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Motorist Education at Estimate

Every touchpoint with motorists is an opportunity to educate. You already knew that. In the previous article we covered the use of SmartFlow during vehicle drop-off. For service advisors the touchpoint Estimate is the most important to create the estimate, educate the motorist using inspection results and get the work authorized. But, the motorist is not at the counter. That makes educating over the phone hard. The challenge is even bigger when the motorist is on the go and not able to be in front of a computer or tablet to demonstrate the inspection results.

We took the challenge and implemented the first version of the job educator available for both, the Drop-Off and Estimate touchpoints. While during drop-off the demonstration of the impact of declined jobs in the service history and their proof of impact using the previous inspection results is important, the Estimate touchpoint focuses on the just finished inspection and its results.  In both cases a dedicated browser tab is reserved for customer education. Each vehicle tile on the workflow page has a new button with a work order clipboard icon, which is highlighted by a magnifying glass. In addition the number of Recommended Actions on the most recent inspection results report (history or current) are shown. The image below shows that the vehicle is in “Waiting on Approval”, the inspection has been finished and even emailed. Now using the job educator will allow to educate the motorist about 13 recommended actions.

Clicking on the 13 will take you to the job educator and automatically pre-selects the Current tab, because there are results for the current visit available. If there are no results available for the current visit, the History tab is pre-selected. Clicking on the job educator button will open a new tab on your browser, allowing you to stream the page on this browser tab to another TV (chromecast and the use of Google Chrome browser make it happen) or monitor screen on your wall or counter. Showing this browser tab only will hide all the pricing details or other shop internal data to the motorist so they only see what is necessary.  See below for a typical appearance of the job educator on the current tab, shown for a desktop and a smartphone. Note that the number of images and recommended actions for each topic are easily spotted on the header of each topic (click on the image to enlarge it).

 

Make sure to click/tap on the image(s) on the inspection results to support the education with an impressive proof (see below for both the desktop and smartphone).

 

Let’s take a more detailed look into the use of trends. Brake pad deterioration or other wear and tear can be shown perfectly by comparing the inspection results of the current, previous and past visit. Check out below the sequence of events by showing the results and recommended actions for two consecutive visits for tread depth. For better orientation I have put the details of the Current (1), and Previous (2) visit next to each other.

 

You can see how the tread depth changes over the course of 8 months and 5,000 miles.

Clicking on the images will open an image gallery for all visits together, so you can walk the customer through the pattern of wear and tear.