AutoFix TechnologyCast

Chris Cotton [00:00:06]:
Hey everybody, thanks for joining me today. This is coach Chris Cotton from autofix Auto Shop coaching and I'm here with the autofix Technology cast. I have a great, I would say up and coming company. I think maybe John can set me straight or different. But my, my time with them has been been very fairly brief but fairly awesome as well. So we have John from Detect Auto here and so John, tell us a little bit, just introduce yourself and then just tell us a little bit about Detect Auto and then I'll talk about, I want to talk about vision a little bit and then, and then we'll go on from there.

Jon [00:00:52]:
Awesome. Yeah, no, thanks for having me. Chris. Super excited to be here. Yeah, as you said, we're pretty new company. We've been building in the space for a little bit, but the products that we've been kind of making our break with lately are newer. We've been on the market for about nine months now. But our whole thing is centered around how can we automate things inside of the shop, speed things up, make it easier for technicians, service advisors and really streamline those day to day processes and eliminate the pain points that you face every day.

Chris Cotton [00:01:22]:
No, that's, that's awesome. And I really love your product. So we use Tekmetric in our shop and I'm, I'm trying to remember how I got with you guys or how that introduction was made, but saw a demo somewhere I think, or, or somewhere. And then we started using the product in our shop and I love it for, for the several things that it does. And again like I talk all the time as shop owners and service advisors and stuff, we don't use anything to the, to the 100% capacity that there is, but we try. And so every day I'm trying to get people to use the products and the features that you guys have for sure. Instead of me talking about it, can you, can you kind of walk us through the products that you have?

Jon [00:02:15]:
Yeah, absolutely. So the main product that we started with back in August of 2024 was a maintenance review system and it plugs right inside of your shop management software. So when you download our browser extension, put it inside of your shop management software, then all you have to do to use it is click our browser extension, pop up and a little side panel opens that shows you all of the upcoming or soon to be due or even overdue maintenance items for that customer's vehicle. So spends all that, all that Time that you spent reviewing service history, it's done. We did that automatically for you. And then we even map it to your canned jobs too, so you can really quickly build out those estimates, which we found it to be a massive time savings when we were even building this tool. We did all this manually for one of our co founders who owns a shop, and we would probably spend 10, 15 minutes a ticket just reading through all those service lines, comparing it against his maintenance schedule and customizing that whole process. And it just takes forever if you're trying to do it.

Jon [00:03:16]:
And what we've seen is it's probably one of the first things that gets dropped when you get busy. You stop doing those reviews, you fall off your process, and then whether you like it or not, you're leaving a lot of opportunities on the table. So that was the first platform we launched and we've been super happy with the results so far.

Chris Cotton [00:03:33]:
Well, I love that feature. Just because you can click the pane open and boom, it's all right there. You don't have to go anywhere to search for any of that. You don't have have to look it up. And I know, you know, you're just a minute or so away from being able to access some other things to get that. But if, you know, if I can save my service advisors a minute on a task, then, you know, 30, 40, 50 tasks a day is, you know, we've saved them an hour plus, it's, it's good top of mind for the services and recommended maintenance, everything else.

Jon [00:04:09]:
Absolutely. What we like to say when we're onboarding new customers is we try to make your shop the destination for building that maintenance plan and taking care of your customer's vehicle for the long haul. So whether or not you're getting those maintenance services done today, you're making a plan with them that in six months or in a year, whatever it is, you're going to come back to them and get those services completed at your shop instead of somewhere else.

Chris Cotton [00:04:34]:
So this is one of the things that maybe I didn't know about or haven't learned. You mentioned just a minute ago that you can also take those and build the can jobs. Is that so we can go into Tech Auto and pull the can jobs over or how does that work?

Jon [00:04:50]:
Yeah. So every time we do an onboarding with a shop, one of the main things we do is we'll process your and load your can jobs from your shop management software. So we currently integrate today with techmetric and Shopware and we would load all Those canned jobs from those two, those two companies and for your shop. And then we'll have them built right into our side panel. So all you have to do to push those recommendations is just click one button and it's added.

Chris Cotton [00:05:17]:
Okay, well I'm gonna have to go back and look at that because I, I completely missed that. That's one of those things that completely went over my head because I think I still go in there and then I recommend them, but then I go in and add the cad, the can jobs through like jobs or sublet instead of just clicking and throwing those in there. So I'm gonna have to work with that. So see again, you know, people use it every day. You forget you, you get in your rhythm, you do it the way you do it and then you forget the, the way that your systems were intended to be used.

Jon [00:05:50]:
Right, absolutely.

Chris Cotton [00:05:53]:
And then, so you got that feature and then what came next? Was it the gross profit per hour or was it like the AI questions under the customer concerns or how did that play out?

Jon [00:06:08]:
Yeah, the next thing we launched was that AI customer concern tool. That one has been really fun to build and we've been making a ton of improvements to that as well. But how that one works is we take in and load customer concerns, whether that's from like the purpose of visit or their initial reason they came to your shop, or even when you're building an estimate and you're having a conversation with your customer. Our system processes that information, prompts advisors to ask better follow up questions to understand the true nature of why they're coming in. So we don't just take a concern like brake noise at face value. We're trying to dig into why is that? Why did you come in here today? How often is that happening? Does it happen when you press the brakes? Does it happen when you're turning? What are the, what is the nature of this actually? And we use all that information to hopefully help the advisor collect enough information so that the technicians can ultimately solve and service that vehicle faster because they actually know what's really going wrong with it.

Chris Cotton [00:07:06]:
Well, and it, and it saves the technician from coming back and be like, well, why didn't you ask this? Why didn't you ask this? Why didn't you ask this? And for me, I love it because I'm not a technician, as everybody knows, and I don't have a technical background. So it helps me to get more information and prompt more information. And it's not just like one or two questions like it'll ask five or six. And then you can prompt it to keep going as long as you want to and put those in there. Right. And those are easy to do. You just type it in. That's another one where you hit the button and it adds it to the customer concern.

Chris Cotton [00:07:39]:
I love it.

Jon [00:07:41]:
And we've even built out to, we've had a lot of shops request that they want to ask custom questions too. For example, if they have a process for like a pre purchase inspection, we've had shops. Now you can build out your own custom workflows. So if you have questions or scripts or whatever that you want asked every time a certain situation comes up, you can build that right inside of our platform too to ensure that you have that consistency for your procedures being followed.

Chris Cotton [00:08:08]:
And I think that's just an awesome add on to what people are doing. I do have a question though. Where do you, and you don't know this is coming, but where do you see AI and detect auto like partnering or, or what else could you do in there? I don't want you to give any away, any secrets or anything like what's coming, but like, like what else could it do? Because I'm always like, okay, well I see what it's doing now, but like what else can it do within your framework and TechMetrics framework and then just like AI in general.

Jon [00:08:47]:
Yeah, it's a good question, right? AI is, I think everyone talks about it, you hear about it all the time. And I'll tell you what, we have coming up too, but also just from the sense of where we think AI is important, it's a really great tool to assist and enhance people. Our goal is we want to enhance the performance of team members, make sure that they can do their job more easily and automate away a lot of the tasks that are not frankly good uses of your time. And then instead you can spend more time working with your customer, servicing the vehicles and actually doing those high impact tasks that humans really should specialize in. So perfect example of that. I think we have a new tool that's coming out this month, actually in April, that's a technician inspection assistant. And we're taking images that technicians take during a DVI. We're analyzing those and then writing up the DVIs for them so now they don't have to spend time typing out line by line all the concerns they have with that inspection.

Jon [00:09:50]:
It's automated for them. So Instead of taking 60 pictures, doing all the rankings and then typing it up, all you have to do, take a picture, give it a Ranking, we write the rest.

Chris Cotton [00:10:01]:
And then how was the, the writing generated on that? Like, I'm, I'm sure, I mean, it's going out in the, into the, into the world and pulling stuff in there. But I'm, I'm assuming you guys have done a lot of work on the back side of this to give it words to use. But I, I guess I'm just in my mind trying to figure out how this works. So you're just putting a picture, you're giving it like a 1 through 5 on how, like, like how much it's needed. Is that what you're talking about when you say ranking?

Jon [00:10:29]:
Yeah. So basically how it would work is we'll take the information from the, let's say the DVI if you give it like a red ranking, and then you also upload the picture of a cabin air filter and it's really dirty. What we will do then is we'll analyze that with that additional context and then we'll upload that result to this model that we've trained and specified with a bunch of automotive specific knowledge so that at the end of the day we're looking at that cabin air filter. We're seeing it's dirty and clogged. We would recommend immediately replacing it. And on top of that, we're also tying that into your maintenance recommendations. So then if you're seeing that, hey, cabin air filter is overdue by 10,000 miles, but it actually looks good from this visual inspection that now gets reflected inside of our maintenance platform too. So we're really just trying to tie that whole system together inside of the shop.

Chris Cotton [00:11:24]:
And so then we would just be able to text or email that out to the customer and then have the conversation with them about that. Correct?

Jon [00:11:33]:
Exactly.

Chris Cotton [00:11:34]:
Okay, well, and that goes back to what you said. Assist and enhance people. Like, it's kind of funny, my version of a dirty air filter and cabin filter, and this is the funny thing I try to find in the shop is, you know, I'll see a picture on inspection and the guys are like, maybe it's a yellow and it's like full of stuff and everything else. And I'm like, guys, that is a red all day long. Like, I don't know where you're coming up with that. So we got to make sure that they rank it correctly. So, so then I guess the next step would be we put it in an inspection and then we're able to maybe hit a button and it drops a. Drops the cabin air filter onto the estimate with the labor and the parts or the pricing and everything in there? Eventually, sometime, yeah.

Jon [00:12:24]:
So, I mean, and the best part is with the shop management softwares we work with, with their native DVIs, they have to have a lot of that functionality built in. And what we're trying to do is we're just enhancing that process. So we know that when we work with people in the shop, working with technicians doing inspections, that process just takes a long time. And it's really important though, if you're not doing a good dvi, you're leaving a lot of opportunities on the table again. But we hear commonly technicians push back on that sometimes because they don't understand why they're doing it. It wasn't presented to them as a benefit to them. It's just extra work with no purpose. So assuming that you can get that buy in from the team and you explain why this service is necessary, our tool is that extra step to make it super easy again to enforce this process and make sure that it's done consistently every time.

Chris Cotton [00:13:14]:
No, I think I'm ready to see that. So how big of a write up does it produce? Is it like a couple of sentences? Is it like a paragraph? What does that look like?

Jon [00:13:24]:
Well, the best thing is, again, it's customizable. So if you want it to give you two full paragraphs for each picture, you can tell it to do that. We don't recommend it because no one's going to read that. But the best part is you can customize it so if you want it shorter and concise and just say, cabin air filters dirty, overdue by 10,000 miles per. Maintenance recommendations recommend to replace immediately. You can do that if you want it to go into detail and describe. In image one, we see that there is even potential signs of rodents chewing on this. Right.

Jon [00:13:55]:
Like you can get that in depth with it if you really want to, but we'll do that for all the different items in your inspection.

Chris Cotton [00:14:03]:
I can't wait to see it. Maybe we can talk about that when we turn the recorder off here about if we can get added to the beta test on that or as soon as you roll it out. I would love to, love to work on that. So we kind of, I think we sped by like the original thing that I loved about Detect Auto and that's like the, the gross profit per hour pill, as I would call it, or button at the top of techmetrics where it's at that tells you like, you know, how much money you're making on the job. Of course you can go into techmetric and hit the button and do profitability analysis and things like that. And now TechMetrics added it at the bottom of the page kind of. But this is like color coded at the top. It changes color.

Chris Cotton [00:14:49]:
I love that. That's a, that's what brought me to Detect Auto to begin with, I think. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Jon [00:14:56]:
Yeah, no, that, that one again, another feature we saw out of necessity. Right. It was a lot of shops we work with, gross profit per hour is one of the key metrics that they care about. And it was hard to fully analyze what was happening on their ticket instead of just at a job level. And so we automated that, we tied it back to the P and L. You can enter in data for your shop and we have like a full service calculator and even some additional assistance we provide to shops who want to get set up with that tool and don't necessarily know their numbers. So you tie that all in, you put in your, your cost, your a lot of the essentials from, from your shop and then we're just telling you on every ticket, are you profitable? Are you losing money on this job? Even if it says you're, you're making revenue, are you actually profitable?

Chris Cotton [00:15:41]:
And again, I love it. I'm a numbers geek, geek. So that's really good. Is there anything like, I don't know how else you would enhance that. Like what else could be done with that gross profit per hour or in that framework at all?

Jon [00:15:56]:
You know, a big thing that we're working on. Again, it's an automation. Right. Right now it's an alert. It's telling you, hey, there's a problem on this ticket and we need to change it if the pricing is too high, too low, whatever it is. Right. We're telling you there's a, it's good or bad. What we want to do is get from an alert and actually make it something where it's actionable.

Jon [00:16:16]:
We're taking an action on your behalf and telling you instead of, hey, you're losing money on this job, here's why and here's how to fix it. So pricing updates, pricing suggestions, all of those tweaks in there are things we're working on.

Chris Cotton [00:16:30]:
Awesome. Well, what, what else is going on at Detect Auto that you can talk about?

Jon [00:16:35]:
Yeah, I mean, probably the biggest things we're working on too. We have a bunch of updates slated for the next couple weeks, couple months really. But we're working out on some tools for tracking promise times more accurately providing notifications inside of the system really just enhancing that internal shop communication. Right. We know that's a big thing people want and we're trying to build tools to enhance that. There's even stuff that we have for tracking returns and making sure that you're claiming all of those credits that are owed to you. So we have some stuff coming out on that front too. And really it's just a whole system again to automate the day to day.

Jon [00:17:14]:
Right. All those tasks should be getting done that aren't. We want to build a tool to help you solve those and make sure.

Chris Cotton [00:17:19]:
And bring it front of mind.

Jon [00:17:21]:
Exactly. Yep.

Chris Cotton [00:17:23]:
So there's. And I have no worth worldly. I don't have any idea if this is something on your radar or not, but I know a lot of people, a lot of the shops I work with talk about, hey, we want a better messaging system between the technicians, the service advisors and the owners built into like our shop management system. And as far as I know, you know, they have a lot of people using Slack, a lot of people using other stuff. Is that something you guys have thought about at all or how would you, if you have thought about it, like how would you pull that off or how would you do that?

Jon [00:17:57]:
I guess, yeah. So the cool thing about our system is it's a browser extension. Right. So you download it on your computer. But we have a whole bunch of technology that's running behind the scenes that powers that browser extension. And the new interface that we're launching here in a couple weeks that will give that technician inspection assistant and kind of tie all of our other products together. The core feature of that is kind of like a chat feature. It's not really an in shop chat, but what we would like to take, of course is, hey, you have a notification for this service advisor to follow up with this customer at specified intervals.

Jon [00:18:35]:
You want to give them a call at 12pm, you want to give them a call at 2, make sure that we're on track for the day, et cetera, keep them updated. And we think that our new interface is really well suited to even enhance those internal shop communications as well. Because if now everyone is using our browser extension, they have it open to do all the tasks that they want to do inside of the shop. It's a pretty natural extension then to be messaging people in your shop that are on kind of your network for browser extension. So definitely something on our radar. It's not launching yet, but we have worked on something for that.

Chris Cotton [00:19:08]:
Okay, good. And that's awesome. Any thanks for all the Information. I love you guys. Again, I can't wait for the Tech the Technician assist program to come out. I think that would be great. Any final words, anything else you want to say before we get off here?

Jon [00:19:29]:
Man, I mean I think there's a ton we have going on. I would encourage for anyone who's listening to definitely just try to get immersed in what AI can do for you. Right. I think ChatGPT is a really great starting point to even help clean up some text. Make sure that inspection write ups or customer concerns are just being written consistently for your team. Whether or not you're using Detect Auto, I just think it's such a great time saving tool. So I would, I would highly recommend checking that out if you haven't already. But outside of that too, I mean if you do want to see what we're doing at Detect Auto, of course you can always head to our website.

Jon [00:20:03]:
It's just detectauto.com and we got a bunch of information on there. You can even grab some time with me if you want to chat as well.

Chris Cotton [00:20:10]:
And I will say so. Recently I saw you guys at Vision. Michael and I taught a class to service advisors at Vision in Kansas City. And out of everything we covered in that three and a half hour course, what most people wanted to see at the end of the course, at the end of the class was Detect Auto and what it looked like and the features of it. We probably had 10 or 12 people standing around my table at the end of the class looking at my tech metric and how we used it and everything else. And I think a lot of those people followed up in the booth and signed up. So if you haven't seen it go out, look at it. I think it's a great feature.

Chris Cotton [00:20:49]:
It's great add ons for the shop to help shop owners out. And again, if you have any questions you can go to their website, ask them. If you want to email me christofixsos.com with questions, you can make sure that you're listening to our other podcast, the weekly Blitz with Chris Cotton and the Autofix Advisor cast with Michael. So have a great day everybody. Again, John, thanks for joining us. This was a great catch up and I'm sure we'll have you on in maybe a couple of months to talk about what's coming up then and then how the technology assistant worked out or the technician assistant rolled out.

Jon [00:21:29]:
Absolutely. Yeah. Thanks again, Chris.

Chris Cotton [00:21:31]:
You bet. Thanks. Thanks everybody. Have a great day. That wraps up this episode of the Autofix Technology cast. Thanks for tuning in and being part of the conversation about the tools and technology driving the auto repair industry forward. A special thank you to our sponsor, Cinch for making this podcast possible. Remember, Cinch isn't just a tool, it's a game changer for your shop's customer retention and outreach.

Chris Cotton [00:21:52]:
I use it in my shop and I know it can help yours too. Don't forget to check out Cinch IO Autofix to claim your free onboarding, a $3,000 value. And as always, rise and grind, folks. I want you to keep pushing forward, stay on the cutting edge and keep your mindset positive. Together we'll keep driving success in the auto repair industry. Until next time, take care and keep thriving.