Here is the path a single customer took through my shop. One customer, ordinary day, nothing on fire.
It started with a message. Facebook, Instagram, email, or the contact form on the website. We answered on whatever channel they used, and from that moment there was no easy way to track that person going forward. We had a CRM. It was overly complicated, and we entered customers into it sometimes, meaning when somebody remembered and when the customer looked likely to actually buy.
If they did come in and buy, we typed their information again into our point of sale. Ours had a schedule built into it, which put us ahead of plenty of shops, because a lot of point of sale software does not, and then the appointment gets keyed a third time into Google Calendar or whatever else is being used that year.
Then we had to remember to remind the customer about the appointment. There was nothing automatic about it. Someone had to look at tomorrow, pick up the phone, and do it.
The vehicle arrives. Now the vehicle information goes into our quality control software. Another screen, another keyboard, the same customer.
Car is done. We contact them by hand to tell them. Back to the point of sale to finish the invoice. Then a separate piece of software to send the review request. Then, if we remembered and if they had opted in, the email address went onto the mailing list.
Count the systems. Count how many times one person’s name and email got typed by hand. That is one customer.
We made mistakes with it, sometimes daily. What made them expensive is that they were not dramatic. A transposed character in an email address does not announce itself. Nothing bounces onto anybody’s desk. The reminder does not go out. The review request goes nowhere. Six months later you want to tell that customer about something and the address in the file has been wrong since the day it was written down. You never learn about it. You just quietly stop hearing from somebody who liked the work you did.
Then multiply that by every job in the building that week.
I did 29 years on my side of the counter, and the retyping was the one thing I could never fix with better discipline. Discipline is not the problem when the same data has to be entered five times by hand. The platform (or lack of a platform) is the problem.
That is precisely why I built 1sixty8 Manifold. One platform that carries a customer from the first contact through to the review request: the inquiry, the customer record, the appointment, the reminder, the quality control, the invoice, the review request, the mailing list. Entered once. Nobody retypes anything, so there is nothing to retype wrong.
What that buys you is time, and it is a lot of time. But the bigger thing is reliability. You know the reminder went out. You know the review request went out. You know the email address in the file is the one the customer gave you, because it arrived the way they typed it.
And it puts your attention back on the work in the bay and the person standing in front of you. That was always the part I was good at, and it was always the part the data entry took away from.
If you want to see what that one path looks like in 1sixty8 Manifold, send me a note and I will walk you through it, one customer, start to finish.