A lot of great points are coming up. I am heavily focused on minor details such as aesthetics, the interface has to be simple and approachable. Some of the appointment boards currently on the market, which do the job, are not exactly what I was looking for. They seem very old-fashioned. I have a certain design in mind (similar to Carmax). I am planing a trip down to Chattanooga, Tennesse to go see the "next-gen" Carmax store. If anyone wants, we could do a field-trip down there as a group! There are a couple of other innovative dealers I want to visit too.
Rick, I will definitely contact TVPOS to look at the possibility to do a custom design. Thank you very much.
Here's a question:
Is it okay to show SOLD on the board?
I've always believe that activity breeds activity - the more SOLD displayed could potentially give the impression deals are being made.
Yes - No?
Lets not loose sight of John's original post and question on how one can achieve a digital appointment board using a third party service (minus changing to a new CRM for this simple function).
John, how "automatic" or "hands free" are you looking for?
Jeff,
I like the way a lot of tech startup companies display company stats on television's around the office (Information such as; registration, # of paying customers, real-time on-site traffic etc). If I had to create a similar environment of "live display" at our dealership I would include daily sales across our 11 dealerships, live online visitors (Google analytics API), monthly pageviews data on our website (Google analytics API), SRP or VDP data on Autotrader + cars.com (manual entry). Basically, I would include real data that would give the customer the sense that they are buying from a "large" dealership that has a lot of customers. Then even if you don't have the best looking dealership, you can bring back the online experience into your showroom. If I had to settle for something free and easy today, I would use the "real-time" dashboard in Google analytics (shows live web traffic) or I would customize a dashboard to my liking in the "Dashboards" section. I would then display the page on a television screen in the showroom. This is hopefully my "phase-2".
Since our BDC department is centralized for all of our stores, our agents already have no choice but to enter it in a system. The same system or a different one would (hopefully) sync with the display board.
Thanks