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Smart Appointment and Service Reminders Educate Motorists

Appointments are the shops’ opportunity to not only fix the initial concern a motorist expressed, but also make sure that pending items are presented so all necessary items are taken care of. Seasoned service advisors use the opportunity at pick-up to announce at pick-up that service reminders will hit the motorist’s inbox and cell phone when due and at vehicle drop-off to present the service history and open issues at the counter. Given the out-of-sight-out-of-mind nature of reminders and the rush everyone is in at vehicle drop-off, this can be a challenging endeavor.

Introducing Smart Appointment and Service Reminders: The AutoVitals software detects automatically whether there are open items in the service recommendation section (2 in the image below) and in the estimate for the appointment. Adding the images/videos and notes from the last visit for exactly the recommended items (1 in the image below) will educate the motorist. Additionally, all items are presented, which were on the Inspection sheet for future attention.

Items, which have been declined at the last visit, will be marked as ‘critical item’.

Solution

 

How the Motorist experiences the Smart Appointment and Service Reminder

 

As demonstrated in the images below, the motorist receives an email or text with a link to the vehicle specific appointment page, which shows any or all of the sections

  • Previous Inspection (1)
  • Urgent Jobs (2)
  • Car Maker Recs (not configured in the image below))

Motorists can research the items, tap on pictures/videos and decide whether they would like you to take care of it, want more information about it or are not interested at this time.

Update on 2018/03/05: Appointment and Service Reminders take the motorist to a web page, which always shows the current status of the customer account. If the appointment has already happened and/or new vehicles have become due or overdue, the web page shows that new status, even if an old reminder is clicked upon. A pop up will now remind the motorist of the change

Update on 2018/04/16: Conditions and images/videos per inspection topic will be shown even if no recommended action has been selected. see below how the call to action is created

How the Service Advisor is seeing the Motorists Response

In any workflow step of the workflow view, the appointment reminder button is shown when an appointment reminder has been sent out.

Once the motorist has opened the reminder and checked topics to be educated about, two numbers indicate that the appointment reminder has been opened (1) and how many topics are of interest (2).

Once the appointment is confirmed, a checkmark appears in conjunction with the topics of interest.

Clicking on the button reveals what topics have been selected by the motorist, exactly  how the motorist saw it on the phone/computer so the service advisor can prepare the visit before the customer shows up

Current Process

 

 

 

 

Currently, service reminders are generic lists of text, most motorists overlook. So appointments are rare. Once an appointment has been made, only emails and text messages indicate the appointment reminder has been confirmed. It is time-consuming for the service advisor and requires a lot of consistency to make sure the previous recommendations are explained at vehicle drop-off.

 

 

Best Practice

 

In order to take full advantage of the reminder, please make sure

  1. you use canned jobs in your inspection, which allows us to detect what jobs have been declined
  2. use the term “future” in your ‘future attention’ inspection status, so we can detect the topics and can recommend them
  3. use the declined job feature in your PoS if supported.
    1. If you don’t have declined jobs in your PoS, set the option below in MyShop->Predefined Jobs as shown. It is the default. 

Note that if you use canned jobs and the SA has selected to sell a different job than recommended by the Tech, we might recommend the job proposed by the tech. To avoid this, please use declined jobs or change the recommend job in the inspection result to what has been sold.

 

What Exactly Does the Previous Inspection Tab Contain?

 

It is obvious that previous inspection results will be instrumental in reminding motorists about the need for the work proposed. That is why we implemented an auto-detection, which works as follows:

a) if the setting “Detect critical items strictly by declined jobs” is enabled, then the “Previous Inspection” tab contains
  • Recommended actions of topics with status ‘For future attention’ (never critical items)
  • Canned job actions that are not on the RO or declined on the RO (critical item if declined)
b) if the setting “Include recommendations from inspections not sold” is enabled (default), then the “Previous Inspection” tab contains
  • Any recommended action that is not on the RO or declined on the RO (critical if status is not “For future attention”) and a canned job

The setting what inspection status is interpreted as “Future Recommendation” can be done as follows:

  • The software automatically interprets a status containing the word ‘future’ as such status
  • You can define on the inspection sheet which status is future attention. See image below

 

 

 

 

 

 

DST & Training

 

During the training in your Digital Shop Team and subsequent deep-dives, this topic will be covered. Watch for announcements in the Digital Shop Talk.

 

 

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