Every dealership loves to have a full service schedule. There is very little that feels better than seeing a full day of service appointments ahead, but when those appointments don’t show up, what was a revenue-generating appointment has now turned into a wasted time slot that costs you money.
No-show appointments can really throw off service teams. They offset the day's workflow and can quickly pile up and start impacting your bottom line. While there is no magic way to automatically stop no-shows entirely, there are plenty of ways to automatically reduce them significantly, improving both service retention and profitability.
Understanding these two main principles is key to effectively reducing no-shows and strengthening your service operations.
- Keep your customer engaged.
- Do business on the customer's time, not yours.
Keep the Customer Engaged
Life happens, people get sick, overlapping plans are made, opportunities come up, and at the end of it all, things need to get cut. For many dealers, they are typically the first to go. When a local repair shop can get the car in faster, when the customer can hold off “till next week,” and next thing you know, you still have a scheduled appointment, and there is no car in the lane.
All appointment-based business models suffer from this, but there are other industries that simply do a better job of communicating their presence and importance. Think about the last time you missed a doctor’s appointment, not rescheduled, just flat out did not show up? For most people, the answer is very rarely, if at all, but why?
The reason is that when you scheduled the appointment, you got a text confirming it, an email or two leading up to it, a few more texts making sure you don’t need to reschedule, and maybe even a phone call the day before just to make sure you’re still good.
You were engaged throughout the entire process. Now, healthcare does this for two main reasons: to keep their patients healthy, and to not lose money paying doctors for hour-long blocks of time patients don’t show up to, which gets expensive quickly. The same thing is true for your dealership.
How to Keep Customers engaged
Customer engagement comes from consistent, non-intrusive touchpoints. Lines of communication that remain open, are easily accessible, and don’t require a lot of effort on the user's end.
Here are some best practices when sending out reminders:
- Have a cadence - Don’t send your reminders one and done, and spam your customer either; give them timely reminders leading up to their appointment.
- Shorten the time frame - You are much less likely to receive a no-show if you schedule the appointment sooner rather than later. Getting the customer in within the week is best practice to keep no-shows to a minimum.
- Make it easy to reschedule - Have a system that lets customers reschedule at any time. If it is 8pm and they can’t make their 9 am appointment tomorrow, they had better be able to reschedule, or they will likely no-show and never come back. Open communication that is easily accessible!
By implementing these three practices, you can significantly reduce the number of no-shows. However, success depends on executing them effectively, which requires a shift towards operating on the customer's schedule rather than your own.
Doing Business on the Customers’ Time
This task is easier said than done, as it often involves offering unique and customer-centric ways of doing business. The good news is that there are now plenty of tools available to help dealers offer a truly unique service experience, improving service retention and revenue. Here we’ll break down some of the best ways to alter your business model to focus on customer convenience and improve retention rates.
Mobile Service
Mobile service is an option pushed by many OEMs to their dealers, and for good reason. Customer convenience is easily one of the biggest drivers for retention in automotive, and the primary objective of mobile service is to give dealerships the advantage of being the most convenient option for their customers. With lots of competition from quick lube shops and independent mechanics, mobile service levels the playing field for a lot of potential and even previously lost customers. The data on this is very clear:
- 92% of customers who have not been to the dealership in over 18 months will re-engage with the dealership if they offer mobile service.
- For vehicles seven years old, 100% of required services were routine maintenance.
- The average mobile service appointment takes just 55 minutes.
Mobile service is a game-changer for most dealerships, allowing them to meet customers where they are and drive service retention like never before. This provides them with significantly more opportunities to build relationships and make sales of both vehicles and service.
Automated Scheduling
When a customer needs service, they likely need it done as soon as possible. In the modern world, there is so much going on in our lives that we often don’t have the luxury of thinking about things such as an oil change, tire rotation, or open recall until we reach the point where we just can’t wait any longer. It is the service providers that are there at that moment that are going to beat every other service provider guaranteed. No amount of email blasts, mailers, or friendly phone calls will change that.
With that being said, what does that mean for us as dealers? How do we make service scheduling as convenient as possible? The answer is modern automation tools. AI-powered automation is quickly becoming the future of customer service, allowing businesses to completely eliminate wait times and human error for many of their more routine tasks.
For dealerships, service scheduling is a prime candidate. There are many service retention strategies you can use when reaching out to customers. SMS is by far the most effective.
Text consistently gets an open rate of 90% or more, and is accessible to the customer nearly 24/7/365.
AI tools such as BizzyCar track service intervals, open recalls, and handle customer communication for you. Allowing you to know exactly how and when your communication is reaching your customers and how many appointments you are getting as a result.
BizzyCar also integrates directly with dealership schedulers and dealership DMS systems to automatically find, reach out, and book these appointments. This keeps dealers from needing to manage their technicians' availability, and prevents the customer from getting a message at the wrong time. BizzyCar ensures there is tech and the parts available so the customer can get in for service as soon as possible, for the smoothest possible experience.
These automations reduce no-show rates dramatically by giving the customer instant access to a time slot, allowing them to confirm their attendance, and reducing scheduling friction. This lack of friction creates ownership of the appointment and makes the customers much more likely to honor it.
Open Communication Channels
Customers need to be able to communicate with the dealership on their time. To compete with quick lube chains, dealerships must be available to take calls or texts. That means having staff near the phones during the day, and using an automated system like BizzyCar to handle communication after hours, and ensure nothing gets lost.
With this near 24/7 communication channel, dealers can ensure they are maximizing their service retention and revenue and can be confident they are offering best-in-class customer service. Open communication continuously opens the option for rescheduling, and adapts to customer needs, ensuring you are capturing as many appointments as possible while also being prepared to work with customers to reduce or even eliminate no-show risks.
Revolutionize your Customer Communication
BizzyCar has changed the way dealers interact with their customers. BizzyCar dealerships are guaranteed a 4:1 ROI on our AI-powered, end-to-end fixed ops tools. Whether you are trying to capture the abundance of recall revenue or trying to keep customers post-sale, BizzyCar has you covered. Book a demo with us to see how much revenue is sitting in your DMS.