Case Study: National Online Appointment Booking (OLAB) Solution

The number of days to the first available service appointment is a useful indicator of both dealership capacity and customer experience. By the same token, the more ease with which a customer can schedule an appointment, the greater the chance of earning that customer’s business.

A national Automotive OEM needed a way to aggregate and quantify this across their dealer body. Dealerships are free to select their own vendors for online appointment booking (OLAB), creating a challenge not only in tracking and measuring but also in integration, as the OEM preferred to link corporate channels directly to dealer OLAB solutions. A better way to report and integrate appointment solutions across the dealer body was needed.

PRES Innovation identified the ability to leverage current OLAB solutions to automate the process of identifying the next available appointment across the dealer body daily.

We also realized that dealers prioritize updating their websites the latest and greatest URL for their OLAB solution, making dealer websites the most reliable source of those URLs versus having to ask them to update an OEM form. Also less problematic than integrating with all the possible vendors and/or rely on each to deactivate links for cancelled services. This led us to automate checking every dealership's website to capture the best link to their OLAB site.

We architected a cloud-based system, scalable across all dealers to automatically discover OLAB tool links and quantify appointment lead times regardless of vendor. Nightly, the system updates a national database with any changes. An API allows a Tableau dashboard to provide daily access to lead times across the nation, allowing the OEM to monitor and analyze appointment availability across their entire network. An interface was created for the OEM to manage known OLAB tools and URL formats and accept/reject new links as the system discovers them.

Regional and National users were provided with never-before-seen tools and insights to work with their dealers on appointment booking and capacity, leading to reductions in wait times and broader availability of deep links to dealer OLAB systems. Key results included:

1 Day Reduction in Average Appointment Lead Time:
Significant reduction in customer wait times for service appointment availability.

Dealer OLAB link availability nationwide:
Link coverage increased from 35% to 75% of dealers (100% of those having automated appointment scheduling systems)