An hour of empty time on the service floor isn’t just a wasted bay. It’s an hourly technician wage a service advisor didn’t earn, a service technician’s repurposed morning, and a customer whose trust in the dealership’s ability to execute is now unfounded.
Across twelve service bays, these factors can add up to a significant drag on a dealership’s fixed ops revenue, far beyond the mere opportunity cost of an open bay.
Most service departments already have a means of contacting customers for confirmation or reminder purposes. Where those methods fail is consistency, as there is rarely a process that confirms that all no-show customers are accounted for, beyond whichever service advisors happened to have time that day.
Automation in the dealership service department aims to standardize these processes, reducing no-shows by taking confirmation and reminder calls off of whoever happens to answer the phone and putting it into a systematic tool.
Here are 7 ways that dealers are using automation in customer communication to reduce service no-shows.
1. Automated Appointment Confirmation
The most basic level of automation is also one of the most overlooked: an automated appointment confirmation upon initial booking
Whether that confirmation is sent via email or text is less important than the fact that the customer is contacted as soon as possible after booking an appointment, regardless of channel. In addition to reducing no-shows by making sure the customer remembers their appointment, it creates a paper trail that can help reduce double bookings and customer disputes about the details of their appointment, as the confirmation will include any pertinent information such as time, date, and services rendered.
2. Automated SMS & Email Reminders
Automated reminders are perhaps the most obvious tool in the fight against service no-shows, as they are some of the most straightforward ways to remind a customer of an upcoming appointment
Sending automated SMS and email reminders on a few different days leading up to a service appointment are some of the most effective ways to reduce no-shows for dealerships, because they allow customers to change or confirm their appointment with minimal hassle.
As an automated message, these communications can include additional details like directions to the dealership, specifics about the service being performed, or even policies about loaner cars, and can make follow-up by service advisors more efficient by pulling all communication in one place, rather than having to reference individual texts or emails.
3. Multi-Touch SMS & Email Communications
Automated reminder messages are effective, but they become even more so when combined with other automated communications about the appointment
A multi-touch communication sequence, with messages sent at different points before the appointment, can reduce no-shows in ways a single reminder cannot, with each message touching on a slightly different detail about the service appointment, such as a confirmation message upon scheduling, a reminder message days or weeks in advance of the appointment, and then a final text the day before.
The value in multi-touch communication sequences like this lies in consistency, as they allow every customer to receive the same information about their appointment, regardless of which service advisor books the appointment or how busy the service department is at the time.
4. Easy Confirmation and Rescheduling Options
Having customers confirm their own appointments is always valuable, but it only goes so far if a customer has to call someone back during the business day to do so
SMS automation makes it possible to let customers either confirm or reschedule their own appointments with minimal hassle. This is vital to reducing no-shows, as any opportunity to change or update an appointment is wasted if it has to be done in person or over the phone with a service advisor that may not be available.
It also creates efficiency for the service advisors, as a customer who confirms their own appointment or reschedules digitally can be much easier to follow up with than one whose appointment was changed verbally without any update in the dealership’s CRM.
5. Personalized Reminder Messages
Asking customers to confirm their own appointments with a generic message is always an option, but it’s rarely successful. Sending generic messages to customers is always an option, but it’s rarely valuable.
Personalized messages using fields from the customer’s appointment, such as the customer’s name, the vehicle being serviced, and what services are being performed, stand out from generic marketing-type messages that get ignored by customers.
The same applies to including details about the service advisor handling the appointment or the drop-off time when applicable, as they allow more specificity in the communication, which in turn encourages the customer to engage with the message. That kind of specificity is particularly valuable for customers with multiple vehicles, or in cases where multiple family members’ vehicles are being serviced at once.
6. Escalation Procedures for Non-Responding Customers
Not everyone responds to a reminder message the same way, and an automated system should be able to differentiate between the customer who ignores a reminder message and the customer who actively declines a service appointment.
That distinction, however, is often blurred by the lack of an escalation procedure for no-shows or customers who don’t respond to automated communications. Having procedures in place for customers who don’t want to confirm their own appointments is an important step in reducing no-shows, because it ensures that those who won’t confirm their own appointments are still contacted in another way, whether that be a phone call from a service advisor or another automated message.
7. Escalation Procedures for High-Priority No-Show Appointments
Not all no-show appointments are the same, with some carrying a much higher opportunity cost than others
A customer who has shown up for every service appointment since 2015 is obviously a higher priority than someone who called in to cancel just this week, but a first-time customer with a long list of deferred maintenance may be the most important appointment of all.
An automated system should be able to identify high-value no-show appointments based on existing data, such as any history of previous no-shows or failure to respond to prior automated messages.
These customers should then be escalated for additional contact attempts, whether that be an extra automated message, a phone call from a service advisor, or a more thorough scheduling procedure to ensure that the appointment doesn’t go unfulfilled.
Striving for Greater Service Department Efficiency
Reducing no-shows rarely comes down to a single action or change, but rather a series of small adjustments that, when applied consistently, have a noticeable effect on a service department’s ability to fulfill appointments.
Even small changes can add up, from confirmation messages sent immediately upon booking, to automated reminders that free up a service advisor’s time to follow up with other customers, to procedures for customers who aren’t contacted or fail to confirm their appointments.
Over the course of a year, even a few hours of additional technician time recovered from no-shows can have a significant effect on a service department’s profitability, without requiring additional labor to follow up with every customer who cancels.
For dealerships that aren’t already using SMS automation as a customer communication tool, a customer engagement platform can provide the functionality and flexibility to employ these tools at scale. If reducing missed service appointments is a priority for your dealership this year, reach out to your customer engagement platform vendor and inquire about communication automation options.