By: Indermeet Singh

RFID has already proven its capability in many areas of track and trace applications and solved some critical business challenges in Manufacturing, Pharmaceutical, Retail, Logistics and Automotive applications.

As technology and business processes get mature, customer experience is another area where RFID is can address vital concerns of all product and service providers. Customer experience management (CEM) is a set of all the processes organizations use to track, oversee and organize every interaction between themselves and the customer. The idea is to meet and exceed expectations leading to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Let’s understand the value of customer experience (CX) in the Auto Service industry and the role RFID can play.

Car manufacturer service departments are interested in providing good CX to ensure loyalty. Car dealerships must balance the shop schedule of car owner paid service or repair orders versus manufacturer paid service work. If services can be seen as an extension of the dealership experience, it can potentially generate repeat customers in the service bay, which keeps the customer base loyal as well as drives revenue. For the car dealer, service (repair and maintenance) is a source of fixed income and to improve customer experience here makes eminent business sense.

All customers like personalized services. Not only do they appreciate being greeted personally on arrival, they also expect quick delivery and speedy bill processing at the time of vehicle delivery. One more thing a customer really appreciates is status updates.

RFID readers capture customer and vehicle status data which can be used by the Manufacturer or Dealerships to improve service processes and keep customers informed.

A workshop, which was earlier a black box, is turned into a well-defined RF Zones enabled by RFID to track real-time vehicle status in successive workshop stages like Service Entry, Washing stage, Shopfloor, Bay, Reserve parking, Final Delivery stage. The use of RFID technology – tags, readers, antennas – captures important information on time spent at each stage that helps in correcting processes and utilization of resources, thereby improving efficiencies and customer experience.

In summary, RFID helps to identify its customer at the point of entry and facilitates reduction in service time, improving CX, as well as allows the workshop to process more cars to increase profitability for the dealership.

Keep checking this space for more blogs, where we will try to share some more insights on RFID enabled customer experience management in other industries.