Discover Automotive Cloud
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Discuss appointment scheduling in the automotive industry.
- Identify common appointment scheduling challenges.
- Describe how Appointment Scheduling in Automotive Cloud helps businesses and customers.
Before You Start
Before you start this module, consider completing this recommended content.
Keep Things Moving with Smart Scheduling
Building strong relationships with customers and enhancing their experience are the goals of every automotive company. One way to move closer to these goals is efficient and hassle-free scheduling of people and resources.
Appointment scheduling serves customers in two key ways.
- Potential customers schedule time to test drive a vehicle before making a purchase decision.
- Existing customers schedule appointments to bring their car into a service center or showroom for maintenance, repairs, or other services.
Unfortunately, managing schedules and aligning appointments to the availability of customers and staff can be a complex affair. But don’t worry–Automotive Cloud is here to help.
In this module, you explore the challenges associated with automotive appointment scheduling and discover how Automotive Cloud reimagines this essential process through an intuitive interface and helpful tools.
Appointment Scheduling Challenges
Many companies struggle with appointment booking and resource allocation. Your company might rely on basic calendar tools, hand-written notes, and phone calls to coordinate tasks and logistics. And you might have noticed that these inefficiencies often cause scheduling conflicts, longer wait times, and unhappy customers.
Let’s consider an example. Raftavium Motors is a leading automotive manufacturer that’s known for innovative designs and great customer service. It offers a wide range of products and has a strong network of showrooms and service centers. And it has just opened several new facilities in Mumbai, India.
Raftavium is committed to top-notch sales and service support. However, it’s been facing some complaints from both customers and internal staff because of scheduling challenges.
Role |
Challenge |
||
|---|---|---|---|
Customer |
Customers can’t find suitable appointment slots due to technician unavailability. So they’re often unable to schedule a service appointment for their car or book a test drive of a newly launched model. |
||
Sales Agent |
Sales agents find it difficult to keep track of upcoming test drives and follow-up appointments as they’re usually done over phone calls or SMS. For example, multiple sales agents promise different customers a test drive for the same car at the exact same time, leading to an overlap of appointments and customer dissatisfaction. |
||
Regional Manager |
Regional managers struggle to manage staff assignments and minimize customer wait times. |
||
Luckily, Raftavium turns to Automotive Cloud from Salesforce, which removes these roadblocks and ensures operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. Let’s explore how.
Appointment Scheduling in Automotive Cloud
With Automotive Cloud, booking a test drive or service appointment is quick and easy—no waiting, no guesswork. The Appointment Scheduling tool helps car dealers stay organized and ready, so customers get fast, friendly service every time they visit.
Automotive Cloud unifies all the necessary data, including locations, employees, assets, and availability, for fast and automated appointment scheduling. Through an intuitive interface, you can quickly view staff availability and select a date and time to match the customer’s preference. For service appointments, managers can assign specific technicians with the correct set of skills to resolve the issue.
If that sounds way too simple, that’s because it is! With Appointment Scheduling, you minimize wait times, avoid double-bookings, and ensure a convenient experience for customers.
Automotive Cloud provides prebuilt scheduling capabilities specifically for common automotive use cases such as test drives and service appointments. However, users can also use the core scheduler to build custom appointment flows for other scenarios, such as managing walk-ins.
Appointment Scheduling supports the two common scenarios you explored earlier: test drive scheduling and appointment booking.
-
Test drive scheduling: A customer books an appointment to test drive a specific vehicle, and the appointment is connected to the sales rep’s calendar and vehicle availability.
-
Service appointment scheduling: A customer or the dealership books a service appointment for routine maintenance, repairs, inspections, recalls, or warranty services.
So, who can use Appointment Scheduling? The short answer: everyone.
-
Customers can schedule test drives, service appointments, and consultations through a self-service portal, website, or mobile app.
-
Service advisors and sales reps can use Automotive Cloud to book appointments on behalf of walk-in customers, or during customer phone calls.
-
Call center agents can schedule appointments through Automotive Cloud or a connected system.
-
Managers or admin staff can modify, reschedule, or override bookings when needed, such as reassigning technicians or allocating the appointment to a different service bay.
Robin Roy, a manager at Raftavium Motors, is exploring how Appointment Scheduling can simplify appointment management. In the next unit, you follow Robin as she configures Automotive Cloud for the organization. Let’s go!
Resources