24 May 2021

Every day it seems cars are getting safer, more environmentally friendly and more technologically advanced – until it’s time to contact the dealer for service.

Service and repair are where auto dealers make most of their money so, with all the technology that’s being built into cars these days, where can we implement some of that innovation into the customer experience?

Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and other platforms, there are clear opportunities for improvement in a few key areas.

Smarter call centres

About 80% of the service functions handled by typical business development centre (BDC) calls can be automated – whether that’s setting appointments, appointment reminders, status updates or anything else that doesn’t need to be addressed by someone with a particular skill set or knowledge base. The other 20% is where the rubber hits the road, and that’s exactly where the dealership’s resources are best used: putting fewer, but smarter people in place to create a more intelligent call centre.

When a dealership gets high-priority calls, it’s crucial that they be directed to the right person – someone who is well-trained, service-oriented and proactive to add value to that phone call for high-value customers. These people will have the training to set appointments based on being in close contact with the sales and service departments to both anticipate and understand what the customers need.

Better internal communication

There’s an old joke among dealership service departments: the service advisors get their 25,000 daily steps because they spend so much time walking between the front desk where they interact with the customers, the service department where they check in with the status of a repair project, and the parts department where they make sure the parts needed to complete that repair are in stock.

In just about every other work environment there’s some sort of platform to handle these types of interactions, and there’s absolutely no reason a similar system couldn’t be used to improve internal communication between the different areas of a service department.

We’ve already created a smarter, more efficient call centre staffed by our most elite group of customer service professionals, so the next logical step is to arm them with the communications tools they need and put them at the forefront of this process.

More comprehensive service through augmented reality

One trend that is going to start becoming more prevalent in the service department is the capturing of the multi-point inspection using smartphones and augmented reality. This will allow the mechanic to take pictures or video of components that can wear down or measure fluid levels. In the short term, we’ll be able to point out and circle these areas for the customer remotely to expedite service decisions and generally make things run more efficiently.

But in the long term, the potential exists for the integration of advanced computer vision technology, which is what we call the visual aspect of artificial intelligence. Using this technology, the system can visually detect problems through AI that a human technician might not be able to see, as well as anticipate future problems that might arise.

Tags: aftersales, AI