Where does automation improve convenience for aftersales and where does human contact remain essential, asks Jack Carfrae.
The numbers say it all: 52% of respondents to a CitNOW survey of 2,000 drivers said they would be happy using an AI assistant to book or reschedule appointments, 63% of a TekCor4 survey of 1,000 car owners said they were more likely to book a service or an MOT with a retailer that issues personalised reminders, and eDynamix says a “good digital strategy” results in around three quarters of customers doing online check-in.
None of the above requires human intervention, but that does not mean the robots have won. Customers still want to talk to a real person – CitNOW’s head of product for Auto360, Kat Lord, tells AM a minority even skip the phone and physically visit a dealer to make a booking – and most of us have experienced frustrating absences of human contact, or at least a long wait for it.
The flipside is backed-up workshops and technician shortages; aftersales departments could really do without more, or even their current level of admin. That is the part where the machines pick up the slack, assuming customers are happy to engage with thv
Automating the aftersales journey
“Every McDonald’s has a touchscreen, but you can still go and talk to somebody at the desk,” says Martin Nørgaard Høgh, CEO of Tjekvik, “it feels a bit awkward nowadays, but you can still do it.
“Automation means that, for those who actually choose to talk to the service advisor, the service advisor has more time to give them a bit more of a personalised experience.”
The personalised element applies equally to automation. Customers respond far better to timely, relevant communication than to half-hearted, vanilla messages.
“Automation’s been around for years, but it needs to feel personal,” says CitNOW’s Lord, “rather than it just being blanket thing and everybody getting the same message, we need to make sure that the data we hold within that CRM… makes that that message resonate.”
Personalising service reminders
Citing TekCor4’s latest survey figures, director of marketing services, Jeremy Evans, says only 6% of respondents said they reacted well initial contact by phone.
“Very few people like that,” he says, “but they do like the digital stuff first – ‘email me, text me, remind me online and give me an opportunity to book it online without having to speak to somebody’. We’ve also got anecdotal feedback from dealership contact centres who tell us that, when digital-first activity kicks things off, inbound calls go up.
“What the call centres also tell us is that, when they then make an outbound call, a customer who’s had an email or a text or two is then a much easier conversion to a booking, because they already know the car is due something – it hasn’t been explained from scratch on the phone.”
Bundling information into a single message also helps. This relies on good data – more on which shortly – and speaks to the notion that customers do not like surprises, especially in an industry in which trust is hard-won, so it helps to dial in predictive maintenance to tell them what the car is due up front.
Evans explains: “If we can combine the reminder activity into one for a service and MOT together – maybe with a recall, maybe with some additional manufacturer maintenance like a cam belt, brake fluid change, gearbox oil change or something like that – from a consumer’s point of view, they prefer to have it all up front so they know what they’re in for.”
Where aftersales needs a person
Digital automation has its limits, and even customers who readily engage with it will at some point want the human touch. That is typically when the car needs something out of the ordinary and unscheduled.
“Aftersales has always been extremely process-driven, which means it’s quite easy to automate,” says Tjekvik’s Nørgaard Høgh, “there should be a handover to a human being when something doesn’t follow the normal guideline, playbook, or processes.
“At an average dealership, maybe 60% of their throughputs are a regular service – an oil change, a tyre change… but maybe 40% is diagnosis, warranty cases – stuff like that. Early in the process, you might hand them customers to a human being rather than trying to force them through some kind of automation.”
“Automating things upstream and post is very, very strong,” adds Faye Staley, strategic account director at eDynamix, “but when you’re actually dealing with the immediacy of ‘I’ve got a car on the ramp; it needs brake pads and discs fitted,’ you can digitally send the report to the customer, but time is of the essence, and that’s where involving a person is necessary.”
Assuming the customer has left the dealership, Staley says it is also worth asking them how best to get in touch if something out of the ordinary crops up.
“Ask your customer, ‘how do you want to be communicated with on the on the day? How am I best going to be able to get hold of you? Is it via text because you’re in meetings or is it via the telephone because you want to speak to somebody?’”
Lord says it is important to bear in mind that most customers do not know as much about cars as technicians. In an environment where automation and mechanical expertise are the norms, it is easy to forget that vehicle owners need things explaining to them, which is also where the human touch comes in.
“It’s when it’s complicated,” she explains, “there are absolutely people who can go through an entire end-to-end journey and not really interact with a human, but that’s when it’s really straightforward… you want a human to be on the other end of the phone, either reaching out to that customer or making sure they’re available to answer questions, because it might not make sense to the customer.
“Most people know what a brake pad or disc is, but not everybody does. And does everybody understand what a suspension arm is? Probably not.”
Clean data powers automation
Each specialist to whom AM spoke for this article said that incomplete, dirty or just plain rubbish data is the antithesis of automation, and filling in the blanks and stitching everything together accounts for a large part of their jobs.
There are two elements; the first is incorrect, outdated or missing information and second is that data lives in different places, often housed by abbreviation – DMS, DVSA, SMMT, OEM etc.
“Not only will things be out of date, but you’ll have different databases within a single business will disagree with each other, so one will say the car belongs to this person, another one will say it doesn’t,” explains CitNow’s chief marketing officer, Anthony Kay.
“You might have something stored in a CRM, you may have another thing stored in the electronic vehicle health check database and somebody else has scribbled something down on a desk.
“One of the nice things that automation can do is pre-populate an online service booking form, but obviously, if you’ve got dirty data, it isn’t going to work, so the ability to unify all those data sets is really important.”
Some believe the cleanup operation is, in part, where the future of automation lies, as AI can help to fill in at least some of the more predictable blanks at scale, and theoretically leave dealers and suppliers with a clearer picture of what’s what.
“At the minute, there still needs to be a human involved in data cleansing,” says Lord, “but one day, I have absolutely no doubt that the whole data cleansing process will be completely automated. Say there’s a new data source we can connect into, we’ll absolutely be able to do that.
“The amount of time dealer groups spend on this is a huge drain. They have people just manually typing things in and updating things. That will be completely gone.”
Suppliers would certainly like to introduce automatic workshop bookings, where customers could automatically see calendar availability and pick their own slot, similarly to restaurant bookings via Google.
Evans believes it is currently too complex, less because of the technology and more due to the variables that go into assigning the appropriate technician to the job, among other elements.
Finally, Lord thinks a logical next step for automation would be to issue customers with even more information up front, theoretically giving them a better idea of what to expect when their car needs work.
“When we’re saying to customers, ‘do you want to book in for X, Y, and Z?’ and they’re like, ‘I’m not really sure what that is,’ if your data source that sits behind it says, ‘this is exactly what you’re going to get when you book in for this work,’ or ‘this is exactly what it means if you do not take this piece of work,’ and we serve that straight up to the customer with lots of detail, then I think it then starts to negate the need for the human.
“At the minute, I don’t think that consumers are there. They still want a bit of human reassurance, and I think that also the data that sits in the background needs to just get a little bit better.”
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