Run the Numbers...
- Amount of average customer-pay RO: $250
- Increase in number of customer-pay ROs: 4 per week
- Service revenues increase by: $4000 per month
eScheduling has significantly increased the number of Repair Orders we handle. The first reason is the increase in our sales-to-service conversion rate. Whenever we sell a new vehicle, we have the salesperson or the finance person schedule their first appointment right at the time of purchase. The customers are always pleasantly surprised to know that our dealership gives them the same 24x7 appointment scheduling and Web-only specials that they get from an airline's Web site. Plus they automatically get their own personalized owner's portal, and by the time they get home they have a confirmation e-mail from us. Our sales-to-service conversion rate has jumped from x% to y%, which brings a lot of new business to our service department.
What's more, the scheduling process is no longer a bottleneck to the process of getting my customers into the shop. Our service advisors get busy, and frankly, I really don't want to know how many customers I used to lose because of long hold times. Having eScheduling is like having a service advisor that's working 24 hours a day, and is able to serve any number of customers at the same time. Plus, even our receptionists can take appointments over the phone using eScheduling. This is great when a customer calls to make an appointment after the service department is closed.
eScheduling is the first solution that enables us to book service appointments precisely, identifying the service advisor, resources, staff and skills involved. We have a great team in our service department, but before eScheduling it just seemed that we weren't operating as efficiently as we should. In the mornings, we had a line of cars in the service drive, and our service advisors were always juggling customers, so we couldn't really handle walk-ins well at all. Whenever we were busy, if you asked me whether we would have an idle bay later in the day, more often than not I really wouldn't have had any way of knowing. For me, there's nothing more frustrating than having idle service bays and personnel in the afternoon, and knowing that we could have taken on more business in the morning.
Our service bays are noticeably busier since we began to offer eScheduling. During busy times of the year, we're at capacity most days of the week now, as compared to maybe one day a week before. I can tell the impact that eScheduling has had just by counting the number of ROs. eScheduling enables us to take in more business, so on average we have about three more ROs per week than we did before. That's worth about $6000 per month to us, and that alone is a very nice return on our investment.
