Serv. appts online

[Key Olds]

How about customers making service appts. directly online. No call or visit to dealership to set the appt.!! Anyone tried?
What about: Logistics? Scheduling problems? Follow Up? Successes? Failures?

[robs007]

We have been taking appointments for about a year now over the internet. For know the customer fills out a simple form with a couple of requested days and time and the service they require. It's worked out fine, we get 2 or 3 a day which helps to releive the phones a little. I would someday like to make it real time, but not until UCS gets into this century. We seem to get mostly LOF and simple service appointments, I think people would rather explain there more complicated problems over the phone. But any little bit helps and anyway we can make it more convient for the customer is a benifit. I'm working on s reminder system now that would automatically send a email reminder for the appointment and for scheduled service reminders. You can check out the form on our website. http://crowleyauto.com

[Kevin Kavanagh]

As a customer that spends a lot of time on the road I can tell you that being able to make an appointment over the net would be value added service for me (it isn't a part of my dealers site). I agree that the types of services would generally be CP work.

If you have or are considering a Prospect/Client Developemnt Center (BDC) funneling these requests thru them can be very effective. It would allow you to have someone that could immediately respond that the customers request has been received,via email, and they could coordinate with the service department as to scheduling and then confirm with the customer. You should also consider using E-Mail as a way to confirm/remind customers of appointments.

Creating an E-Mail reminder service is something that could be done in house and there are a couple of sites that offer the service for dealerships also.

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[Key Olds]

Thanks Kevin for the input...I like the way you think! Jerry Smith

[John Moore]

We have been using the 'net' for a couple years now for service appointment scheduling and more importantly, service follow-up with our customers. We get about 6 on-line appointments per day and communicate with at least 15 customers per day regarding service experience. The most difficult part was training the service writers to ask for the e-mail address and finding an approprite field on our ADP system to easily retrieve this info. We currently are assembling the on-line reminder notification for our customers as well.

[Cliff Cope]

Jerry,

My company has developed both service appointment and email service reminders for individual dealerships and OEMs. The impact of these programs varies from dealer to dealer even within the same market area and brand. Their success within your business is largely dependent upon the same practices that make your service department successful today quality customer service. The most common denominators among the highest performing programs are quick responses in conjunction with solid procedures for following up each request. Studies have determined that if it takes much more than a few hours for you to respond to a request, many customers will begin to lose confidence in your system.

Online appointment scheduling can be a great time-saver for your service department. Your web page can have a form for incoming requests that are forwarded to an email address for your service department. For smaller projects, I have found that an email to pager interface enables you to respond quickly while completely removing the need to constantly check your email for requests. Integration with your service computer is a little more complex, but may be worth the effort, as your application will benefit from the enhanced personalization it brings to the system.

Email reminders are a different story, at this point in the year we have sent more email reminders than the previous two years combined (100k+). This method of communication has a few notable characteristics with the two most notable, being the low cost and a response rate in the 80%+ range. The challenge with this form of communication to your customers is how to overcome the SPAM or junk mail appearance of your message.

Good luck,

Clifford Cope

[Brian Devlin]

If you are an ERA Reynolds user you may perfrom E-mail merges for appointments and merchandising to your customers via ERA and ERALink, this feature would allow you to e-mail your clients maintenance reminders.

Appoint. co-ordinators could also e-mail appt confirmations and such also....

ERA has a specific place for e-mail addresses..

[Kevin Kavanagh]

I recently discovered an interesting way to communicate with your customers using the web. If you have a business development or customer realtionship center, we call them Prospect/Client Development Centers (PCDC)or have someone available to take a call this technology would allow a customer to click a button on your website and you would be immediately contacted and a phone connection could be made to this client real-time. This allows for true one to one marketing using the web. If you were contacted after hours it let's the customer leave a voice mail. I've tried it and it is real technology. Contact me if you want any additional information on this technology.

I see this as a great way to handle the customer for a service appontment!

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