Staging the Next Visit
This is the next installment in our Redefining CRM series, looking at how Client Relating Capability applies to the way shops handle scheduling.
A great deal of emphasis is newly being placed on online schedulers.
While the technology has been around for well beyond ten years, auto repair adoption is many years behind other industries, and with some good reason. Clients very often do not know what to ask for when scheduling on their own, and the expectations for appointments are often murky or unexpressed on shop websites.
One thing is certain: online schedulers are now, and will continue to be, an effective tool that makes appointment setting convenient for both new and existing clients. This has been the experience for users of Autoflow since the kiosk and online scheduler were first introduced in 2019.
Online scheduled appointments now account for well over 50 percent of the appointments booked in many repair shops. In our founder’s shops, Golden Rule Auto Care, the share of appointments made online in Autoflow fluctuates between 60 and 80 percent.
An online scheduler is chiefly a tool that reduces the amount of client effort required to secure an appointment. The problem with that statement is that effort is subjective to the individual end user, and the scheduler is not a hands off feature for staff. Some clients will always prefer talking to a person. A scheduler allows us to meet either type of client where they wish to be.
Core to the Autoflow experience is, once again, that staff are the key drivers. Staff driven digital messaging can easily be oriented toward getting clients to use the online scheduler. Shops that passively place a scheduler on their website and make little or no effort to drive people to it fail to realize its full potential.
Don’t move information to the client. Move the client to the information.
These features sit alongside another prominent trend: ROBO, or Research Online, Buy Offline. With so many clients already researching online, making it easy to schedule an appointment from the place they are already looking makes a lot of sense.
From there, we probably need to ask a few things. Can your marketing contribute to their research? Are we providing an action for them to take that does not involve a purchase? And is that offering consistent with the offline, human interactions with your staff?
That consistency really matters. If we are asking people to fill out a form, that data needs to be presented to the staff in a meaningful way. The last thing people want is to repeat themselves when they have already delivered answers to questions that we may habitually ask again.
I do lament one downside of online scheduling and even AI agent adoption in this era. In my upbringing and experience in the late 90s and all through the 2000s and 2010s, appointment request calls were a key piece of relationship building, a first impression. Phone skill should be capable of creating a lifetime client. As we make it easier for clients to avoid an actual conversation with our staff, we make it a little harder to connect and differentiate ourselves. We need to consider carefully where technology moves those opportunities without replacing them.
Which leads me to the penultimate goal during a visit.
