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[BillKVMotorCo]

How often do you run into same day or next day appointment bookings since it's not synced with your shop availability?

I should say that I'm definitely not SUPPORTING not having one. Our Toyota site is so little used that it's not a problem. Our group site (we are a GM dealer as well) is our most used site. That site doesn't allow a time or date to be selected.

 

[Alex Snyder]

It doesn't appear so, I checked a few Toyota dealers near me and they all have different service schedulers:

• xTime
• CDK Service Edge
• Dealer FX

CDK Service Edge probably provides the least user friendly interface of the bunch.

Thanks for the research. In my dealer days I looked at home pages, VLPs, VDPs, About, and Specials pages on my desktop when visiting other dealer sites. Those were the things I cared about then.

Since becoming a civilian, I skip the home page, try to turn off all the location-allowing bullshit as fast as possible, check the VLP to play with the filters and skim for payment plugins, open an interesting car to look at photos, then look at the service scheduler all on my iPhone. If the experience sucks, I may look at the desktop version.

Things are always better on desktop because that's what dealers are looking at their own site on. 83% of shoppers are looking at the mobile site, so that's how I look too.

 

[BillKVMotorCo]

It doesn't appear so, I checked a few Toyota dealers near me and they all have different service schedulers:

• xTime
• CDK Service Edge
• Dealer FX

CDK Service Edge probably provides the least user friendly interface of the bunch.

Thoughts on this response from my service manager in regards to online service schedulers?

"I'm not impressed by the schedulers because when it's all said, they don't allow the users to truly schedule completely online and have the appointment show up on our calendar properly. Those companies also want someone on our end to spend probably forever going in and customizing parameters to try to make the scheduler work right, but it's just not realistic to think customers and some settings on our end will allow our schedule to fill correctly and not overbook somehow."

 

[Ryan Everson]

Thoughts on this response from my service manager in regards to online service schedulers?

"I'm not impressed by the schedulers because when it's all said, they don't allow the users to truly schedule completely online and have the appointment show up on our calendar properly. Those companies also want someone on our end to spend probably forever going in and customizing parameters to try to make the scheduler work right, but it's just not realistic to think customers and some settings on our end will allow our schedule to fill correctly and not overbook somehow."

Yeah that's a common thing I've heard from some of our service managers too, often based on an experience or anecdote from 5+ years ago and they've completely written off service schedulers ever since.

Every service scheduler has different functionality and some of it depends on their integration depth with your dealership's DMS.

I would recommend finding one service manager that is open to working with you on configuring it in a way that allows them to manage shop capacity while maximizing stall/tech efficiency. It's a lot easier to say "it worked for Bob over at the GM store, here's how he set it up" vs "the software vendor says it will work."

By not having an online service scheduler, at worst you're losing the customer to a competitor who does, at best they're hopefully calling your dealership and suffering through a 5-minute phone tree where their call may get dropped several times.

Service advisors are constantly busy. Any way you can decrease their inbound call volume, the better. Their time should be focused increasing the number of hours per RO through upselling needed maintenance and getting customers to approve the work.

xTime is my personal favorite service scheduling solution.

 

[jon.berna]

Ryan is good at his job

 

[jscole86]

at best they're hopefully calling your dealership and suffering through a 5-minute phone tree where their call may get dropped several times.

If this isn't the sad truth.

xTime is our favorite as well. Our scheduling is set up from an hours based capacity, which helps manage the shop load, and not overbook (too much). It does take a lot of thought with setup though, but I'd say it's worth it.

 

[BillKVMotorCo]

Yeah that's a common thing I've heard from some of our service managers too, often based on an experience or anecdote from 5+ years ago and they've completely written off service schedulers ever since.

Bingo. This was my assumption as well. It didn't work 5 years ago so it probably still doesn't work. Nailed it.