3 AI Workflows That Actually Make Your Shop Money While You Sleep

**[00:00:00]** Welcome to the web talk show. Today we're discussing three AI workflows that actually make your shop money while you sleep. Now, before we just get into everything, I'm going to briefly tease what we're going to be talking about. So, we're going to talk about proactive customer communication, intelligent diagnostics, and upselling as well as some operational intelligence. And this may sound complex and highly difficult, but it's not. At the end of the day, we are going to be talking about practical uses of AI in your auto shop to make it more efficient, to get your customers to keep coming back, to keep them happy, and also to keep your employees and your staff happy, and of course you as a shop owner as well. So, welcome to the show. If you're watching on YouTube, please leave your comments in the chat. I will have the chat open right here. If you are on X or LinkedIn, leave your questions there as well. and we'll see if they come up. Supposed to bring them up here as well. At least the X ones should. So, please leave any comments. You have any questions, comments, concerns, or anything during the live stream because we're live. I'll be happy to answer them during the call. So, last time we were talking about voice AI receptionist specifically. So having a voice AI agent that can take your calls and book appointments, give out pricing, services, costs, status of your vehicles, etc. so that your front-end staff can get uh more time to work on things that might be a little more important or even just getting some of the pressure off because they might be drowning in too many calls and they cannot get to the calls and you're losing **[00:02:00]** customers because of it. So, voice AI agent very practical use case for a shop so that you actually get those bookings in the schedule, get those appointments set and answer everyone's questions without having to have people waiting on hold. Today though, we're talking about a little bit of a different side of things. Still AI related, still autoshop related, but if you have any sort of service business, it will apply the same way. Just the examples today are going to be for auto shops. But even if you have an auto detailing business, a diesel engine repair business, or anything like that, this will apply just the same. So, we're going to th cover the three areas that I talked about before. And let's start with the proactive customer communication. That part is really important because depending on which system you might have right now, it might already have some functionality that allows you to keep track of the mileage. If someone came in for an oil change or a tuneup, your system might keep track of that and let you know this person hasn't come in in 18 months, they're due or whatever. Or it might even go as far as send them a text directly or anything like that. Some systems already do that. Some systems don't and some shops to be honest just don't have systems. They're still just using a spreadsheet or they have any just any way they want to manage their business which is fine as well. But they might want to have these features and getting a full build of a software for an autoshop can get pretty pricey. So sometimes you have to decide on should I just bite the bullet and go and start using a shop system **[00:04:00]** just to get those features and it might mean six months of implementation and moving all my data back and forth and might become a mess or can I do something that's relatively quick and get the same level of benefits and experience for your customers. That's what we're going to talk about today. There are ways regardless of which system you're using or no system at all to actually create this sort of functionality in your business and AI has made it a lot simpler to do with less custom development if that makes sense. So let's talk about the automated service reminders based on mileage. That is a good one. And it's a very common one. And like I said, even if your system already does it, I've seen autoshop systems that will have the feature, but it just sends an ugly message or it sends a message from an email address that doesn't look professional or it doesn't have a good template or it's a very old template and it doesn't look good or it just always lets in spam because it's not personalized. So even if you have something sometimes it's not exactly what you would like to do for example if you were doing it manually. So I like to invite people and do the exercise of how would you do it if you were doing it yourself. So let's say you just opened your shop. You're very excited about it and you don't have a lot of staff. you just have your mechanics and or maybe you are the mechanic as well and you got a customer and you did a good job. They were very happy. They walked out the door never to be seen again. And of course, you're like, "Oh, I **[00:06:00]** want to get them back." Because you care for them. You care for their vehicle. You want to make sure that they actually do the oil change or whatever's next in their service calendar to keep the car running for longer. It's it's a good investment. So, if that's the case, if it were you, you might probably do something like sit down in your desk and look at their information. And you might even go in and see the history with that customer. And then you might just draft an email and send it to them or you might draft a text and send it to them. So think in those terms of what you would do and how you would want to do and you might soon realize that even if you have 10 people for which you have to do that you're not going to send the exact same thing to everyone. You will want it to be personalized and be related to their history with you so that for them it's something pleasing to receive and take a next step like visiting again or getting an appointment or something like that. So if you first do that exercise of how you would do it as a human um regardless of team size then you can start to say okay well maybe this can be automated if we had the right information. So to give an example, let's say somebody bought tires 18 months ago and the AI, you can have the AI go through the records and calculate the average mileage from their service history and it could predict that they're due for a rotation or replacement and it can send a personalized text like, "Hey Mike, based on your driving patterns, your Civic's probably around **[00:08:00]** 40,000 miles. Time for that time rotation. Do you want me to book this book you in this week?" So, if you send something like that and it seems to come from you or the shop manager or even some of the mechanics, then that'll feel really good to the person. And you can also just draft these and test them before you actually send them. Look at them, approve them, and actually send them whatever you want. The automation is not really the important part. The important part is that the customer gets that notification, that communication that shows them that you're there for them, that you're you're on top of things because they're not. They're they're just living their life. They have a lot of other things to worry about more than the tire rotation. So if we can automate this in a way where the system already finds all the information, the relevant data between your different systems, then you can send not a generic blast but a personalized type outreach based on the actual vehicle data and service history. And this can apply to anything else like when they did their last oil change or things like that. And if you're like me and you've taken your car to the shop, sometimes you do get reminders, but they're very generic. You're like, "Yeah, reminder, you just forget about it." But if someone from the shop actually had reached out to me and said, "Hey, this is Mark. I I worked on your vehicle last time and uh everything looked great. We just want to make sure that everything is uh in good shape. Do you want to book an appointment to get it done or something like that?" Then I might actually answer or go in **[00:10:00]** and book the appointment. And now with the voice AI, of course, I could just do it very quickly. So, that's the sort of thing that you want to do because you want people to remember these things because it will make their vehicle last longer. And it's also very good for business for you because it's another opportunity to get the person in and help them. And then if they have another vehicle, they might trust you enough to then bring that other vehicle or when another service comes on the road, then they might do a service. So, for everyone listening that's not in the auto repair business, you might think I'm talking about, oh, I want to just extract as much money from clients possible. And that's not the truth. If you're running a business, you do want to extend the customer's lifetime value. But that's that's the key word. You you want to extend the customer's lifetime value. So, if I just want to billow you a bunch when you come in, are you going to come back? You're probably not. So, if you come in for a break check and I tell you, "Oh, yeah, but we have to have change your suspension and your brakes and your discs and everything, then you might think that I'm scamming you or just trying to squeeze you out of every dollar." And then I might not come back. Unless, well, of course, there's a very severe issue in the car and that's the case. It happens. But in most cases, people want to run a legitimate business. And if you want to run a legitimate business, you care about your customers. That's why you create a business. you care about the customer's vehicle and so I will **[00:12:00]** say hey you might want to look at these things for the future or this is important this is not important and that way you trust me enough to when something comes up you actually bring the car in and that way even if I charge you $39 this time $49 the next time then maybe you'll have a higher ticket issue down the line because cars are cars and at that point then you'll do something else and even if you just stay with little value um or cost services. A customer's lifetime value if they stick with you is a lot more than just billing them something expensing at the beginning. So just to compare if someone comes in and you just bill them $300, $500, $1,000, then again they might not come back. So that's it. That was your customer lifetime value and then they're gone. Now, if you build them 39 and in a year they're not 39 and then down the road maybe 100 and then another 39. There you go. You just start growing up the lifetime value. They'll bring their other car, they'll tell their brother, their brother will bring the car, they'll tell their their friends, their friends will bring the car. So lifetime value and then affiliate related transactions come into play as well. So you always want to keep customers happy and this is an excellent way to do it. just automate the personalization of the reach out when it times comes to do the next service. That's just one example. And if you're live here, if you're in the conversation, please let me know. Have you ever had the experience where someone sends you a text and you're like, "Oh, that's nice." And you actually reply. Even if it's **[00:14:00]** a service provider that you weren't thinking of, they were there for you and you you want to give back. So that's that's always a nice a nice feeling. So let me know if that has happened to you. Just drop it in the chat. And the other topic that we can talk about that is very similar to this is post service sequences. So imagine and I I haven't experienced this personally. I think this would be very nice. So, let's say I take my car somewhere and after 48 hours the business sends me a message that says, "Hey, how's the Accord doing after the break job? You have any questions?" Something like that. Just very basic. And so, what happens is like what I mean 48 hours later, they they they already did the service. they could have forgotten about me, but they're sending me a message just to see how how everything's done, if the the brakes are working fine, if the squeaks are gone or whatever. That gives me a very good impression of the business. I'll think, "Oh, wow. Oh, these people are really on top of things. I might reply, I might not, but that's fine. I just keep that in my mind." So, it can turn a satisfied customer into maybe a review, right? Like, if they do reply, then you can sell it. I mean, just escalate it to send them a review link on Google or Trustpilot or Yelp or whatever. So, that's that's super good because at the same time, you're doing two things. So, one is you are letting them know that they are appreciated and that you're thinking of them. And then two, if they weren't happy and they had questions in maybe at that moment they **[00:16:00]** were ready to drop a bad review, but they got that they're like, "Oh, there's someone there." They can just reply and then you can have them talk with a representative or even you, the shop owner or manager and then you can see what's going on. Maybe a mechanic made a mistake. Maybe there was something loose already. Maybe there was something that was overlooked and you can make it right before they put a bad review for the business. And that will convert them into an even better customer because they'll be loyal to you because you actually think about them. Like I said at the beginning, it's most business owners don't go into business to take advantage of people. They go into business to help people with a specific thing that they're good at or they enjoy or they know that people need help with. At least that's my experience. I said most, not all of them. So I think that's that's a good idea if you're thinking of automating something. At the beginning, I talked about if you don't have a system that already does this sort of stuff, you can automate it. So there's tools like N10, I talk about Nain a lot. It's like Sapier or Make.com. These are just tools that allow you to create automations and drag visually with a drag and drop interface. So even if you don't have a sophisticated system for your shop, you can use a tool like NEN to go and talk to your system or go and talk to your spreadsheets and see every day just go through and see who is up for an oil change or what's the mileage on the vehicles or what they should get and based on repair history. But also, **[00:18:00]** so here's where the intelligence part comes in. You don't have to have all the data in the world. like you could talk to Mitchell Tech, you can talk to all data. There's a lot of databases regardless of the if your shop has a system. There's ways to talk to these databases that can allow you to know or the AI to know what typically happens to a vehicle. So there's tons of data out there that you know that all blazers from I don't know 2000 have this particular issue. So you could reach out to people when you know they are about to get to that 100,000 miles or something that you know that historically that vehicle has had that issue and you can proactively send them a message and say, "Hey, our data shows that these vehicles usually have this issue around this period or these mileage. How's your car working? Is everything good? Are you feeling any vibrations or anything like that?" So the customer is going to be like, "What? Nobody's telling me this." So they might come in, they might check it, everything might be fine, but again, you've got another opportunity to get them into the shop and help them out. And there's tons of data about this. And so you can proactively get people to come in and fix something that might go wrong or is starting to go wrong even before they realize the issue just because there's so much data out there. the same way that recalls work. There's these recalls and they send out the blast telling you um that this might happen or get a piece replaced, etc. And unfortunately, that happens for newer vehicles, right? There's a recall and then obviously if it got pressed or **[00:20:00]** whatever, so people might get the letter, they might realize, they might find on the internet. for older cars the that stops happening and so people stop getting information about something that other people are having issues with because it's already outside that sort of warranty cycle. So if you have access to that data and your customer's car, so you can sort of see and calculate and abstract information and be oh I have this insight I can share with my customer and then that's an opportunity to bring them in. Even if by bringing them in you don't they don't have anything. You just do an inspection. Maybe it's a free inspection but then they say I need an oil change anyway. Let's just do it right now. So another opportunity to get them in and help them out. Like I said, what we want is to help our customers out. Another option that we could do is a seasonal campaign. Now, seasonal campaigns are very, very popular. In the outer industry, of course, there's the winter, summer, very different. If you're a tire shop and you're in one of those states where there's actually seasons, then you need people to change your tires from winter to summer or whatever that may be. And then in other places like here that you don't do that. Then there's other things like you might trigger a campaign to tell everyone who hasn't had a battery test in more than 12 months. Just let them know, hey, the temperatures are dropping this week. The last thing you want is a dead battery in the morning. Free battery check if you come in before Friday. Then a lot of people will come in and you can check their batteries and it's just **[00:22:00]** a test. Doesn't cost you anything. And then it's an opportunity again for them if the battery itself there like it's physical test. you're not scamming anyone. If it see that that their battery is not good, then it might be a good opportunity because the same way home AC when the winter months come, when the cold comes or when the excessive heat comes, everyone's booked because if your AC has a problem, everyone else's AC has a problem. And so, it's very hard to get it fixed and it's not a fun thing to have. Same for the battery. So, if you can proactively invite them to check it and if there's something wrong to replace it, then again, you're you're winning rapport with your customers. You're doing goodwill. You're getting that back. And I think that's a great idea. Just have the regular. You already know if you've run your shop for a while now, then you know what typically happens in certain months of the year. And so you can start sending the information to people based on the time of year and what services might be good for them to prepare them. Or if you know it's vacation season or even if the person has told you in the past consecutively each year at that time of year they that's when they go on vacation that's when their trip comes and they always take the car to check levels and everything and tire thread uh levels and all that. Then you might proactively send them an email or a text or even a call them and say, "Hey, it's this time of year. You want to come in, do the levels, and then that way they'll remember." It's another thing that they can check off **[00:24:00]** their list, and you're helping them do that. So that's I think is a great example, something you can do again with something like NH10. We can help you set that up, by the way. I haven't mentioned that, but we do that all the time for customers. If your system doesn't do it already or if you don't have a system, we can set that up so that you can start proactively messaging people and helping them take better care of their vehicles. And again, this works for any type of industry, especially service- based industries, but today we're talking about auto repair shops specifically. Now if we switch gears a little bit and we talk about diagnostics briefly touched on it last time and that's the whole the mechanic side of things. So right now we're talking about proactive messaging things like that to bring customers in. That's all very good but then there's there's the shop management side of things and what the mechanic is doing. And I gave some example last time but I'll give some more today. So if you have some your texts, they're working. They're under the hood, they're under the car, they're they're have grease on their hands, etc. They're they're working, but sometimes they need answers. And so we can have a real time parts and spec lookup with voice or chat. So the text under the hood got their hands dirty. They could say something like, "Hey Chop, um, what's the torque spec for the log nuts on a 2019 F-150?" and it'll it'll get you answers without having to go over and walk to a computer or go over to talk to someone which might be busy that has the answer for it. So they could still do whatever **[00:26:00]** they're doing and just like you can even have them have like a little microphone on them all the time and they can just double tap it or something and turn it on and have it talk to the system and ask them for for things that are very specific. And the great thing is it reduces errors. It speeds up the work and and it keeps your text in a flow state. So instead of stopping, going to do something else, probably getting distracted, maybe even forgetting something, you can you can actually have them get the information they need in real time. And it can connects to parts databases like World Pack, Parts Plus. It could connect to OEM cataloges, etc. And so it could do cross referencing directly. Again, you don't have to have all that data in house. So, there's a lot of data that's available that you can connect to and get that information whenever you need it. And I was just thinking of we were driving one time. I think we were headed to Colorado and all of a sudden there's a Jeep in one of the lanes farther ahead and you you could see the the left rear tire starts going out and then it completely gets loose with the axle and everything. And obviously the Jeep goes like that. It doesn't flip fortunately. It goes and it could get over to the to the side of the road. We were on the freeway and then the wheel with the axle just bounced that 70 mph just bounced towards us and all the rest of the cars. We had to verge around it. And you can imagine that obviously nothing happened that was great. It could have been a very severe accident for **[00:28:00]** whoever hit that if someone hit it. And that's not something you typically see. And many times the reason something like that happens is because they might have taken it to a custom shop to do some sort of lift or something different that that's not up to spec and somebody forgot to tighten some lugs or they used the wrong torque or they broke something when they were doing it or they got distracted. they did some random thing, came back, forgot to plug something back in, and then since they weren't in that flow state, they sort of wrapped everything up or someone came back and did it, finished the job, and something was forgotten. And that happens a lot of times, not only in the auto industry, but also even in in aviation, that's happened before where where some texts might have forgotten to do something when they went to launch or something. So keeping that flow state, making sure that people are completing all the actions in sort of that flow is very useful for everything, even software engineering. So if you can do something to help your texts get all the information that they need at that moment while they're still doing the thing is going to be very useful, very helpful for them as well. So that's that's another thing that you could do. And then another one that I briefly touched on last time as well was the visual inspection assistant. So the visual inspection assistant, I think it's very I don't it's still mind-blowing to me because we've accidentally stumbled upon the power of it when we were setting up some automations for a client. We were doing some image classification automations and just for fun we had the flow analyze the **[00:30:00]** image as it went through h so that then we could add attach some metadata some information about what we were gathering uh within the images but the level of detail that these LLMs especially some of the cutting edge ones it's impressive it could tell you if a plant has a certain looks like a certain type of disease is on it or if you have a brake pad that is worn and is missing a certain amount of millimeters compared to what it should look like or if it has a specific type of jagged edge that tells you that something else is happening. Right? It's amazing what these things can do. And so if you can set up an an image recognition step and have it go through an LLM and understand and then also get data from certain databases and and have that information so that it can do retrieval augmented generation. So basically have niche specific information to compare to. It just makes it so much more powerful because you can then understand a junior tech can understand a lot more just by taking a picture of the thing. So they're working on it. They're following their instructions, but instead of having to remember go to a book or something, they could take a picture and then that could be analyzed and then sent back and said, "Okay, so you're missing this or this black part means this thing might be happening or whatever." And then they can go and talk with someone else. we get it validated or they can make a decision right there on the spot. But it just really helps people to continue with their work without having to go and consult something else proactively. So that's that's the key part **[00:32:00]** getting things in your shop to work proactively to make your stuff more efficient. That's really helpful. So also there's a lot of things that are overlooked because you're not you're not paying attention to them. So, if you think something like the brake pads, it might look okay. And they're just going over and they're like, "Yeah, these look okay." But now, if you consider that they only have 1,000 miles on them and they look like this, then it's not so okay. It's okay at 5,000 miles or 10,000 miles, but at 1,000, that's not a good sign. So it could you also proactively see that and see the history for that person and see, oh wait a second, they just changed those. That doesn't make any sense. There must be something wrong. And so you can look into it. And that's the sort of thing you as a veteran car shop owner or veteran mechanic might see if you're there. You just see it with your eyes because you have all the experience. But a lot of junior techs won't. And so this again can help you if you can set these flows up. it can help you have that data on hand to make this better. And then finally in within this same topic, there's the contextual upsell suggestions. Again, upsells are typically a way to increase the order value. So if you're thinking as a business owner, it's a way to increase the order value, but it should always be done morally and considering that you're actually helping the person. So let's say a customer's in for an oil change. The AI can cross reference that the vehicle is at 95,000 miles, the transmission fluid was done at 60,000 miles or never, and then it **[00:34:00]** could prompt the tech or the service writer, this vehicle is due for a transmission service based on the mileage. Suggest adding it to the estimate. And so that way when the person's doing the estimate, they don't have to go looking to see how how much like what they add. No, the system will tell them, hey, suggest this or suggest this other thing. just let them know the stats on this based on the usage and what can happen if they don't. Right? So, you're not doing pushy upselling or anything. It's just relevant recommendations based on actual like maintenance and schedules and and history that you have for the customer. So, it's good for the customer and for the shop. And the reality is your techs are busy. They don't have time to check every veill's history against any like all the maintenance intervals. But the AI can. the AI just does it automatically. So, and don't think this is like a Jarvis level iron man kind of AI. No, it's a very basic thing. It's just a flow that can run whenever you're trying to create a quote or something. It could go check the different systems, check the times, check data from different sources, and then bring back a result that's relevant to that person. So, and then for a Q&A, like if if you're here on the live stream, what's the most common upsell you think your shop is missing right now? Just type it in the chat. That'll that'll help us with the conversation later on as well. Like things like oil changes leading to flushes, brake inspection, tire service, etc. Just curious to see what people are seeing. Now if we go to the third topic which is operational intelligence that I **[00:36:00]** teased earlier that is more for the shop owner shop manager especially if you have like franchises and franchisees etc. You just want to keep tabs on everything you could have a a digest go out. So every morning at 7 or 8, whatever, you could have a voice note that comes in to you and just tells you a summary. Say, "Yesterday 12 cars completed, 8 8,400 revenue, 94% on time. Bree had two delays, both waiting on parts. Today we have 14 scheduled, two walking slots, and then and one high value job, which is an engine work 2,200." Right? So you don't ask for it. You're not checking. It just sends you a voice every day. you see how everything is working and it's it's simple. It's not a system you have to go log into remember the password or anything. No, it just sends you a text or it sends you a voicemail, sends you a WhatsApp message, whatever you want, it'll do it. U it could also automatically notice things like bay 2 has taken 40% longer than estimated on the last three jobs. So, it could send you an alert and then the efficiency is down. So, you can go check, right? You can go check maybe that particular tech is having a hard week. Maybe they're overworked. Maybe they have too much jobs because you thought that was the the efficient one and then they just they couldn't I don't know they got bunkked down whatever. So you can figure out what's going on. It might be something that's not related to the shop. It could be an external influence. And so if you realize that that one is the one that's the bottleneck, then you can do something about it proactively again. **[00:38:00]** Then also for cash flow like based on current bookings and over average ticket for example it could it could just send you something like oh you're tracking 38,000 for this week you're 4,000 on the target you have six open slots on Thursday do you want me to trigger a promo campaign uh for the due to service list so maybe you have a due to service list and then the thing can tell you hey you're you're not going to meet your quotas then do you want to just send a promo do you want to start a promo because sometimes we forget to do promos and people like promos and so if it makes sense for your business to do promos you just forget to do it even though they work. Then it could be just like a nudger telling you, hey, here it is wrapped in a little bowl for you so that you can do it. So I can connect to all the scheduling systems, revenue systems, marketing, and just sort of get you going that way. There's tons of things like these that you can do. I'm just scratching the surface, but just so you know, there's many things that you could do with automations, with AI, without AI. It's just getting the data from many places, organizing it, getting abstracting details, figuring out patterns. That is what AI is really good at and that's what automations are really good at. So, if you're thinking about how all this could work in your shop, it's it can it definitely work for your shop. So, send me a message. You can do it via Twitter, via LinkedIn, wherever. send us a message on the website. If you're thinking about doing something like that or you **[00:40:00]** just want to get some outreach going for your shop or you want to send those reminders and you don't know where to start, just send us an email and or a message and then we can look at your shop what you have and then give you suggestions. Hey, you can do it this way or this way or that way. And there's this do-it-yourself approach and then there's a pro approach and then there's the sort of done with you approach. There's many ways to handle this and it doesn't have to be expense for your shop, but it can definitely be a revenue driver for your shop. So, hope this has helped. I talked about a lot of things today. So, uh hopefully it was helpful. So, let me know what you think. And if you have any questions even after the stream, just put them in the comments, put them in the chat, wherever you're watching this, and I'll be sure to respond right there. Or if it's an interesting topic, I'll just talk about it on the next live stream as well. So, if you haven't already, you like this content, please like and subscribe. Ring the bell on YouTube as well so that you get notified whenever we're live or whenever we have a new video out. And