Retail Anywhere - Service - Offering a Flexible Service Experience

Hello, everyone. I'm Gabrielle Sprinkle, presentation specialist at Reynolds and Reynolds. When most people think about digital retailing, they focus almost exclusively on the front end of the dealership and the vehicle sale. But if the goal of your business is to sustain long-term profitability, you have to be able to increase the lifetime value of customers coming to your dealership. That means providing a digital experience for customers in service too, but doing it without sacrificing efficiency, tracking, and most importantly, profitability. First, let's dive into the challenges surrounding a digital service experience.

Think back to the processes your service department had five to ten years ago. Appointments were made by calling into the dealership or walking in the day of. Checking in looked a lot different too. The customer came in, waited in line to be seen by an adviser, which led to waiting even longer as a multipoint inspection was performed before being presented in-person with recommended work, usually handwritten.

Then came maybe the most important step of the process, upselling. Are you confident upsells were presented to every customer every time back then? How confident are you that it's happening in your service lane today? Missed upsell opportunities continue to be one of the biggest challenges service departments face. That's why tracking those opportunities and having an efficient follow-up process in place is so important.

What about getting work approved by a customer? Are advisers wasting time making phone calls and leaving voicemail after voicemail with no response from the customer as the vehicle sits on the lift, taking up a bay because it's torn apart? What other profit-producing activities could they spend more of their time on if the approval and the follow-up processes were done digitally?

Today's consumers prefer text messaging over phone calls, online scheduling over making appointments in-person, and many other digital options like approving the work and paying online. But unlike sales and F&I, the actual service process can't be fully done in a remote fashion. The technician still has to work on the car. But more and more often, the customer isn't staying at the dealership while their vehicle is being worked on. So the challenge then becomes keeping communication channels open while the customer is away. There's a lot that goes into the service experience that can be hard to keep consistent and detailed. Processes have to be done right to maximize efficiency and sustainability. So how do you combat these challenges?

The Retail Anywhere approach uses a single system and allows your service department, no matter where the customer is, to create a seamless digital service experience for appointment scheduling, upselling, RND, follow-up, and more.

The first step is making sure you have control of the process so profits are at risk. Checking in for a service appointment is as simple as a customer entering their information into a kiosk or scanning a mobile QR code. During the check-in process, upsells are presented one hundred percent of the time. And while the vehicle is being serviced, advisers can send videos and pictures of recommended work, allowing for additional profit opportunities to be captured.

The second part of this is accuracy. With an online portal, customers can view all their previous service appointments, vehicle repairs, and previously declined work. Everything the customer sees matches the DMS. Customers are able to approve and pay for their services from anywhere, at any time with pre-populated totals that match service invoices. There's no need to record amounts for either the customer or adviser.

The last part is efficiency among your staff. Using a single system allows for a completely seamless process, which provides customer information at your fingertips and accurate, real-time tracking every step of the way. Vehicle updates and multipoint inspections are completed digitally and sent via text message, opening up communication between the dealership and the customer without sacrificing the productivity of employees.

At the end of the day, using the Retail Anywhere approach in service, or any department, is about balancing the customer's needs with the long-term success of your dealership. How do you make sure both come away from the experience satisfied? We want our dealership partners to be as profitable as they can be. That means investing in tools and processes that improve the customer experience without sacrificing anything. The Retail Anywhere approach allows users to serve customers the way they want to be served, from anywhere at any time, without forfeiting the reason they're in business: to make money. Thanks for watching. Visit reyrey.com/retailanywhere for more information.