Helpful Articles on the Smog Industry

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The STAR program and consumers

Smog Advantage

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Running Your Smog Shop

Basically there are three ways to organize the customer flow in your shop.

  • Have a service writer that handles the customers and the technicians only do smog checks.
  • Have no service writer and technicians both handle customers and do smog checks.
  • Both the service writer and the technicians talk to customers.

The importance of having a clear traffic flow

It is important that your customers know what to do when they get to your shop. It is also important that customers in different stages of the process do not interact with one another at key points. For example:

  • You want the customer to clearly understand where they go to start the process. This is important if your shop get busy and someone cannot help immediately.
  • You don't want to be discussing price in front of other customers. If you negotiate your price down, you don't want your other customers to know that.
  • You want the waiting area to be away from or insulated from the test area to reduce noise and improve comfort.
  • You want the area where the customer pays away from where the customer starts as when you are busy you will have a line at both places. This can frustrate customers and turn them away.

Work orders are your customer marketing information

Regardless of whether the location uses a service writer or the technician handles the customers, many shops hand a clip board with a paper work order for the customer to fill in. Offloading the work to the customer makes sense but using paper work orders makes your customer information completely inaccessible for direct marketing efforts.

  • As the customer fills out their contact information the technician can be doing smog tests.
  • Customers will write down the correct information, a staff member in a hurry may not.
  • Having the customer fill the information is faster than a technician who cannot type entering the data.
  • It is what everyone does.

Why use computerized work orders

We are in the business of making a web based work order system so clearly we think it is a good idea. We believe this because communicating with your customers before your competition, is the best way to stop competing on price and also find new business. Why?

  • You already have a relationship with your customer. If you contact them and make it easy to get a smog at your shop you are justifying your price.
  • If you don't contact them, they are more likely to look around. Once they do that they will see offers on the Internet which are based on price. Now your customer is interested in a lower price.
  • Most households have more than one vehicle. So every smog that comes in is actually the chance to do another smog on another vehicle, but only if you contact the customer.
  • It's free to market to them with Smog Advantage. If you get the customers email, we will send out marketing offers to them free. What's better than that?

Smog Advantage does not slow you down

We understand that time is money and so regardless of how you run your shop, we make creating work orders lightning fast and provide you with many options so you can run your business your way.

  • Smog Advantage desktop automatically inputs the customers name and address from their drivers license. We automatically enter vehicle information from the DMV bar code OR from their vehicle plate number.
  • Smog Advantage Mobile enables a technician or service writer to approach a customer anywhere at the shop. The customer enters in their own contact information and even signs the authorization on the tablet or phone.
  • Smog Advantage Kiosk is a self service kiosk where the customer enters their contact information and vehicle information by decoding their vehicle plate into a secure mounted tablet. The technician or service writer then adds the price and gets the customer signature.
  • You can start a work order on the Kiosk and finish it on the desktop or tablet. Start a work order on any desktop and completed it on any other desktop or tablet.