The SOP: How Smart Shop Owners Can Get Ahead Using AI 

Dan Vance is the owner and CEO of Shop Dog Marketing in South Ogden, Utah. His agency works exclusively with independent auto repair shops, offering a range of services that include SEO, PPC, video, and social media marketing. His goal? Simple: Help shops get found, drive more cars into bays, and build a consistent pipeline of customers.

Vance spoke to Ratchet+Wrench about one of the most important—and often misunderstood—tools in a shop owner's toolbox right now: artificial intelligence (and why savvy shop owners embrace it).

As told to Chris Jones

Understanding How Consumers Search

There have been some studies showing that users are going into AI and they're using prompts to figure out their car problems: "Hey, my car smells like this," or "My car drives this way," or "There's a funny sound that I hear. What do you think's going on?" AI is helping them self-diagnose vehicle issues they may be having, making them better prepared when going to search engines and looking for shops they feel are going to be the most competent in being able to deliver results.

We know that people still trust those top three search results because they feel they're the best, but we're seeing that users are making the list of everybody in the marketplace, and they're sorting them by their review strength and the number of reviews they have by using AI.

While not all shops have strong reviews, since people don’t understand how repairs work, and they get upset and write bad reviews, what’s a shop to do? AI can help us understand what we need to do to build trust in the consumer's mind and start building our brand strength with them. A good example of using AI in marketing would be asking it, "How can I build my brand in the local market?" AI can help you with ideas on how to make that happen. AI is a place where you can do all kinds of brainstorming, and you don't have to pay somebody else to do it for you. You can use your creativity and your experiences within your marketplace to ask it for ideas based on behavior.

Understanding Your Customers Through Review Analysis 

So, back to reviews. Search engines like reviews because they're a feedback forum that's not from the shop owner. We already know search engines are reading your reviews, which means you should be reading them, too.

You can copy and paste your reviews into AI or upload a document to start analyzing reviews. Just make sure you take out information you don't want AI to read—AI is an open format. If it's already in a public place like a Google My Business listing where they've left a review, copy and paste the whole thing in and ask AI to start giving you some feedback, like, "Hey, these are reviews for my shop. What are some key takeaways?" And it'll give you feedback. “What are some things that appear to be positive but are actually negative?” And it'll give you feedback. “What are some things I could do to improve some of the negative reviews I've been getting?” And it'll give you feedback.

I’ve even seen some shop owners get really excited about what they learn, and then they start grabbing reviews of their neighboring shops or their local competitors, and reviewing those shops with AI. They use prompts like, "What are consumers complaining about?” “What types of services are they not happy with?” “How could I be more competitive?” AI will give you feedback on all of those questions.

Creating Documents and SOPs with AI 

Creating documents like SOPs to run a more efficient shop is something AI can also do.

You can do the same thing for HR policies. You can say, "Hey, this happened in our shop today with an employee. This has never happened before. I should address this broadly for the rest of my staff and for our company moving forward. Here's what happened." AI will help you sort through that, and in minutes, you're going to have something to address the problem that you can hand to your team and say, "Hey, because of this thing today, this is how we're going to address this in the future." It's going to make it much more organized, a lot more productive, and it takes the pain out of it.

Looking back on SOPs, you can add this prompt: "This is the way we're currently taking vehicles in (tell it how). How can we improve that, make it more efficient? How can we get more cars in and get them out faster?" AI will help you with that.

Analyzing Phone Calls for Lost Revenue

While most shop owners use call tracking, they don't always listen to the recordings. With AI, you can take call tracking, especially if there's transcription, and paste it all in AI and ask: "How are we doing on this?"

We ran AI on 65,000 phone calls for a whole year. We looked at seasonality and the different ways that people are calling. It told us all kinds of things:

• What times of day do the calls come in?
• How are the calls being handled?
• How many conversions are really happening?
• How many new calls were received?

We estimated that there's probably around $150,000 in lost revenue per shop just on missed calls—they're not even answering the phone. Well, for that kind of revenue, hire someone who helps with the offload of the calls coming in. "Hey, my name's Ashley. How can I help? Just one moment. I'm going to get you somebody live in just one second." AI helped figure this out.

AI Is Here to Stay, Not Just a Fad

AI is here to stay, and it's going to increase. It's going to get bigger and bigger, just like the internet did. The reason is that users like it. It's changing user behavior, and user behavior is where money flows.

I’ll leave you with this. We have a client who called one day and said, "I can't believe it, but I just got a call from a lady who is coming to me from the dealership who asked AI who's the best shop in town that fixes transmissions for Subarus." His name came up. No competition, no reviews, no other feedback—singular, strong influence. She called him, came down, he fixed her transmission and a few other things, and now he's got a great new client. 

All of the big companies are making millions and millions of dollars from investments in AI. They're not doing that because they think it's going away. They're definitely betting on it, and we should be too.