Garage management systems 34 www.aftermarketonline.net MARCH 2025 As UK dealers face an uncertain year ahead and customers have less disposable income, efficiency is key to ensuring profitability for dealerships of all sizes across the UK. Many dealers have begun to embrace digital self-service solutions as they offer customers and dealer staff increased efficiency and convenience, which has a direct impact on dealer revenue growth. This shift was particularly prevalent in 2024 and is set to grow this year. Tjekvik, a specialist provider of digital self-service solutions for dealer aftersales departments, collated its UK market data from last year, and it revealed strong customer engagement with its digital self-service tools, partly due to their ease of use. By being offered a more efficient method of business, Tjekvik found that customers were more likely to pay for value-add products and services, creating hot leads for sales executives. The convenience of these tools creates new avenues for dealerships to generate revenue and meet customer demand more flexibly than ever before. A common issue in aftersales departments is that customers arrive in the early mornings and late afternoons to drop off or collect their cars. This results in queues that cut productivity by overloading staff and undermining the customer experience. Tjekvik’s self-service systems create an efficient check-in and check-out process. Service, maintenance, and repair customers can avoid queues by checking in and out when, how, and where they want — whether at home, online or at the dealership using touchscreen kiosks. Last year, over 640 UK dealerships using Tjekvik’s self-service solutions handled more than 2.5 million interactions. This rapid adoption shows how quickly customers are embracing self-service and how easily dealerships have integrated the system. The most popular digital interaction for customers was home check-in, with 56% of customers checking in their vehicles for service, repair or MOT from the comfort of their own homes. For those customers who preferred to visit the dealership instead, kiosk check-ins reached 26%, with a further 15,226 customers using tablets to check in their vehicles. For those customers who preferred to get on with their day after their vehicle had been seen, 82,207 customers used Tjekvik’s digital check-out. Digital convenience isn’t just about boosting efficiency, it’s driving revenue too. Our self-service solutions offer added-value products and services directly to customers, leading to increased upsell opportunities and additional revenue. Last year, more than 240,000 UK customers bought value-added products or services, generating more than £9.2 million in extra revenue. The top-selling items were lubricants and additives. While Tjekvik’s technology benefits aftersales departments, it also has a positive effect on retail teams. Digital check-in solutions logged over 126,676 vehicle valuation requests, creating hot leads for sales executives that generated further revenue opportunities. Average labour rates increased by 2.5% in 2024 and invoice values grew by over 5%, according to business performance data based on more than one million independent garage transactions. Garage Hive, whose real-time data platform Garage Industry Trends tracks a range of metrics, said the transactions registered were a significant milestone for the service. The service tracks average invoice value, future bookings, labour rates, net promoter score and shows demand for repairs and maintenance by vehicle age and fuel type. More than 175 workshops have voluntarily shared anonymised data through 1,010,000 transactions since Garage Industry Trends launched in September 2022. Garage Hive director Alex Lindley said: “This freely available data provides valuable benchmarks, helping owners and managers evaluate their performance and make informed decisions.” Visit www.garageindustry trends.com to find out more. Milestone for free garage data service Aftersales cashing in on digital self-service
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