Service Manager™

Service Manager™
The Service Manager™ merchandises service sends thank you notes, service reminders and promotional mailings in letter or post card format. The letters are ready to be signed and put into standard business window envelopes.

The Service Manager™ makes customer follow-up and service record keeping automatic. The information comes directly from the Computerized Automotive Repair order System. (Without C.A.R.S., the information is entered manually.) The system will produce service reminders automatically after the appropriate amount of time for up to 20 service categories. (Of course, you decide what amount of time is appropriate.) The appropriate amount of time can be different for vehicles which are used differently. For example, squad cars need to be serviced at different time intervals than private autos. Private autos need to be serviced at different time intervals than delivery trucks. Each type of vehicle needs a unique service schedule and the system can handle it.

The system keeps vehicle maintenance records by date, mileage and employee. It also tracks how much the owner has spent on servicing each vehicle. When used with C.A.R.S., the system monitors the number of vehicles serviced by each employee and how many jobs in each category that each employee does. You will use some categories to track repetitive maintenance items like oil change and tire rotation, and to send service reminders for those categories. You might use other categories to monitor once-in-a-lifetime services like lifetime shocks. Other categories can be used to monitor periodic services, like air filter service, which are important enough to monitor but not worth sending a reminder.

The system also keeps vehicle information such as VIN, Engine, License, etc. and allows you to store "Private" notes about each vehicle and its owner. The information can be retrieved by the customer's name, license, VIN, home phone or work phone. The report generator can print a complete or partial customer list selecting from practically any information contained in the customer files. Unwanted information may be excluded.

When you want to feature a service to bring in business you can target your promotional mailings to specific customers. For example, you could have the system find all customers with vehicles that have more than 36,000 miles on the odometer and have not had transmission service in the past 18 months. You can have the system print out a letter or post card telling the owner of this special service package, or print mailing labels to use on flyers, or print a phone list of the customers to call. The system can also produce a promotional mailing using a special format for your message that would suggest the services which are currently needed on each vehicle.

The system's ability to automatically delete vehicles that have not been in for service in a long time is the key to the system's self-managing ability. (Of course, you decide what a long time is; 15 months, 2 years, 12 years, whatever you wish.) This eliminates the dozens of hours of work necessary to keep less sophisticated systems neat, orderly and up to date.

The Manager's Assistant™ bookkeeping system supplements the employee service information produced by the Service Manager™. The Service Manager™ works directly with C.A.R.S. Computerized Automotive Repair order System and vice-versa.