TowingBossPro Blog — Towing Software

Repeat Locations: Body Shops, Dealerships and Lots in Your Towing Software

Look at a month of your drop-offs and a pattern jumps out. A big share of your tows end at the same dozen places: three or four body shops, a couple of dealerships, a few independent mechanics, a storage lot and your own yard. On paper, those addresses get written fresh every time, sometimes three different ways.

In Two-Way Texting for a Towing Company: One Thread Per Customer, we covered keeping customer conversations in one thread. This article is about the places customers and accounts send you over and over.

Customers and Locations Are Different Things

A towing company deals with people and places, and they don't map one-to-one. A body shop is a location you deliver to dozens of times a month, but the customer on each of those tows is a different driver. A dealership might be both a customer — when they pay for transports — and a drop-off for tows that other people pay for.

TowingBossPro keeps customers and locations so you can handle both. Repeat locations like body shops, dealerships and lots are saved, so they can be picked as a pickup or drop-off without being retyped.

Faster, More Accurate Dispatch

When the drop-off is a saved location, dispatch picks it from a list. No spelling the road name over the phone, no wrong suite number, no "is it the one on the highway or the one downtown?" The address is right because it was right the first time someone set it up.

That speed matters during a rush. A dispatcher taking calls back to back saves real time when half the drop-offs are a pick instead of a typed address.

It works for pickups too. Dealerships and lots that call you to move vehicles out are pickups you will see again and again. When a dealer calls for three units to go to their other store, both ends are saved locations, and the call takes seconds to enter. The only new information is the vehicles themselves.

Notes That Travel With the Location

Every repeat location has its quirks. The body shop that wants cars nose-in along the fence. The dealership with an after-hours drop around the back and a key box by the service door. The lot with a gate that locks at six. When those details live with the saved location, every driver who goes there gets them, including the new guy on his first week.

Update the notes when something changes and the next driver has the new information. That is a lot better than a lesson learned the hard way at 11 p.m.

Be specific in those notes. "Drop in back" is less useful than "drop along the back fence, nose in, keys in the black box left of the service door." The more a note sounds like your best driver explaining it over the phone, the fewer phone calls you will actually get.

Cleaner Records and Better Relationships

When a body shop is one saved location instead of five variations of an address, you can actually see how much work flows through it. How many cars did you deliver to them last month? Is that growing or shrinking? Those numbers matter, because shops and dealers that send or receive a lot of your tows are relationships worth looking after.

It also helps when a location calls with a question. "Did you drop a blue pickup here last Tuesday?" becomes a quick look at the calls tied to that location.

Locations on the Map

Saved locations show up on the map like any other pickup or drop-off. Because dispatch sees both ends of every call on the map, it is easy to spot when several calls are heading to the same shop and pair them on one truck. A rollback that drops at a body shop and then picks up a car two blocks from it is a good afternoon.

In the driver app, each saved location gets the same one-tap navigation as any other address, so drivers end up at the right gate, not just the right block.

Setting Them Up

Start with the ten or fifteen places you drop most often. Add the address, a clear name, and whatever notes your best driver would tell a new one. Add more as they come up. If you are moving over from a spreadsheet, CSV import brings your customer list in, and you can build out locations from there.

Within a few weeks, most of your drop-offs will be picks instead of typed addresses. For the rest of the system that uses these locations, see the towing software page.