Should AI Be Booking Your Service Appointments? | Stephen Jeffries

Meet Stephen Jeffries of Xtime 0:00

[Steve Shaw] Welcome back, everybody. My name is Steve Shaw, and I am here with Mr. Dave Rogers. How you doing, sir? What's happening today?

Dave Rogers: I'm doing fantastic, my friend. Fantastic. Couldn't be better.

Steve Shaw: You are. You're always doing fantastic. I understand that you brought a guest. We have a guest today. I can't believe somebody actually wants to be on our show with us.

Dave Rogers: Yeah, I've got a guy here. You always have a guy, right? So this is my guy. Stephen Jeffries works for Cox Automotive. I don't know how many years I've known him. I've known him for a long time. He's my Xtime rep.

Steve Shaw: He looks like he's about eighteen, so you can't have known him that long.

Dave Rogers: I think he's faking it. I think he's got makeup on, or he did something with the camera. He's got it all fixed up.

Stephen Jeffries: Nah, twenty years of drinking and smoking will do it too. That's what I've got. Forty-one.

Dave Rogers: That's good. So welcome, Stephen. Glad to have you on board. It's been quite a while. We've been chit-chatting about Xtime and Cox products and stuff. So introduce yourself to Steve and the gang, and let everybody know who you are.

Stephen Jeffries: Stephen Jeffries. I've been with Xtime and Cox Automotive now for going on thirteen years and some change. Once you hit ten years, it's like, where am I at now? I kind of grew up in the automotive industry, and I love cars anyway, so it's a pleasure to be here, man. I really appreciate you guys having me and talking fixed ops.

Make online scheduling easy 1:36

[Dave Rogers] So when you get caught up on our ninety-some episodes, you'll see Steve and I have gone around on a few about appointments, which I know is your specialty, right? In Xtime. And you and I were texting back and forth the other day about one of my stores using the AI, the marketing and the Xtime service suite, and you were blowing smoke up my ass, telling me they were doing pretty good. We've had this discussion before with different people about appointment scheduling tools, yours included. If you want to throw a plug in for your tool, that's great. If you want to talk in generalities, that's fine too. But what do you see in the market as far as online appointment scheduling tools, and obviously the tools the dealer personnel use? What's going on in the business right now, and how do you see it developing?

Stephen Jeffries: Let's focus on general. In the business, with where everything is going with AI and what AI is able to build, the biggest thing to think about is ease of use. If it's on the web, make it easy. If I'm Googling you, let's put it right there in the top five: view our inventory, schedule service, a direct link. And what I'm seeing out there is transparency. But ease of use, let's start there. You want to get the customer there. You buy a new vehicle, and you want to get that customer on the website to schedule their first appointment, with QR codes. Back in the day you had to have an app. Now you can point a camera, and boom, you're there on the website. Save it in that phone.

A lot of dealers, and these are topics we can all touch on, the sales-to-service handoff, right? A lot of dealers out there aren't even doing that, or it kind of falls to the side. But as far as the website goes, AI, call center, all that stuff, you want to keep the service list nice and clean and short, so customers are picking services they would normally pick. Nothing too complex, like a service writer would pick. And show pricing. Why would you go on Amazon and buy something if there's no price on it? Why be afraid to be price shopped? If I'm already on your website and I see the price, I can keep going. Why would I go elsewhere when it's right there in front of me? Boom, okay, that's a pretty decent price.

Steve Shaw: So I just jumped on a dealership's website. I picked one at random, and I won't say the name. I said okay, XYZ dealership, and then I've got to scroll all the way down, I've got to search for all these features. I don't even know who runs it. So I've got to search for everything, and then I find, over here on the right-hand side, after I scrolled over, schedule service, and then I go through it, right? So I'm about four or five steps in already just to get to the schedule service button. And why wouldn't it know my name? Why wouldn't it already know who I am, things like that? It's awfully cumbersome already. I'm four or five steps in and I haven't even gotten as far as making an appointment. So I'm already annoyed. And that's easy to fix.

Dave Rogers: Well, that is part of the problem, right? Making it simple and easy to find.

Steve Shaw: Right. One of my buddies said the other day, "Wouldn't it be great if you logged onto a dealership site and it said schedule service, like this big?" If you really think about it, of course we're new car dealers, we're selling cars, but the majority of people coming to our website are scheduling service in the first place, aren't they? So wouldn't it be great if we had this massive box right here on the left? People do look up and to the left. That's where they're looking. Put a big button right there that says schedule service. How easy would that be if we did something intelligent like that? It drives me crazy.

Stephen Jeffries: Right. And I know with some OEMs, you can't change too much on the website, because then it's not going to adhere to what they want.

Steve Shaw: Well, there you go. I know the company, but I don't know who's on the back end, who built the website. But you just said it. The OEM says you have to do it this way. I'm a customer, man. Wouldn't you want to do it the way the customer wants it?

Dave Rogers: That's part of the problem. It's like the tiles, the big tiles on the screen. A lot of times a third-party company uploads that stuff for us automatically at the beginning of the month: here are the new lease deals, this is what you have to do. Some manufacturers give you the ability to put another slide in and get the extra one in, but some of them don't. They run the rules on stupid shit like this, and they make our life difficult. And Stephen, you're right. It should just be a big giant button right in the center of it.

Steve Shaw: Like, why am I here? It could just be sales on this side, service on this side, one button, done. Now I know I'm in the right spot. Stop trying to mess with me.

Dave Rogers: Now, Stephen, you said something real quick, and I'll let you continue, but you said something about limiting the choices when they make the appointment as well. What did you mean by that?

Stephen Jeffries: If I'm going to your website and I start seeing it broken down into a particular bulb in the front, a bulb in the rear, diagnosis on the differential, differential fluid exchange even... With a lot of scheduling tools you can run reports on what customers are picking, right? With my tool, Xtime, or any of the other vendors out there, you can probably run a report showing the top services customers pick on your website, and you'll see it's "tell us more," or check engine light, running rough. A lot of times they might not pick filters, but they have in the past, so I would keep air filter and cabin filter on. Keep the basics on there, and avoid adding things like an opcode as a title. I don't know what that is as your customer. You see that a lot.

Show the price 8:16

[Steve Shaw] Right. I'm playing with this as you're talking, to see how simple it is to make an appointment on this guy's site. And I'm also looking at pricing. I could waffle back and forth on whether the price should be there. I don't offer prices on my particular website. I am, quite frankly, expensive. But you're right. I was talking to my webmaster about it the other day. I was like, "Well, should we just put the prices on there?" And she's like, "Well, you don't want them to know what the prices are." And I'm like, I think you're right. It would be nice to know. Look, you can call me, and I can give you the whole value proposition on why you should hire me. But ultimately, if it's about price, it's about price. Know what I charge. And then if you call me, I know you've been on my website and you know what I charge, right? I don't have to tell you anymore.

So from that perspective, I think it's a great idea. Look, an oil change is $99.95 or whatever the price is. Okay, I make the deal, right? And as Dave likes to talk about, if I was going to mystery shop or secret shop or dare to compare, now I know I can compare you to the other ones and go, "You're ninety-nine and they're fifty." At least I know that answer. It saves me a lot of time. It would be worth it. I think it's a great idea. I like it.

Stephen Jeffries: And that brings in the other topics too, like dealer recommended menu packages. The OEM is offering this, or we're offering that as well, plus some, for around the same price or whatnot. You can have your basic, regular, premium, or bronze, silver, gold menu packages. That's another area you can touch on. But studies do show that when customers are visiting your website, they're going to complete scheduling an appointment all the way through at a higher conversion rate with pricing.

Make the appointment and let advisors do the rest 10:12

[Steve Shaw] Okay. I didn't know that. Well, and studies show as well... I love it. "Studies show." If I give a choice between a basic and a premium, it's a fifty-fifty chance, right? If I have the price, I'm going to select either the basic or the premium. It's 50-50. Give me the price. Let me know. I don't care, quite frankly, if you choose the basic or the premium, certainly on the internet, right? Pick one. Now you have an appointment lined up. If you pick the basic, then my advisor has their job to do when you show up. I would fall into that camp as well. Put the price on it. Let the person choose what they want to do.

And I've always believed, and I'd love to hear your thoughts from a call center perspective, because we'll get into arguments with service advisors and different people about it: the job of the website, as well as the person in the call center, is one job. Make the appointment, right? Get the customer to make the appointment. We have service advisors to do the rest. So make it easy enough that I can schedule it. Now you've got me locked in. Send me a follow-up and make sure I show up. I love that idea.

Stephen Jeffries: Make the appointment. Exactly. And with our tool and other tools out there too, I'm sure, if a customer declined something in the past, we can see that and bring it up. Same on the website. If there's an open recall, and we're integrated with that certain OEM, we can bring that to light too, and you can set how many days out, to make sure we have the parts in before they arrive. Because you know how often we run into that. Little things like that, man, keeping things dialed in, having a performance manager like me to help. Because with a lot of dealers, if you don't know, you don't know. And these kinds of things can happen, right?

Steve Shaw: Do you think a dealer should have a performance manager on site? Not you, but somebody dedicated for themselves at their stores?

Stephen Jeffries: Yeah, like me, man. Bring me out there. Pay me. No. But it doesn't hurt, especially with the tools they might have. Someone who can understand those tools. But in general, Steve, like you: going out there with the knowledge, having seen what works across hundreds, thousands of other stores, and giving them that outside-the-box view. That does help. And that's kind of what I get off on, right? My gratification is that I give a shit about your business, and I want my clients to know that. It feels good at the end of the meeting when they're like, "Man, I love your meetings. You're not wasting time, you're valuable." That means the world to me.

Declined-service follow-up: three, fifteen and thirty days 13:04

[Dave Rogers] When we talked, we were also talking about the follow-up marketing, the way your company does it. Some do it and some don't, and some do it better than others. We have some stores on your program where I know declined maintenance is one, and if somebody comes back, it does pop up the old recommendations, right? When I go back to make an appointment, it reminds you that this was declined last time. What have you seen with all the marketing? I think one of the biggest things is that you are gathering data through this tool. You can track the customer and see all this stuff. So what are you seeing as far as people returning, and what they're willing to buy and not willing to buy?

Stephen Jeffries: Let's start with a customer who declined work, and three days later they're getting an email and a text on what they declined. Don't give away too much too soon. "Hey, here's a reminder, here's what you declined, we'd love to get you back in the door." Then fifteen days out, or twenty-one days, I usually say fifteen, give a little meat off the bone. Do ten percent off, maybe with a value max of a hundred, a hundred and fifty off, right? Kind of set a little safety net. Then we go to thirty days. Again, these are areas a dealer can pick, but these are the ones I stick by: three days, fifteen days, thirty days after. Give fifteen percent off at thirty days. All right, now we're bringing them in. But you don't want to give away too much. You want to give it to the customer after a little bit of time, so we still give ourselves time.

Steve Shaw: One percent a day that you wait.

Stephen Jeffries: And declined services is the basic package with Xtime marketing. It's not putting a monthly email out on any holiday or seasonal special. It's just declined services, and that's one of the getting-your-foot-in-the-door types of marketing pieces. If you have any type of video MPI, where you're making recommendations and presentations, you've got to have something like that as the cherry on top.

Steve Shaw: So what's the sweet spot? As a dealer, if I've got a decline, at what point would you send out an email? You say three days, right? What gets the biggest take? Is it three days, five days, ten days? Where do you see people making that appointment? Do you have that stat?

Stephen Jeffries: It's just like when you're asking a customer for approval, right? The faster we can get it, the better chance we have of closing on it. Same thing with previous-decline marketing. That three-day message: "Dang, yeah, man, I need to go ahead and do it. Let's go ahead and schedule it." That first one, the three-day, is where you see the highest response. The fifteen-day is kind of, "Hey, we're still trying, here you go, here's a little something," right? But right after that three-day is where you see the most.

Steve Shaw: Is there such a thing as a one-day?

Stephen Jeffries: Yeah. You can have a one-day follow-up text going to a customer. And the call center can do outbound. We call it outbound in the Xtime world. That's where they have an assigned list, and they can reach out to those customers one day after, or line it up with the three-day email they get.

Steve Shaw: Do you see better results at one day than at three days?

Stephen Jeffries: Three days, usually, on calling the customer on it. Give them a little time to chew.

Missed appointments and reminders 17:10

[Steve Shaw] Three days. Okay. I think that's interesting. I study behavior, so I'm always looking for the quote-unquote best practice. I love statistics, and in a class, people love to hear them. Do you have a missed appointment type of thing? I'm a big proponent of, if you miss your appointment, I'm calling you within an hour, right? I need to know why you aren't there. Within a half hour would be even better. And the same thing with a decline. You obviously have the stats, so you know better than I do, but if three days is the sweet spot, what if I sent you a text message in a day? Is that seeing traction? Is it as good as the three-day text message or not? That's what I would really want to know as the dealer: what's out there, what's working, what's the best? That's my question.

Stephen Jeffries: Notifications in general. It's just like a dentist appointment. When I leave the dentist's office, we'll schedule that next time, and I'm not putting it on my calendar. I'm going home. Whatever, right? Now I forget about it. So it's just like an appointment reminder. You want to get that text message out. You want to capture mobile phone numbers. Email addresses are important, but mobile phone numbers these days are, to me, more important. You want both. And that ties into the missed appointment. If they miss their appointment, have it set on autopilot with your notifications to reach out to that customer via text automatically: "Sorry we missed you." And give them that link so they can go directly back in to reschedule. Let's see, I've got ADHD severely, so sometimes...

Steve Shaw: No, that's great, because I just filmed a BDC class on Friday. And that's what I was talking about: what's your process, number one? When are you going to reach out to that customer? If you have it automated... Say I'm a customer and I stand you up, per se. I missed my appointment for whatever reason. I might feel bad. If I didn't show up at noon, I might think, "Shit, I just got off work at two. Can I still come in?" If I don't get that message, I think you're mad at me, right? I think, man, I stood that person up and they moved on. So if I get that text message, "Hey, we missed you today, we'd still like to have you," I'm like, "Yeah, cool, I can make it in," or "My meeting ran long, can I still come in?" That immediate, automated text message, I love that feature. Text me in thirty minutes and say, "What's up, bro?" That would be near and dear to my heart.

Stephen Jeffries: Say you had twenty-three customers who didn't show yesterday in a high-volume store. Call center agents have that outbound tool again, and I'm sure there are plenty out there where you have a list of customers who did not arrive. Give them a call the next day. That's where you can have them side by side. They got the text, and maybe they forgot to call us, whatever. Because you do feel bad if you miss an appointment, and a lot of businesses are going to charge you if you try to come back. We're not going to charge you. It does not hurt to follow up with the phone call.

Steve Shaw: Exactly. I want to know they still like me.

Dave Rogers: I'm more like Steve Shaw. An hour after: "Hey, Steve, I had you down at ten o'clock this morning. It's eleven o'clock now. I just want to make sure you're okay, nothing happened." That's my thing. I would never wait. The next day would maybe be a follow-up if I didn't get an answer the first time. Because I think it shows that you care, it shows you want their business. Just like when you make their next appointment. Like you said, it's a bookmark. Me, when I go to the dentist and they tell me my next appointment is in six months, I put it in my calendar, right? That's what I do.

Steve Shaw: Dave's the only one that does that, but he does.

Dave Rogers: In my calendar. I tell them, "I don't need your business card. I don't need that stuff. I'm just going to put it right in my phone." What the hell? It takes two seconds.

Stephen Jeffries: I got a physical the other day, and I still have to put my next one on my calendar, now that we're talking about it.

Dave Rogers: It's so funny you say that, because you've got the phone in your hand, right? It's probably coming up. If I look in the calendar, I'm sure I'll see it: the annual physical with the regular doctor, and then a dermatologist, right? Before I left, they both scheduled next year's appointments. I'm pretty sure it's October. So maybe you two knuckleheads don't do it. It must be the name Steve or something. Why wouldn't you just put it in? Now, Steve Shaw needs somebody to email his Claude, his assistant, to remind him to put it in. But the rest of us aren't like that.

AI, the command center and AI schedulers 22:31

[Steve Shaw] Stephen, I built myself what I call the command center, and if it's not in my command center, it does not happen. I've been doing this now for what, four or five months? My whole life is in my command center, and I have it all prepped. If I get a task, or somebody tells me something, I hit the function key and say, "Hey, Claude, put this on my tasks, put this in my command center," and it puts it where it needs to be. Then the next day, when I go through my tasks, it tells me exactly what to do. It checks my email, it does everything.

If you want to get a hold of me, somebody could do this: if you wrote an email to me that said, "Hey, Claude, remind Steve of this," when it hits my inbox, my assistant, Tiffany, one of my agents, checks my email every so many minutes. She'll bring it to the front of the line and pop it into my command center. So the next time I look at my command center, boom, I have a notification that I got an important email. Because people who know me know to tell Claude to do that. So there's some cool shit out there, or cool shit you can make.

Stephen Jeffries: Dude, that's super cool. My Outlook is the same way, and I'm starting to figure all this stuff out and work with it. I might look like I'm in my early twenties, but I'm forty-one, and I'm still getting the swing of how this stuff can benefit you. Not just in this, but in your stocks, and what are the best scratch-off tickets to pick. All kinds of stuff it can help you with, if you think about it.

Steve Shaw: So do you guys look at AI as a competitor, or a future competitor? For all the silliness I personally can do, from a Cox point of view, do you consider that? Or are you just moving ahead and continuing to grow your business? I don't know if that's a good question, but are you looking at it like people can do what you're doing on their own?

Stephen Jeffries: No. We're looking at AI, and basically we know where AI's going, right? It's going up, and it's going everywhere. There are a lot of great benefits, and there are a lot of fears out there, because it's an unknown. Now, Cox Automotive is putting a lot of money and a lot of thought into these tools, the updates, where we're going with it and how it helps us as performance managers. It's learning my job. It's learning everything about what I do. These meeting recaps are beautiful. It helps me write them out in nice, pristine detail with action items. I love it. If I forgot something, "What have I missed today in my high priority?" It'll show me. I'm usually pretty good anyway. I already knew that.

Steve Shaw: Tell me something I didn't know.

Stephen Jeffries: It's definitely a big piece of Cox Automotive now, implementing it in our tools and how things function, to benefit us, our clients and their consumers.

Steve Shaw: What's funny, I had a guy tell me, he was a representative of a big company calling on stores, that every time he leaves a store, he tells his AI, "This is what happened today." It puts it in a bucket, right? And whenever he gets a call or has to call on that store, he's like, "Hey, what's going on with this store?" Exactly what you said. When he told me that months ago, I was like, that's fucking brilliant. So every one of my clients has a bucket. Anytime the phone rings, I go, "It's Johnny," and I can go over to Johnny's file and see everything about that particular client. What a lifesaver that was. And now, why couldn't we do that with a customer? I sign on to your website, and it knows who I am, because there are cookies. I have to accept cookies on every website. Couldn't it say, "Hey, welcome back, Mr. Shaw. It's great to have you here with your 2026 Jeep Grand Wagoneer"? I have to say that on every episode. Done. We're done.

Stephen Jeffries: It's funny you said that, because I have OneDrive, and I keep all my clients in files in my OneDrive, every single store in a Word doc. And Dave, you were saying we've known each other for years. Dude, I've got notes going all the way back to the mid-twenty-teens. It's wild. I don't really even need them anymore, but I like having them in highlighted spots so I can look at them. Again, you're working with the new technology like everybody else, and adapting it.

Dave Rogers: So that's why, when I'm talking to him, he'll go, "Dave, a couple of years ago you told me you didn't like that feature, so we didn't turn it on." That's why he keeps throwing things back at me. Control F. But I was thinking more about the AI stuff. We interviewed the guy from Evenflow, which was AI making the appointments for us, based on opcode, best time of day, whatever it is, actually using AI to learn how your shop works. And we've talked to some other folks where it obviously works backwards, right? Technician availability, and then putting the appointment in. Do you see that coming to all appointment platforms? I've got to believe it's going to have to morph into that, where it doesn't really require much of the person taking the appointment. It could just say, "This is the best slot for this. Would you like Tuesday at two o'clock or Wednesday at two o'clock?" That type of thing.

Stephen Jeffries: I get dealers asking all the time, "Hey, do you integrate with Impel? Do you integrate with Pam?" All these different AI appointment schedulers out there. And I've listened to some of these. I've called some dealers and listened to how it sounds, and it's wild. It is not "press one." It's a conversation with a lot of these, even the background noise. It's got folks in the back shuffling papers, an office type of sound.

Steve Shaw: Oh my God, that's hilarious.

Stephen Jeffries: But it's cool. And because Cox Automotive is putting money into this stuff and partnering up, it's feeding off of our settings, like tech availability, to keep the techs busy in the shop all day and keep the bays full. Xtime looks at the customer experience when scheduling appointments. If you've got five service writers, you don't want ten customers with the same appointment time expectation, when you're trying to front-load your day, keep the ball rolling and keep your day full throughout.

Dave Rogers: I don't think it's as easy as we would think. There's a lot that goes into making the appointments. Steve, what were you going to say? Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.

Steve Shaw: No, I was just curious. I get accused of being out of touch, because I am. I'm out of touch. My trainers are in stores every day, and I'm often doing seminars and stuff, so I'm not on the front line every single day. So does Xtime have the AI scheduler? When I go to make an appointment, will it make the appointment for me based on tech scheduling or service advisor availability? How would that work?

Stephen Jeffries: Like Dave said, it's what you pick throughout the steps when scheduling an appointment. We can integrate with AI, and AI feeds off of our settings, right? And it's going off the advisor. This is customer experience. When you book it and roll up in the service drive, we want to make sure we have the dedicated advisor, and it could have been the one who helped you last time. So if I'm scheduling that appointment, we've got to pick the services first. First, what's going on with your vehicle? Boom, boom, boom, here are the services. All right, we're lining that up to what we have available. Then, are you dropping off, or do you want to wait? Based on the amount of services you picked, will a waiter option be allowed based on the settings we have in place? How many waiters can we take during a fifteen-minute time slot, based on the advisors we have and the drop-offs coming in, all these different things. The system won't let you move forward until you pick your services. Then: do you want to wait or drop off? Who would you like to see? Here are our times.

And then when they roll up, I've got a tablet in my hand. I see all my appointments coming in. I see a red Chevy Corvette coming in. "Hey, is your name Tom? Great, I can see you're coming in for XYZ." I'm greeting you, I see what you're coming in for, and I see what you declined last time and any open recalls. All that stuff's right there. And you're checking that customer in with the eighty-thousand-dollar car they just bought from you, right? You're showing that you care, and you're right there. "Hey, by the way, you declined this service last time." "No, I don't want to do that." "Okay, no worries. I'm just going to take some pictures of your car to make sure you get it back the way you brought it to us. I also notice your tires are looking a little thin in the back. You doing some burnouts? What's up?" So you can give quotes on things like that, right?

The technician's still going to go back there and do the inspection and might recommend them again, even if they declined tires in the drive. But that's transparency, and that's where it all ties in with the shop. We could keep on going, right? But it's all about the customer experience initially. If I'm a customer, I don't want to be standing beside my car for ten minutes wondering who's helping me out. Somebody's going to be already there to greet me with a smile. That's big. And it's the way you present yourself. You can have all the tools in the world, but if you're not having a good day... I'm an easygoing client. I'm going to give my Waffle House girl a good tip because she's sweet, she's looking after me and flowing with me. But if you're a dead horse, then yeah, whatever. All those things are the customer experience, and that's how it starts. Positive.

Capacity, express and the aha moment 33:46

[Dave Rogers] So how many service managers, and you're speaking mostly with service managers, are focused on the customer experience with appointments, and how many are focused on making their lives easier, so their employees and advisors don't beat the crap out of them during the day? What do you think is their main motivation for managing appointments? Or is it because the owner, or myself, is beating them up that I can't get an oil change in two days? What do you see? You don't have to mention names. I don't want to throw anybody under the bus.

Steve Shaw: There are only two people listening, so don't worry.

Stephen Jeffries: There's a disconnect. Since I started working on the Dealertrack side and learning F&I on the front end, I've seen there are two different languages going on. When you get an owner or a GM involved, a lot of times it's, "Well, I want more in. Front-load it, whatever, I want more work in." And the service manager's pulling his hair out, going, "Man, we're already jam-packed."

Steve Shaw: Can't get done what I have.

Stephen Jeffries: Right. So the way I explain it to an owner or a GM is, "Well, one of your sales guys sold five cars yesterday. Are you going to have all five of those customers come in at the same time so he can deliver the vehicles and show them all the features?" No. "Well, that's what's happening right now back there." Things like that. When it comes to the customer and the experience, yeah, we can cram all these ROs into a day. But... man, I thought of something else too. Walk-ins. But anyway, ADHD, guys. I just get worked up.

Steve Shaw: Squirrel.

Dave Rogers: Now I know how he keeps the Zoom calls down to thirty minutes. He's at thirty-five now. He just broke it.

Stephen Jeffries: Dude. You want to schedule our next performance review? No, but I'm telling you, Mondays and Fridays not so much, but the middle of the week, that's when dealers are hitting you up, trying to get things fixed and doing these meetings. It's a juggling job, man, but I do love it.

Dave Rogers: Well, you're good at it. I tell you, there's nobody better with the appointment schedule, or anytime we have an issue with any store. We mystery shop our stores twice a month. Not every store's on Xtime appointments, but while we were talking I just went out and looked at the one Mazda store, which has always been an issue for us as far as booking out. I can make an oil change tomorrow at three o'clock, which is exactly what I want to see. I want to be able to make it within twenty-four to forty-eight hours. If it's not eight o'clock in the morning, it is what it is, but at least at one or two o'clock in the afternoon, I can make it tomorrow. To me, that's good. If I go another day out, I can make it at eight o'clock in the morning. So whatever we've done to tweak those sites is doing good. I like to see that.

Stephen Jeffries: I'm glad you brought it up, because here's another big one. I'm sure you guys have talked about it before: express, Quick Lane, the maintenance schedule, right? We have a main shop with its own set of appointment capacities per day, and an express team with its own set of appointment capacities per day, which is great. So I can fill up my main shop, the Tetris is zipped up, and I can still book my express for that day. The thing is, more often than not I'll have a dealer where I have to give them that aha moment. I say, "All right, we just built your express team. How many appointments do you want to allow off your express capacity from your website?" And they tell me none. I say, "Why?" "Because customers can just come on in. They can just line up."

And I'm like, "Okay. So you're going to let them come in, but if I go to your website to try to book the same exact thing, I can't. I'm zipped up." "Yeah, no, I want them to call." Okay. That's part of the struggle of my job, but it's also a fun challenge, getting them to see what I call the aha moment, right? A lot of these old cats taught me over the years, like Darryl Ferguson and John Griffin. They taught me about performance management and brought this to light for me, and I'm like, dude, that makes complete sense. If you have it available, give it to your customer online. Keep that capacity at what we call no limit, and let it feed off your master capacity for that particular team, express or main shop.

Steve Shaw: Well, Dave and I are laughing, because I'm a drive-in kind of person. I'm like, just show up, right? But I would also say, "Hey, if you want to book an appointment, go for it." I am the proponent of right-now service. Right now, just bring it in. But hey, if you want to book it, please do. We'll know you're coming.

Dave Rogers: I agree a hundred percent.

Stephen Jeffries: And you're not going to turn people away.

Steve Shaw: Right. I'll never turn you away.

Dave Rogers: Some places do. Listen, you've got people stopping in. "No appointment necessary, stop in anytime you want," right? That should be an open-door policy. You want to come in, we'll figure it out when you get there. You want to schedule an appointment, I'm going to try to get you in as fast as I can based on that appointment schedule, because you took the time to make the appointment, right? And then you have same-day phone traffic. You always have these different avenues coming at you, and that's where the skill comes in. It's not just throwing all this mud against the wall and seeing what sticks. You really have to figure these things out. But you're right: if your main shop is full and there's no availability for your express, you've got an issue.

Online booking, QR codes and the GM tip 40:27

[Dave Rogers] But I wanted to ask you. One of the times we had a call, I think it was with Mazda, they were going over the percentage of people making online appointments. I think the last time I had this call was probably in February, and it had crept up to almost 45%. Are you seeing that same number? Was it just Mazda? Is it everywhere?

Stephen Jeffries: When you have your priorities right in your settings, and you're putting no limit in there, and it's going off your primary, what we call advisor capacity, you're seeing these customers with newer smartphones. Even dealers who say, "Well, my clientele's a little older." Buick, GMC, Cadillac, a place out in no man's land with an older clientele. "They don't even have cell phones. They don't even have an email address." Well, grandma's still getting pictures of the grandkids somehow, right? A lot of these folks are getting used to phones that can do everything a computer can do. We are seeing more and more customers going online out of ease, right? We were talking about simple: booking simple and scheduling their own appointments.

And like I said, a thing like a QR code, right? I have a lot of dealers, and I'm in North Carolina, so everybody hears that kind of southern twang, where sales and service are a mile apart. So if they buy a vehicle, I'm not going to walk you over and do a sales-to-service handoff, right? We're going to schedule that first service appointment, and I'm going to have the customer do it on their phone with a QR code in the door jamb of the new vehicle during the PDI process. Do a next-service-visit sticker, put that on there. In the waiting rooms, a QR code to view the latest inventory if you're in service. Vice versa, schedule your service appointment from the sales area. It's things like this that get missed. And that's what drives more customers. If I'm going to your website and booking, I'm comfortable with it, and I'm going to come back and do it again next time, and that's how you get retention. And you turn those walk-ins into appointment-creating consumers. That's the way to do it.

Steve Shaw: Absolutely. Dave, we are pushing it. You want to wrap us up?

Dave Rogers: Yeah, but I've got one more question.

Stephen Jeffries: Dude. It's just like therapy, man, it flies by when you're sitting there talking about your feels and your passions.

Steve Shaw: That's why we do it.

Dave Rogers: So one more question I had down: recently I saw one of these news articles out there saying service scheduling is improving in the industry, and for some reason Volkswagen was leading the pack. I don't know where the data came from. It was on one of the car business websites, CBT News or one of those, in some articles I read. What are you seeing? Can you tell by brand who's good and who's bad? Is Volkswagen really that much better than everybody, or is this just a clickbait article I got caught up reading? I didn't buy anything off it, but I know I was following a couple of trails.

Stephen Jeffries: Well, a lot of OEMs have big followings, right? Volkswagen, yeah, it's just what's hot at the time, I guess. But it doesn't matter, man. It could be a damn Mitsubishi store.

Dave Rogers: It was Pied Piper. They don't know what the hell they're talking about. They wrote the damn thing. That's who we use for mystery shopping, by the way. We use Pied Piper.

Stephen Jeffries: It's across all OEMs. It doesn't matter which OEM. It matters who's running the ship, and how we're addressing these things. Are we just putting them to the side and complaining about not having enough business? Or are we doing all these things we've talked about, getting those customers on our website simply, and keeping things in line so the appointment gets made successfully, with ease? These days thirty thousand dollars isn't that much anymore. If I'm buying a thirty, sixty, eighty, hundred-thousand-dollar car from you, you want that same feel all the way through, in satisfaction and transparency, booking appointments, and, I know we're out of time, video MPI. All these things are key to keeping that client trust.

Steve Shaw: Well, we should talk about the video MPI. We should have you back on and do round two on video MPI.

Dave Rogers: We will. We'll have him back on to talk about it, because they have that built in, and they have the scoring, the AI scoring and stuff, so we can go over that. I think we're going to roll that out in two stores soon, so it'll be interesting to talk about.

Stephen Jeffries: I love it. That's my baby. That's where my roots come from, with Inspect, the RO electronic inspection. That's where I initially started, and that's my baby. So I love that.

Steve Shaw: Cool. Well, let's have you back in a couple of weeks and we can talk about that. That'd be fun.

Dave Rogers: All right, good. Anyway, we'll do the fixed operations tip of the day for general managers. I think just do what Stephen Jeffries just told you: go back there and tell them to open the floodgates and let people come in, whether you can take it or not. No. No. I do think it's a valid point.

Stephen Jeffries: Let's keep those bays full throughout the day and keep our clients happy, right? Call me.

Dave Rogers: A lot of times GMs, and people in the front, just get a feel. They don't feel like it's busy enough back there. They just feel things are slower. A lot of times there are no facts and figures, and they just don't know, right? "It doesn't feel busy back there. Let's open up the floodgates." And I do think there's a little bit of science that goes with appointments. There's a little bit of swag, right? And there's a little bit of luck, man. Some of the best days you have in this business are just lucky days. Everything goes smooth, everyone shows up, all the work turns into upsell, you've got four hours an RO, everyone makes money, and you're happy at the end of the day, right? And then the next day you could have the exact same number of customers, and it's bedlam. It's chaos. That's the part of the business I don't know if AI is ever going to solve. Maybe Stephen Jeffries will come up with a solution, or Steve's AI tools. I guess it's a race to the finish to see who does it.

But as a general manager, I would say get to know your performance rep and the manager who oversees the account, take a look at it from a logical standpoint, and let's not just assume they're standing around back there not doing anything. Because Steve, good point: five deliveries at the same time, they'd never have that. Sales GMs freak out when they have too many ups on a Saturday and not enough salesmen, right? They bitch about it every Monday: "We had twenty customers, we could only take ten." But then they have no problem flooding the floor in service. So good point. Very good point.

Stephen Jeffries: Exactly. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Steve Shaw: Good job. Awesome. Well, it's great to have you here, Mr. Stephen Jeffries. If somebody wanted to find you, where would they find you?

Stephen Jeffries: You can find me at Cox Automotive, Xtime Performance Manager, Dealertrack F&I. Reach out to me.

Steve Shaw: We'll put your email and the link in the description and see what happens. But thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate your insights on appointments. Can't wait to talk to you about multi-point inspection. And I guess, Dave, I will see you next week.

Dave Rogers: Yes, sir. Have a good one, man. Appreciate it.

Steve Shaw: All right, later.

Stephen Jeffries: See you guys.