How do I gain access to Shared Customer History?
In order to access the Shared Customer History feature, you must be on Tekmetric Multi-Shop. Go here to learn more about Tekmetric Multi-Shop and how to sign up.
How does the feature work?
Check out the quick video below for a high level overview of the feature. For a more detailed explanation, continue reading the rest of this article.
Link Customers Across Shops
To experience the benefits of the feature, you must first do a little bit of work up front to "link" customers across the shops in your organization. For specific customers within a shop, you will have the ability to search across all shops within your organization for potential matches for that customer and "link" them together. Tekmetric uses phone, email, and name to identify potential matches, but it's up to you to make the final confirmation of "yes, these two customers in two different shops are actually the same person." This section will walk through how the linking works.
In the following locations:
- Customer Profile
- Job History table
- Declined Jobs table
- Repair Order
- Summary tab
- Job History table
- Inspection History table
- Inspections tab
- Declined Jobs table
- Inspection History table
- Estimate tab
- Declined Jobs table
- Job History table
You will see a View history from other shops button in the lower left section of each respective location (see below for an example).
If you select this button, Tekmetric will initiate a search across all other shops within your organization for potential matching customers and display those results.
The customer listed at the top of the modal is the customer in your current shop. All other listed customers are from other shops and are potential matches for the customer in your shop. If you want to "link" customers from other shops to the customer in your shop, you can toggle the customer on and select Link and Close at the bottom of the modal. Once that happens, you'll start to see history from other shops (for the linked customers) within the shop you're currently working in. The section below goes into detail on this.
View History from Other Shops
Once you've successfully linked customers from other shops to the customer in your current shop, you'll be able to see history from other shops (for the linked customers). See below for an example within the Declined Jobs section of the Repair Order.
All three declined jobs listed are declined jobs from a different shop than the one that the RO is being worked in. The Shop column on the right indicates that the declined jobs are all from "Adam's Demo Shop."
If needed, you can toggle the visibility of other shop history on/off by using the blue toggle available at the bottom of the table.
If you need to unlink your shop customer from other shops' customers or add more links, you can use the Settings link available at the bottom of the table.
History from other shops can be viewed in the following locations for a customer that has been linked to customers from other shops:
- Customer Profile
- Job History table
- Declined Jobs table
- Repair Order
- Summary tab
- Job History table
- Inspection History table
- Inspections tab
- Declined Jobs table
- Inspection History table
- Estimate tab
- Declined Jobs table
- Job History table
Add Work from Other Shops onto an RO
While working within an RO in your current shop, you can add declined jobs, past jobs, and inspections from other shops onto that current RO, all without leaving the RO itself. In the example below, you can see that by selecting the three-dot menu on a declined job from another shop, there is an available option called Add to Estimate. Selecting this option will add the declined job to the RO currently being worked on within the shop.
Search Across all Shops when Creating an RO or Appointment
Customer Search
When adding a customer on a new RO or Appointment, you'll now see a "Want to see more results?" option at the bottom of the search results drop-down. You can select this option and Tekmetric will kick off a search across all shops for results that match whatever you've already typed in the customer search field.
Your results will display in a modal on top of the form you're working within. In the left panel you'll find all customer search results (with the customer's shop listed), and in the right panel you'll see a list of all vehicles associated with whatever customer you've selected.
If needed, you can edit your search criteria by typing something new in the text field. You can also change what criteria you want to search on by using the drop-down located next to the text field. You can pick between searching on Name, Email, Plate #, VIN, and Phone.
After deciding which customer and vehicle you want to add to the RO or Appointment and hit Select, your selected customer and vehicle will be automatically populated onto the Create RO or Create Appointment form. The customer and vehicle will also automatically be added into the shop and linked to the original customer in the other shop you found them in.
Vehicle Search
When creating a new RO or appointment, if you've selected a customer that is already linked to customers in other shops, you can search for vehicles in other shops that are associated with those linked customers. In the screenshot below, you can see that Clayton Betts is the selected customer on the Create RO form (he's already been linked to other Clayton Betts' in other shops). Within the vehicle drop-down, you can see another "Want to see more results?" option that allows you to expand your results.
When you select this option, the results drop-down will expand and show all "linked vehicles", which are vehicles associated with customers in other shops that are linked to the customer you've selected in the Create RO or Create Appointment form. These are noted with a "Linked Vehicle" label.
If you select one of these vehicles, it will get automatically added to your shop and populated on the Create RO or Create Appointment form.
Duplicate Customer Check Across Shops
When creating a new customer, Tekmetric now searches across all shops within an organization for potential duplicates that may already exist. In the screenshot below, you can see that a potential duplicate customer has been found in "Adam's Demo Shop", which is a different shop than the shop that the user is attempting to create the customer in. If necessary, you can still proceed with creating a brand new customer using the button at the bottom of the modal.
Otherwise, you select the customer from the other shop and hit continue to choose which vehicles to import.
After hitting Continue on the above modal, you'll be taken to another page that lists out all vehicles associated with the customer you've selected that exists in another shop. On this page, you can pick which vehicles you want to import to your shop along with the customer. Once you finalize your selections and proceed, the customer and vehicle(s) will get automatically added to your current shop and the customer will be linked to the original customer from the other shop (meaning their history will be connected).
Frequently Asked Questions:
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Is the linking configuration set at the shop level or organization level? The linking configuration happens at the shop level. Meaning, if I’m a service writer in Shop A and I link Clayton (Shop A) to Clayton (Shop B), this does NOT create the same link within Shop B itself. Service writers in Shop B will have to link Clayton (Shop B) to Clayton (Shop A) separately.
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Is this feature a central database of customers? No, this feature is NOT a central database of customers. Each shop still has its own list of customers. If Clayton has been to Shop A and Shop B, each shop will have its own Clayton customer instance. Shops will have to take action to connect the customer instances - Tekmetric provides them with the ability to do so and gives a list of potential matches based on certain criteria.
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Is centralized MSO customer reporting available at this time? Centralized MSO customer reporting is not provided at this time. All customer reports still live within each shop and do not display history from other shops.
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Will changing a customer's data in one shop change it in any shops that have customers linked? Changing a customer’s data in one shop will NOT change it in all other connected customer instances in other shops.