“Less is more” is a mantra many dealership service department managers have been forced to adopt as their mantra. You’ve likely been plagued by the following issues: increasing profit margins, understaffing, not enough hours in the day, recommended repair approvals that move at a snail’s pace, a lack of sufficient square footage in your repair shop and a shortage of service bays.

Add to these challenges another conundrum. While customers want to receive the information they need from your staff, they do not appreciate invasive modes of communication. Phone calls are definitely not ideal in this day and age. So, how do you communicate with them enough without going overboard?

A Level Of Communication That Is Just Right

Remember the story of Goldilocks And The Three Bears, in which Goldilocks had to try out all of the chairs before finding the perfect fit? It can be equally challenging to find the fit that is just right for communication with service customers.

The majority of people overwhelmingly prefer text messaging to other forms of communication. It does not disrupt their busy lives, they can respond at their convenience and the process takes up very little of their time. Perhaps most importantly, text messaging has a 45% response rate compared to 9% for phone calls and 6% for email.

Using TEXT2DRIVE™ – the full-featured communications platform – dealers sent customers a total of 4.7 million text messages in March of 2019*. 76% of those messages were automated. TEXT2DRIVE does the work for you with a series of automated messages sent to customers including:

• NEW: Lease expiration
• First service notice
• Appointment calendar invitation
• Appointment reminder
• Welcome message
• Status update
• Ready for pickup
• Online bill pay
• Declined service reminder
• Vehicle service reminder

These automated messages are sent by the software, saving you and your staff hours of precious time. They were designed with templates that are quick and easy to customize. Furthermore, they are profit-driven and focused on improving your service department’s bottom line.

Faster Turnaround For Recommended Repair Approvals

Dealerships that use declined service reminders from TEXT2DRIVE generated $6,643 of additional revenue on average from January 2019 to February 2019**.

The power of declined service reminders lies in their ability to ensure that the owner of the vehicle gets the repair recommendations. Too often, the customer has no idea recommendations were made because someone else picks up the car and neglects to pass on the message.

Sending recommended repairs to customers in a video is also highly effective for getting approvals. Most of your customers are not knowledgeable about the mechanical workings of automobiles. It can be difficult for them to comprehend the necessity of a repair. However, when a service technician shows them exactly what needs to be done via video, the customer can better understand the issue, recognize the importance and feels more inclined to approve the recommended repairs.

Recording and sending a brief video via text messaging takes very little time and yields profitable results including an increase in opened repair orders (ROs) and more revenue. In fact, dealerships enjoyed an average $125 increase per RO over a 30-day period in March of 2019*** due to sending videos through TEXT2DRIVE.

One dealership in particular, Sandberg Volvo Cars, enjoyed significant benefits when it used text messaging to communicate with customers including:

• Reducing response time from an average of 4 hours for voice mails to 90 seconds for text messages
• Cutting call volume in half in the span of one month by sending out 2,000 text messages instead
• Boosting open rates from 20% for emails to 98% for text messages
• Saving service advisors 40 hours per month

You can truly do more with less when you use TEXT2DRIVE. It saves your service staff time while taking advantage of revenue-generating opportunities that are easily missed without a way to capitalize on them.

Maximize Time & Profit Opportunities

* From TEXT2DRIVE; January 13, 2020 data usage report from the dates of January 2019 to February 2019 Author Norm Crawford.
** From TEXT2DRIVE; January 13, 2020 data usage report from the dates of January 2019 to February 2019 Author Norm Crawford.
*** From TEXT2DRIVE; January 13, 2020 data usage report from the date of March 2019  Author Norm Crawford.