In this day and age, most people have cellphones and prefer to get texts during the work day. And so, Tekmetric gives the ability to send inspections and estimates via text or email.
Consider the following scenario: your service writer finishes putting together an extensive estimate and calls the customer to review the estimate, but ends up leaving a voicemail. Before you know it, it has been several hours and your service writer got busy and forgot to follow-up with another phone call and now needs to wait till the following day to reach back out. Imagine if he sent a text or email with a link to the inspection results and estimate.
The customer would review it on their own time, process the findings and estimated services, give you the okay by approving the estimate through the link As a result, vehicles are no longer sitting on the lift or worse, they have to be reassembled while they're waiting, no blockage in the shop workflow, and you give a better customer experience.
With the Digital Signature feature, you are able to authorize repair orders efficiently and keep an audit log of approval and signature history.
Digital Signature Process
Simply navigate to the Job Board > Repair Order > Estimate Tab and make sure that the estimate is ready to share with the customer. Then you can simply select the green Authorize button at the bottom of the repair order.
From the authorization screen, you will be able to see the estimate and all the information available to readily view. You can expand each section to see the related details such as the name of the shop, customer, vehicle, RO number, and client concerns. The level of detail shown here can be configured in your transparency settings.
Note: The screen you see when you select Authorize (shown below), is the exact same screen your customers see when you digitally share estimates with them.
Approving the Work
Once the customer has reviewed the work, they can either approve or decline the job(s). You can also select what method of authorization that you want to use. You have the ability to select between the following options and then authorize the repair order to show up in the Work-In-Progress section. To do this, simply select the dropdown arrow by the method.
- Digital Signature - signature on the repair order.
- Paper Signature - prints out a PDF of repair order.
- Verbal In-Person - customer completes at the counter.
- Phone Call - call customer directly over the phone.
- Text Message - send text message to customer.
- Email - send the customer an email.
Note: Navigate to Shop Settings > RO Settings > Advanced Settings and you can enable or disable the "Require Digital Signature for Digital Authorization" and make this a requirement on all repair orders. Please note that individual authorization types (such as Phone Call or Text Message) cannot be disabled; the only configurable advanced setting for this process is the digital signature requirement.
Authorization History
Once the customer has approved and authorized the work, there will be point-in-time records of all authorizations on your Summary tab. You can download carbon copies of what was approved at that point in time.
FAQs for Authorization
How do I un-authorize a job or undo an authorization? You can do so by navigating to the repair order and un-approving the job by clicking the green "thumbs up" icon. This will then allow the job to be re-opened.
Is there a way to reverse an authorization and decline the job? Yes! You can remove any approved job within the RO. Then if the job needs to be declined you can do so on behalf of the customer or the customer can decline one the estimate is sent.