In Germany, every driver is familiar with this annual procedure: at the first indication of snow fall, cars are due in the garage for the change to winter tyres. For operators of garages or automotive service companies, this offers a number of touchpoints for service communication, as well as after sales promotions.
The first snow is falling. For drivers, this means a quick visit to the garage to make the change to winter tyres. For the garage operators this is good business. The sudden increase of customer volume within a period of a few days also leads to larger coordination effort, higher capacity utilisation or even capacity overload resulting in dissatisfied customers who were unable to get a faster appointment. By means of an anticipatory service communication, controlled by real time marketing automation technology, these problems could be significantly reduced and an additional turnover could be generated in the after sales.
In the following, we will use the example of the winter tyre change with German automotive service providers to illustrate how a service and after sales dialogue across all channels can be controlled through real time marketing automation. artegic received the ECO Internet Award 2015 for this case.
Case Study Automotive Service Customer Journey
Via an interface, the real time marketing technology is connected to the data base of the German meteorological service. As soon as the weather data predicts the probability of snow in a certain region, the system checks which customers live in this region (information from the CRM) or are currently there (geo data from smartphones). These users will then be notified via app notification (if no app is installed, via another channel) about the imminent snow and the necessity to change the tyres. Further measures, e.g. email (the most important channel for customer retention in the automotive market), geo-ads in social media or even print mailings will be used to suggest available appointments in garages in the region. The content of the digital measures is dynamically delivered in real time so that the appointment overview is always up to date. Via a back channel, the appointment can be confirmed directly from the measure (e.g. email). If a customer is currently located near a garage which has a free appointment at short notice, he can use his app to guide him there.
Once an appointment has been made, the customer will receive reminders at different intervals. As soon as the tyre change has been made, the dialogue will be continued with further messages. The customer receives further service messages, e.g. satisfaction surveys, reminders for service appointments and at some point again a notification about the change to summer tyres. In addition, he also receives personalised offers for accessories, suitable for the time of year and tailored to his vehicle model.