Xtime’s ServiceCRM™ solution helps two high–powered Honda dealers raise customer satisfaction while maximizing service capacity and shop flow
It was November of 2004 when Mike Monell, Service Director for Norm Reeves Honda in Cerritos, Calif., first saw a demo of Xtime’s Web–based ServiceCRM™ solution for fixed ops. At the time, he was six months into the process of having a different web appointment system installed. Despite the dollars already spent and the fact that installation was more than halfway done, Monell cancelled the other project and turned to Xtime for his service department’s next–generation scheduling solution. Why? “Xtime was way, way more advanced than anything else out there. When I found out about Xtime… I wished I hadn’t wasted all my other time,” he says.
Jeanette Baldwin, Service Director for Anderson Honda in Palo Alto, Calif., is so enthusiastic about what Xtime has done for her business that she refers to it as “sliced bread for service managers.” She presented Xtime at a meeting of her 20 group last year; since then, she says, “There isn’t anyone who doesn’t use it. It’s phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal.”
Shop Control Enables Full-Throttle Shop Flow
When asked what sold her on Xtime, Baldwin quickly answers, “Shop control. More than anything, it’s the ability to see and control how many waiters were coming in in a day. And then what really sold it for me was the data push and pull into my R&R DMS. You couldn’t get any better than that.”
With Xtime, her eight appointment takers easily stagger arrival times and keep an eye on the number of waiters. Before, says Baldwin, “We were drowning in waiters. Now I can control my workflow and in turn guarantee my customer satisfaction.”
As service director for the largest Honda dealership in the metro Los Angeles market, Mike Monell also knows a thing or two about managing high service volume. His shop services an average of 175–225 cars each weekday and 225–250 on Saturdays. He’s customized Xtime to help maximize his greeter capacity — using one of his two service drives exclusively for oil changes and the other for all other ROs. Additionally, he now takes appointments at night. “Between the express shop, the main shop and the night shop, ”Xtime helps him “run two or three shops a day,” he says. Better lot management (and decreased lot damage) was yet another benefit of Xtime, says Mike.“ Cars need to get in and get out because I don’t have the space to park 200 cars. Everything has to be quick. Everything has to be efficient.”
It wasn’t always this easy. Xtime provides Mike with the controls he needs to push maximum volumes without sacrificing quality. “When I was using Reynolds and Reynolds without Xtime… if I had a commission person that was behind on appointments and they missed a couple of days during the week, they could overbook the drive at a certain time so they could hit their quota. And then we’d have upset service advisers with customers waiting too long.”
Xtime’s “time as inventory” approach to scheduling has helped both Mike and Jeanette maximize shop capacity. By flagging each type of service with a certain number of minutes, Xtime helps their shops book as many appointments as possible until the hours in their daily inventory are sold. “I could write 200 cars, and they could all be oil changes, but then I’m out of work. So I go by hours instead of car count…. I’m able to get more cars through my shop so I’m not out of work by 2:00. So it maximizes paychecks and revenue for the store” explains Monell.
Offering Owner’s the Ultimate Convenience: Real–time Online Service Appointment Scheduling
Another way that Xtime helps both Jeanette and Mike increase customer convenience without raising staffing costs through real–time, online service appointment scheduling. Jeanette says that by booking their appointments online, her customers are often able to make last–minute appointments they might not have had access to if they’d tried to make an appointment over the phone. Located in tech–friendly Silicon Valley, she estimates that about 15% of her monthly ROs now come from customers booking their appointments through Xtime’s online eScheduling tool. For Mike, that number is about 10% and growing. “We all know how nice it is to book an airline ticket without getting on the telephone. Now our dealership offers the same convenience,” says Jeanette.
“You can teach someone how to make an appointment in 5 minutes”
Ease of training has been critical to the successful adoption of Xtime among their employees. “You can teach someone how to make an appointment in five minutes, and they’re confident in how to do it,” says Jeanette. “It’s very user–friendly.” Mike agrees. “My employees really like it because they don’t have to type so much,” he says. “With Reynolds and Reynolds, they used to have to type all the time and grab their binder. Now all they have to do is point and click.” If, for example, a customer with an ’05 Accord calls to make an appointment for a 30k-mile service, the appointment taker “can just drag the mouse over the question mark and ‘Boom!’ it tells everything we’re doing for the service with the price. It’s kind of like a script right there in front of you.”
For customers making their own appointments, Xtime does the upsell: “We’ve made our service menus vehicle–specific. When someone looks up their Pilot, they could see what services were available, what’s done on the services and how much they cost, before they even hit the door. Xtime has already started educating our customers. It has snowballed into such an essential tool.”
Response from both Mike’s and Jeanette’s customers has been overwhelmingly positive. Mike claims a 91.7% convenience–of–appointment score vs. a 89.2% national score for Honda. Says Jeanette, “The only person I’ve ever had say anything negative was someone who couldn’t remember his password.”
Since Mike implemented Xtime at his dealership, two other Honda dealerships and a Ford dealership owned by Mike’s dealer principal have all started using Xtime. Simply put, says Mike, “We know it’s just the best tool out there.”