October 2020

members of the team do get involved as well. So, TechMan has already helped some of their new customers get onto the new system. The regular contact does not end there though: “Once a business is up and running, does a customer need a lot of support? Do you get calls in the day saying ‘this isn’t working, that isn’t working, I don’t know how to do this’ - that sort of thing? “A lot of it is about understanding the system, so for the first couple of weeks after a business first comes on board with us, we get a lot of calls, through which a lot of ongoing support is provided to that customer. A lot of hand-holding goes on with them.” This is expected: “We always tell customers ‘do not hesitate to contact us’, so we are always there and available on the phone. Our customers will contact us for non- TechMan related stuff as well, asking about processes and different things O rganisation is key for a business that wants to be successful. Garage management systems offer a host of ways of streamlining activities for a workshop, while also providing a route towards adding all-new services for customers. With this in mind, we thought it would be interesting to find out what goes on behind the scenes at TechMan, the garage management system provider created by a garage, as the legend goes. What with social distancing, this was to be another Day in the Life by way of technology. Our guide for the day was Customer Liaison Director Peter Mchilhiney. Based above the spacious In Town Automotive workshop in the heart of Northampton, the business has three departments, as Peter explained: “We’ve got our sales team, which consist of our Sales Director Leo Freebairn and two other Internal Business Development Managers, and then we’ve got our Development team, which consists of five Developers. Then we have our Support team, which includes myself, two main first-line support staff, and then a trainer as well.” We prevailed upon Peter to show us what happens on a typical day at TechMan, if such a thing exists, Support We started our day with the Support team, which will be the part that you, the reader, will be most familiar with. Peter explained the process of a typical working day for the guys: “The day consists of making sure all customers are looked after. One of the big things for us is obviously the on- boarding of customers, and making sure that when a business signs up with TechMan that we set their systems up, we make sure all their data is transferred over, and the general hand-holding of customers throughout the process of going from one system to the TechMan system.” We started at 8am. The guys have 46 AFTERMARKET OCTOBER 2020 DAY IN THE LIFE www.aftermarketonline.net TECHMAN OF THE HOUR Above: Behind the curtain at TechMan Aftermarket spends a day with the team behind TechMan, to find out what makes them tick, and how it all works just come in and it’s all systems go. There are some new customers that are just starting and they need to be transferred over. We go on to find out how we help them. “First of all,” revealed Peter, “we contact the customer, welcome them to TechMan, and have a chat.” Once all the relevant information is gleaned from the new customer, and all the data is transferred over one system over to another, its then formatted. There is more to it than just number-crunching though: “The other thing is understanding the customer’s needs. With a lot of garages, although they do the same job, everybody works in slightly different ways, and has different parts of their business. It is very much about understanding that side of things on our first initial calls, when we are speaking to new customers.” This is one of the key parts of Peter’s role, and it is him doing it as much as possible, depending on how much they’ve got to do. The other