By: Tom Edwards, National Sales Manager

Like it or not, technology leaders like Amazon have set the bar high, and consumers have become accustomed to their level of service.

Amazon established retail experience expectations that other industries- automotive included, are forced to meet. In the past, dealership service departments weren’t expected to immediately know if a new customer bought running boards or maintenance products when he or she purchased a vehicle. Customers had low expectations. 

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Today, customers not only expect to know the real- time status of their Amazon Prime order, but they transfer this expectation to the dealership’s service department. The service advisor must know about the “We Owe” from yesterday’s vehicle purchase as well as the status of a special order part. Today’s car buyers also expect automotive service advisors to have other pertinent information readily available, such as pre-paid maintenance details.

Service managers tell us here at Dominion ACCESS that they are seeing higher levels of service appointments than ever before. Customers place an increased value on their time and schedule maintenance as preventative care. An appointment can turn to dissatisfaction quickly if a return visit to the dealership is required because an open campaign wasn’t discovered initially.

To help dealers in this research process, we’ve created a quick service checklist that walks through some of the quick questions that every DMS should be able to answer.

When researching new DMS systems, besides simply asking how quickly an appointment can be converted into an RO, dealers should take a deeper dive.

• Can the DMS send appointment reminders?
• Can the service advisor view “We Owes” and pre-paid maintenance items?
• Can the VISS/VIP/OASIS be done in the appointment screen? Or, better yet, “Can it be done while making the appointment?”

And finally, how real- time is the proposed DMS? When the customer tells a dealership’s service advisor his or her address changed at write up, did the address actually change when the RO printed? If not, it can appear that the service advisor either wasn’t listening or didn’t know how to update this properly. Neither of these impressions is good for a dealership.

The team at Dominion ACCESS can help your dealership answer all of these service questions and more! Schedule your custom demo today by calling us at 877.421.1040.