Most shop owners who invest in shop management software are using maybe a third of what they're paying for. They swap the old manual process for a digital one, call it an upgrade, and move on. But that's not an upgrade; it's just a translation.
In this episode of Maximum Octane, Jason Patel sits down with Brett Kinsfather and Zack Buffum from Shopmonkey, a shop management software platform that's been in the space since 2017 and now runs a team of over 220 people. Brett comes from a deep background in automotive and focuses on industry partnerships and education. Zack is the director of training and operations and was there almost from the beginning. Together, they bring both the shop-floor perspective and the software side of the equation.
The conversation covers a lot of ground: why shops keep bolting new software onto broken processes and then wonder why nothing changes, what Shopmonkey sees as the most underutilized features across the industry (DVIs and canned services top the list), and how fewer than 15 percent of auto repair shops have a functioning DVI in place despite the technology being available for nearly a decade. They also get into the customer experience conversation, what it really means to map the full customer journey, why a shop's competition for experience is not the shop down the street but every great experience that customer has ever had, and how to make vendor relationships actually work in both directions.
Tune in to episode 145 of Maximum Octane if you have shop management software and a nagging feeling you're not getting everything out of it, or if you're thinking about switching platforms and want a clearer sense of what to look for and how to implement it right.
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