When a new customer arrives in your mobile service lane, that customer’s data is not in the DMS. This means that the service advisor has to manually enter all of that person’s data. Typically this includes the person’s name, phone number, address, vehicle VIN and make/model.

For service advisors using mobile tablets this data entry takes a lot of time, which is bad for both the customer experience and service productivity.

To solve this problem, Auto/Mate recently added reverse phone lookup and optical VIN Scan features to its DMS, including its Mobile Service Consultant application.

 

Reverse Phone Lookup

This feature is provided by an Authenticom integration and requires an optional add-on subscription.

When a service customer arrives, the service advisor simply looks the person up using their phone number. If that customer is not already in the DMS, Authenticom finds and suggests the name and address of the person associated with that phone number. The service advisor confirms with the customer and hits “Accept” to auto populate the fields with the data.

 

The reverse phone lookup feature can also be used in other departments. Any dealership employee can enter a customer’s phone number and Authenticom will return a suggested name and address if that person is not already in the system.

 

VIN Scan

Once the customer’s name and address are entered, the next step is to enter the vehicle VIN, make and model. With VIN Scan, the service advisor uses the mobile tablet camera to scan the vehicle VIN and capture it instantly. Additionally, the make and model associated with that VIN will auto populate the fields.

If the vehicle was owned by a previous customer, a pop-up screen will ask you if you want to transfer ownership of that car to the new customer. The vehicle’s entire service history will also be transferred into the new customer’s records.

From there, select which labor ops codes are associated with the appointment and you can instantly generate an electronic RO.

Together, the reverse phone lookup and VIN Scan features can shave the meet and greet process in the mobile service lane from 15 to 20 minutes, down to 5 minutes or less.

Another benefit of using Authenticom and VIN Scan is that human errors are eliminated and dealers will have more accurate data in the system. Better data means more success with marketing campaigns.

Eliminating manual data entry also improves the customer experience, allowing the advisor to focus on interacting with the customer instead of typing in data.