American Tire Distributors Affiliate Speeds Up Estimates and Boosts Customer Satisfaction With Shopmonkey

Overview

Just outside Raleigh, in Cary, North Carolina, residents look to Black Forest Technik as their go-to shop for maintenance and repairs for all European vehicles. 

For a locally-owned shop like Black Forest Technik, client satisfaction is everything. Just like a good pit crew, their team needs to have excellent communication and operate at a high level of efficiency. As an American Tire Distributors (ATD) affiliated shop, tire services are a major part of their business, but the process needed streamlining.

Since implementing Shopmonkey and turning on the integration with ATD, both Black Forest Technik and its customers have benefitted from the intuitive features that Shopmonkey’s platform offers.

The Challenge

Slow Tire Estimates and Orders | Scattered Customer Communications

As an ATD-affiliated shop, Black Forest Technik benefits from access to ATD’s expansive inventory of tires for a large variety of models. But before Shopmonkey, ordering tires was cumbersome.

“Ordering tires before we had Shopmonkey was a lot more involved,” said Morgan Wilson, service advisor at Black Forest Technik.

Before Shopmonkey, Morgan wasted countless hours toggling between multiple platforms. He used to start the process by going to ATD’s wholesale site to find the tires, then he would price match with competitors, and then could finally place his order. For the shop, having all of these tabs open to come to a decision was just not efficient and the process was equally as slow for their customers.  

Tire estimates creation and orders were not the only area of the business that Black Forest Technik was looking to streamline – they wanted to become as efficient as possible in every area of their workflow, especially when it came to customer communications. The team was taking phone calls on different lines, answering emails and texts, and giving estimates in different places. It was hard to keep all of their customer information straight, with processes being so scattered. Not to mention, responding to customers was slow and lacked cohesion. 

The shop set out to find a new way to streamline its operations.

“I would tell another ATD user to get on board with Shopmonkey, and their parts procurement feature. It makes everybody's life easier. It's much more efficient, quicker, and makes a service advisor's job much more straightforward.”

The Solution

Fast Tire Estimates and Ordering | Regular Customer Compliments | Organized Internal Communications

Shopmonkey’s ATD part procurement integration was exactly what Black Forest Technik needed to solve their problems related to tire estimate creation and ordering.

“The time taken to quote a set of tires has been greatly reduced,” said Johnny Byelik, General Manager at Black Forest Technik. “Shopmonkey has made it very easy to find a set of tires and add it to the estimate, without having to do a lot of the steps we've had to do in the past.”

Instead of toggling between multiple platforms to find the right set of tires at the right price, the shop can now accomplish that at the click of a button without ever leaving Shopmonkey. The platform sources tires based on the make, model, or VIN number of the vehicle, and it’s easy and quick to pull up all of the information a service advisor needs to share with the customer. This new feature saved the team a good chunk of time and allowed them to easily create tire service estimates.

“I would tell another ATD user to get on board with Shopmonkey, and their parts procurement feature,” Wilson said. “It makes everybody's life easier. It's much more efficient, quicker, and makes a service advisor's job much more straightforward.”

That’s not the only thing customers have gotten out of Shopmonkey and Black Forest Technik’s partnership, though. “Our customers rave about Shopmonkey's usability and their estimates and the communication that we're able to provide over and over again,” Byelik said. 

The team hears from their customers on a weekly basis that they love the increased transparency and communication since the shop started using Shopmonkey. One specific component that has received significant praise is the inspections feature – which allows shops to send photographs, videos, and notes to show what’s going on with their vehicle. 

It’s not just customer communication that Shopmonkey has improved – it’s also greatly enhanced internal communications. Through Shopmonkey, Black Forest Technik’s technicians can share receipts and diagnostic results internally on any customer work order. Keeping their communication in one spot keeps the team on the same page, plus it makes it easy to save all approvals, declines, and documentation with the customer over time, and all internal notes from the team.

“I would recommend Shopmonkey to other shops for all the reasons why we love it,” Byelik said. “The communication with the customers, the ease of being able to put information between labor and parts. As well as how professional it looks.”