Let’s be honest, your customers don’t look forward to visiting your service stations. They’re visiting because they have a problem or need preventative maintenance for their vehicle. Not exactly something you would see on an Amazon wish list. But this doesn’t mean you can’t make them happy, loyal customers through a streamlined service process that builds trust between them and your business. One way to do this? By offering them the ability to schedule their appointment online. Intelligent Online Appointment Scheduling also ensures that you’re prepared with the right technician, service bay, equipment and parts on hand for each scheduled appointment.
Acquiring More Customers
Intelligent Online Appointment Scheduling is great way to drive customers into your locations by capturing them at the peak of their interest through the channels they engage in. As customers engage through your website, social media channels, or receive coupons through email or direct mail, they can schedule their service appointments at a date and time that works best for them while ensuring the right technician, equipment, bay, and parts are available. Appointment scheduling can help distribute customer demand by offering appointments at times your locations may be less busy, allowing you to provide great service to scheduled and walk-in customers. Even before customers choose a location to schedule an appointment, location estimated wait times can be displayed for each location allowing your customers to schedule or check-in to a location that best fits their schedule.
Welcoming Scheduled and Walk-In Customers
Walk-in customers are still the main source of your traffic which causes unpredictability in staffing requirements, parts on hand, and increased customer wait times which tend to send a lot of people walking out of your doors and to another service center.
This is where a queue management solution will streamline the entire on-site customer and employee experience from start to finish. Equip store employees with Concierge Mobile, a clientele application that provides everything your employees need to know about upcoming appointments, customer details, and the number of customers in the queue along with their current wait times. Employees can see accurate estimated wait times to alert new walk-ins of when they can expect service, add them to the queue, or schedule a future appointment at a date and time that works for them. Employees can also send text notifications to waiting customers to notify them when it’s their turn for service.
Additionally, you can enable customers to serve themselves with a self-service kiosk. Customers can interact with the kiosk to check themselves in for their scheduled appointments or add themselves to the queue if they don’t have a scheduled appointment. Finally, an on-site queue display allows customers who are waiting in the lobby to see their place in line to understand how long their wait might be. This gives them the opportunity to decide whether they should wait for their vehicle or schedule a future appointment at a better date and time.
Increasing Resource Utilization
By using Intelligent Online Appointment Scheduling and on-site queue management, you’re able to build predictability into your service schedule and better align services over less busy times. Additionally, as customers cancel or reschedule appointments, their original appointment windows become available for other customers to schedule. This helps fully utilize your bays, technicians, and equipment so there is minimal downtime between services and helps smooth customer demand over longer time windows as opposed to having everyone walk into the location over a lunch period.
What You Need When You Need It
Integrating your Intelligent Appointment Scheduling solution with other applications is a powerful way to share information across the organization and further increase utilization and cost savings. By integrating with your parts management system, the dates and times offered through Online Scheduling can factor in part availability and include the lead times needed to deliver parts to locations for scheduled services. This means fewer parts on hand, decreases in depreciation costs, and a better customer experience.
Integrating Intelligent Appointment Scheduling with workforce and customer relationship management systems ensures all customer data is captured back into your CRM to build a complete picture of the customer’s experience and purchases. This allows you to personalize your outreach strategies and encourage future scheduled maintenance visits.
Your Customers will Love It
Customers scheduling guaranteed appointments are going to love the experience they have knowing the time they scheduled is real. They are going to be able to schedule the services they need at the date and time they want with an expected and reasonable wait. Customized email and text notifications will keep them reminded of their appointments and allow them to confirm or cancel should a problem arise.
Unscheduled walk-in customers will be happy knowing what the current estimated wait times are so they can make the decision to join the queue or schedule a future appointment. Furthermore, your employees will be happy knowing each scheduled appointment has the right technician, bay, equipment, and parts available to get the job done fast.