With over 600 million service transactions annually, Big Data offers great promise in optimizing service marketing and execution. Armed with better predictive data about vehicle service needs, we could address many challenges which drive costs and dissatisfy customers.
- In the prevailing low trust environment, consumers often forego needed repairs or suffer buyers’ remorse due to the lack of an objective evaluation regard true service needs.
- Dealers miss over half the available work among VINs serviced because work is not diagnosed or not sold.
- Despite ever more sophisticated diagnostic tools, diagnostics still absorb over 20% of service labor hours and most service outlets struggle to achieve 85% fixed right first time.
- Service marketing efforts are limited to predicting scheduled maintenance and largely silent on more critical vehicle repair needs due to inconsistent inspection data and operation codes.
- US dealers spend over $500 million coding warranty claims and yet still under claim by $1.5 billion. OEMs spend significant efforts monitoring claims to prevent fraud, yet their methods undermine the consumer experience, lose data valuable to solving quality issues and damaging dealer relationships.
The primary reason these challenges have not been addressed lies in the nature of the data. The most valuable data are in the unstructured text fields entered by the service advisor and technician. These fields consist of jargon, short hand and misspelling all unique to a technician or service location. Even much of the structured data – e.g. operation codes or part numbers – are unique to a technician or service location. The inability to aggregate data across multiple sources and intelligently organize has prevented the effective use of big data tools and techniques. That is until now. Empiritas has been working with Ubiquiti, an Ann Arbor based software and analytics company that specializes in transforming text into usable data. Since 2001, Ubiquiti has focused on interpreting warranty and repair order data to assist OEMs and suppliers in driving superior product quality. Ubiquiti has developed proprietary software and techniques to transform the unstructured data found in repair orders into the kind of structured that can be analyzed and quantified. In its core business Ubiquiti serves many major OEMs and Tier One suppliers.
Identify
By recognizing patterns across similar vehicle and utilizing VIN-specific data we are able to more accurately predict vehicle service needs. This enables service marketing to create relevant offers on repair and maintenance items, significantly improving service marketing returns (Bullseye). We also augment efforts to capture unsold operations information. By “reading” the text we recognize customer concerns and causes that were not corrected on a specific repair order (Recapture). Aggregating at the store level, we can assess store performance against an objective standard. We can accurately predict a store’s potential based on its units in operation. We can determine any short falls by source – e.g. VINs not seen, issues not diagnosed, opportunities not sold – and by operation (Shop Scout). Empiritas has been partnering with Ubiquiti to develop and deploy several new applications focused on improving the service business. Working together they have developed several new products which leverage big data to deliver superior performance in four critical service management functions; identify, notify, recognize and realize.
Notify
We can power any number of service marketing applications designed to inform consumers about their service needs. Our most powerful application, we call Vehicle MD. Vehicle MD is a consumer self-diagnostic tool that allows a customer to input information about vehicle problems experienced in natural language. The solution returns likely issues and solutions in the same natural language, giving the consumer confidence in service writer recommendations. The solution helps bridge the trust gap which undermines the current owner / service provider relationship.
In addition, we work with service marketing companies to better inform service reminder campaigns, smart phone service applications and other efforts to reach consumers with more relevant message at the time of need.
Recognize
We combine vehicle-specific data and similar-vehicle data to determine the likelihood that vehicles experiencing certain symptoms are likely to have other service needs. We call this recognizing “co-occurring issues” (Service Check). This solution is a significant enhancement on multi-point inspections. Rather than place all vehicles through the same 125-point inspection, we guide technicians to the most likely issues; improving compliance and yield. We encourage clients to be transparent and provide consumers with the same view on likely issues. Showing consumers a “people-like you” view of service needs, helps drive sales conversion and long-term credibility (Verify).
Realize
We provide technicians with the most likely robust fixes based on customer concern and diagnostics output. In effect, we present each technician with the collective wisdom of all technicians who have worked on similar vehicles. The feedback is immediate without the need to consult bulletin boards, reach TSBs or call master technician hotlines. Because the solution is authored by the real-time data, as soon as some technician has solved the problem, his wisdom is immediately available to all. This creates significant value early in model years, on hard to diagnose problems or less common models. (Tech Forum). Part of realizing value is getting paid. As mentioned above, warranty administration is a very burdensome process that equals 3% of the total warranty cost for the industry. We have developed a solution that largely automates the warranty admin; pre-populating OEM required fields from the original RO, selecting or narrowing codes and identifying potential missed claims. Our current solution reduces claims effort by over 80% and finds 3-4% in unclaimed work. For a typical dealer this represents nearly $60,000 in annual value.
Results
The net result is we have leveraged our knowledge of the barriers to improved service performance to open new revenue sources for Ubiquiti. We have worked collaboratively to define the requirements, identify potential customers and used trusted relationships to quickly bring solutions to market. Conservatively, these new revenue sources will double Ubiquiti’s revenue over the next three years.