It should be easy, not annoying, for a customer to schedule a vehicle service appointment with a dealership.
But sometimes it’s a hassle, as evidenced by a Pied Piper Management Co. “mystery shopping” study. The consultancy measured how effectively dealerships by brand handled service appointment requests, both online and on the telephone.
Some dealerships did better than others. The ones with problems risk losing customer confidence and loyalty.
“All a service customer wants, whether online or on the phone, is someone or some technology to interact with them,” Pied Piper CEO Fran O’Hagan tells WardsAuto. “They don’t want to be put on hold for five minutes.”
If they are, they may start to wonder: If scheduling a service appointment becomes an issue, what hassles are ahead in the actual servicing of the vehicle?
The most common issues that muck up appointment-making include being placed on hold indefinitely, getting stuck in a phone tree/AI loop and going to voicemail when transferred.
Pied Piper submitted 4,887 service requests to dealerships representing major automobile brands.
For the survey, dealerships receive service appointment website and telephone scores, each ranging from 0-100, based on their performance in measurements tied to best practices most likely to drive service revenue and customer loyalty. The website and telephone scores were combined into a single service scheduling effectiveness (SSE) score.
Mini dealerships scored No.1 in the combined scoring. The brand achieved an overall SSE score of 66, seven points higher than the industry average.
Following Mini in overall SSE score were Lexus, BMW, Mazda and Honda.
While Mini had the highest overall SSE score in the study, Porsche ranked highest in the website portion and Lexus achieved the highest telephone score.
Mini’s strength came from balanced performance across both website and telephone service scheduling – placing second in Service Website Effectiveness and third in Service Telephone Effectiveness.
By contrast, other brands ranked higher in one channel often performed worse in the others, resulting in lower combined scores, says Cameron O’Hagan, Pied Piper’s vice president of metrics and analytics.
It’s important for a dealership to confirm an appointment, says Fran O’Hagan. “It was surprising how common it is for dealership software not to do that.” Automated phone and website service systems often fail to send confirmations without anyone at the dealership noticing the misstep, adds Cameron O’Hagan. “Dealers for many brands are inconsistent in sending (automated) follow-up confirmations for service scheduled online.”
He describes those messages as critical for reassuring customers that their dealership is ready and expecting them.
Two-thirds of service customers still rely on the telephone to book appointments, even as online scheduling grows steadily each year. Despite the prominent use of the telephone for making appointments, automakers seem to be more interested in digital appointment-making systems.
“OEMs are very interested in online scheduling,” says Fran O’Hagan. “If we talk to them about telephone scheduling, their eyes glaze over. “But when we talk with the big dealer groups, they’re all riveted when the topic is using the phone for appointments. There’s no mystery there – more of their service customers are using the phone for appointments.”
Artificial intelligence-driven online scheduling is great for easy things, such as oil changes. But online has trouble with complicated situations, says Fran O’Hagan. “If I have a mysterious clunk coming from my car, I want to talk to somebody about it.”
If the automated scheduling system has trouble understanding a caller's concern, the call will go elsewhere. But that can take a while.
“If it takes on average 93 seconds before an online system transfers a call (or) if the call goes to voicemail, that’s a problem,” says Cameron O’Hagan.
