John is an experienced after sales team manager. He is working at a multi-location car dealership, servicing couple of well selling car brands. The business along with workshop occupation rate is good – mechanics are mostly busy but there are some available slots here and there. Despite the fact that the Managing Director Jack keeps reminding John on a weekly meetings that they could do better, John really sees nothing to worry about. The service bookings that they receive are getting fulfilled so what else could he really do. But there is something! Keep reading to hear the online service booking story that lead to dealership success.
Challenges leading to changes
On a casual Tuesday, John is calling to his long-time hairdresser as his wife has booked tickets to the theatre later that week. Looking good matters to John and he of course he wants to please his wife. After couple of unanswered calls, John gets busy with his daily work and forgets all about the hairdresser. The next day, after still not receiving a call back, John tries again, without any result. This is when John starts to get a bit worried. His week is quite full and the time is ticking. Luckily, he recalls that his colleague usually visits another hairdresser just a 5-minute drive away. John’s colleague had mentioned how easy it was to book a time online.
John visited the salon’s website and with a bit of hesitation, started the online booking process. It was tough for him as he was loyal to his hairdresser. On the other hand, he could not risk it as he had to have a decent haircut and fast.
To his surprise, he got an appointment for the next available slot. Going to a new hairdresser was a bit of a hassle since he had to spend some time explaining how his hair was usually cut. However, at the end he was quite happy – he got the haircut, his wife was pleased and the play in the theatre was bearable. John knew that he was safe from any theatre visits for a solid 3 months.
Coming back to work the next week, John started to think after another chat with his boss. If he had decided to change his hairdresser because he couldn’t reach his own service provider in a convenient way, how many of their dealership clients had done that? Fact was, their dealership received all service bookings by phone or email.
That’s when John decided that something had to be done. He contacted his software partner to find out what options they had. John was well-aware that having the booking form on a website was going to be only half the solution. The form needed to be connected to workshop planner to really offer a true, seamless online experience to a customer. Just a nice-looking booking form on a website that generated an email was not going to solve anything.
Dealership success with online service booking
Luckily, it wasn’t long before John got his wish. An online service booking module was embedded to their dealership website. Best of all, it was seamlessly connected to their workshop planner. This meant that clients could find a suitable free slot for the service they were after and book it conveniently online.
John was thrilled! What caught him by surprise was that many bookings were made during the weekend. He was glad to note that his service advisors were not as busy as before with checking their email inbox, trying to fit incoming bookings against the calendar, calling the clients to confirm bookings or trying to re-schedule. He also noticed that service advisors had managed to reduce the pile of work orders on their tables while having more time for visiting clients and giving them much-needed advice.
Just a few months into the experiment and John was happy. For his two outlets, he had counted around 800 online reservations during their best month. What struck him more however, was the fact that it was not only their loyal customers making the bookings. He actually saw a measurable increase in new customer bookings.
While things were looking good, Jack, the Director was a practical guy and wanted to see real benefits from the change. So Jack decided to pull some statistics and do a bit of math. He started with the assumption that manually handled leads would normally take around 6 minutes. This meant that the 800 online leads they’d received, would’ve amounted to nearly 80 hours a month of manual labor. This was a 1,700€ saving per month and 20,000€ annually!
At that point, it was safe to say that Director Jack was really happy with the results as well. However, for John, it was a triple win. Not only did they see a significantly higher number of bookings, they also saved valuable time for their customer service staff, and easily captured new leads and clients.
So what’s the morale of the story? If you want to catch the wave, you have to be like John!
Modera provides an Online Service Booking module that can easily be added your current website. You can enjoy connection to Keyloop/Automaster DMS or Incadea DMS. If you don’t have a Service Planning module or it can’t be integrated with the Online Booking tool, that’s not a problem either. We’ll happily take care of that as well.
