Chris Fisher, independent garage owner and creator of garage management system Clarity-GMS, tells PMM readers what he thinks are the six worst mistakes garages are making online.
I run an independent garage and built Clarity-GMS because every GMS I tried either didn’t do what I needed or took screen after screen to get there. Every fix below cost me time and money before it became software.
1. Expecting the phone to stop ringing
The phone isn’t the enemy — customers often prefer it. Aiming to cut calls by half or more is key.
Customers, being creatures of habit, call to book unless given a reason to change. We trialled 10 per cent off for booking online. Right away customers were setting up customer accounts and adding their cars; a secondary bonus was that the system now pulled the MOT expiry date and sent a reminder out 30 days before it ran out, cutting “it ran out yesterday” calls. 10 per cent looks like it eats into the margin, but not as much as the hidden costs of a call.
2. The contact form
For many garages, the first version of “online booking” is a contact form: The customer fills it in, the garage rings back to arrange a time… advantage gone.
It doesn’t know what’s free, so it can’t confirm a booking. A real booking page on a proper garage management system reads the diary and allocates the slot.
3. Not setting the booking website up properly
Creating a booking website and configuring it properly are two different things. Start with staff — not every mechanic can do every job, nor does it know who’s off that day, though it could.
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Capacity — how many MOTs or services can you manage a day? Without that figure, the website can overload you.
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The calendar — left alone, customers book the earliest date, so Monday and Tuesday fill first and Friday absorbs the rest. A good system controls which dates it offers, spreading bookings across the week instead of the front.
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Lastly, the clicks — reducing the number of things a customer fills in. Number plate and address lookup autofill are a must — less typing translates to fewer abandoned bookings.
None of this is complicated for a good GMS — it’s just the part everyone skips.
4. Guide times
Book times from Autodata or Haynes are unrealistic. A turbo replacement quoted at six hours took four days — the engine had to come out to get at it.
Yet jobs running over affect the jobs that come after them. I made our GMS add a user-defined real-world percentage on top of book time. We now quote and book to that figure.
5. Walk-ins
With walk-ins, the job gets written on paper, not entered into the GMS. The booking site thinks the slot’s still free; someone books it online that evening — double booked.
The solution: Reducing the time it takes to enter the job to a few seconds — done. That’s the bar a system has to clear before staff use it every time.
6. Answering the emails
Not every booking request arrives by phone or through the website — some come by email, a customer asking to bring the car in, or whether there’s space this week. Left unwatched, it sits in the inbox and by the time anyone reads it the slot’s already taken.
The fix is a GMS that reads incoming email for phrases like “can I make a booking” and replies automatically with a magic link to the customer’s own booking page, no login required. A message that could have waited hours, or days, now gets a reply in seconds. The customer’s booked and not gone elsewhere.
None of this fixes itself. All it takes is an afternoon with your software supplier to tell them what you want your booking system to do.
