All-in-One Retail Service Platform to Enhance Customer Experience

Business challenge of a top 100 global brand

Our client is a world-renowned car manufacturer that’s been listed among the 100 Best Global Brands by Financial Times for the past six years. The company’s car service platform, which integrates with the customer management systems of over 200 repair centers throughout Canada, called for significant improvements to effectively cater to their customers’ retail and maintenance needs. When our client came to Intellias, their system was buggy and slow at times, lacked useful functionalities, and needed considerable optimization to cut costs and expand database capacity.

Today, our client sells and services a lineup of leading vehicles through a network of dealers in 172 countries. A strong synergy between global automotive corporations and local dealerships has provided mutual advantages for decades. It has also boosted the development of online car retail and servicing platforms to ease the buying and maintenance experience for car owners.

Solution delivered

The system we’ve helped our client develop is an all-in-one platform for end users, on the one hand, and a handy tool for service consultants, technicians, and dealer managers on the other.

• To schedule a service appointment, the owner’s portal takes a customer through simple steps such as specifying the vehicle details and services needed, selecting a service location, and picking a date from available slots. The system then sends a confirmation email and an appointment reminder to the user.
• The management dashboard allows dealer managers to keep tabs on the statuses of bookings, invoices, replacements of spare parts, etc. Dealers can also manage their employees’ schedules and set up appointments accordingly.
• Technicians can use the system’s mobile app to generate a multi-point vehicle inspection report by going through a check-up list that includes tire rotation, wear and tear on tires, fluids check and refill, braking and steering, safety belts, battery performance, exhaust system tests, drive axle boots, paint scratches, alloy damage, bumps and dents, cooling system checks, and more.
• Information about production defects is uploaded to an FTP server, and it updates this information in the app’s database. Entering the serial number of a faulty component triggers a recall campaign, and all necessary replacements for manufacturer defects are added to the technical check-up list.

While testing the platform performance, our team found and fixed numerous bugs and made several configurations to the system. In keeping with our client’s vision to enrich the platform with new functionalities, we’ve added a number of features and customizations:

• Transportation options

Online service booking allows car owners to inform a dealer whether they’ll wait while the vehicle is being serviced, collect the car later, or need a temporary car. In turn, dealers can choose to limit the number of waiting customers to reduce wait times.

• Cutting load times

As the databases grew in size, the mobile app load time was two minutes. Our engineers shortened the loading time through a stored procedure, and it now takes less than a second to load the app.

• Speed optimization and cost reduction

Without changing anything in the code, we added missing indexes to the database and managed to triple its speed and ease the load from 80% to 40%.

• Health check

Our team has written scripts to automatically send notifications to users in the event of failed synchronization as well as to analyze the number of and reasons for unsuccessful appointments.

• Business analytics dashboards

We’re now working on business analytics for our client’s top management that will visualize financial indexes, KPIs, information for every dealer, quarterly data, etc.

We’ve also added an exit service module to collect customer feedback, email send-outs to alert administrators of possible employee account locks, a special offer function for additional discounts, and chat functionality.

Technologies used: Azure Cloud, Power BI, ADO.net, FTP

Business outcome

Partnering with Intellias has marked a new milestone for our client in achieving their goal of providing customers with an exceptional level of service through a vast network of authorized dealerships. We’ve refined the customer management system to create a unique one-stop shop for maintenance and repairs. Consumers can now have their vehicles serviced to the highest standards by factory-trained technicians that use up-to-date diagnostic equipment, special service tools, and genuine parts.

But we haven’t only made our client’s system more convenient for users. With all the adjustments and improvements our team has made, our client is now reaping the benefits of the new version of the platform, including reduced load times, cost efficiencies, and business analytics capabilities.