Automotive technology business AutoPlay is providing the local automotive industry in Australia with the first of several COVID-19 specific technology enhancements.
AutoPlay is releasing its first two product features to support safer working processes in the dealership with a dedicated tool for customer contact tracing, including vehicle hygiene and customer disclaimers, enabling dealerships to more safely operate during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Available to dealership clients the new technology will include:
• COVID-19 compliance disclaimer
Under existing operational restrictions, dealerships should track every customer that visits their dealership: when they were there and with which vehicles and people they interacted.
Although AutoPlay already has features that enable recordkeeping in this manner, it now also features a COVID-19 compliance disclaimer.
This disclaimer allows the dealership to record if the customers they are engaging with for Lead, Test Drive, Appraisal or Loan Car interactions were showing any flu-like symptoms.
It discloses that their personal information may be shared to the relevant authorities should contact tracing be necessary in the interests of public health.
• Customer Contact Tracing
While considered good business practice previously to know all visitors to a dealership sales yard or premises, there is now a very real and important reason to diligently obtain this information.
In the event a visitor is diagnosed with COVID-19, the dealer may need to provide a full digital record of contact to the relevant health authorities.
Dealerships must be able to quickly identify which staff members came into contact with the visitor, the other people with whom those staff also had contact both on that day and any subsequent days, and which vehicles that visitor and the salesperson had engaged on together.
Any further people who entered those vehicles will also need to be identified. All this information is readily accessible and available for quick collation and review in AutoPlay’s new contact tracing module.
• COVID-19 vehicle sanitisation record
This allows for a cleaner to sign off once a vehicle has been sanitised, complying with the current heightened need to ensure all surfaces are regularly cleaned and disinfected.
This section exists on all Test Drive, Loan Car and Appraisal Forms in AutoPlay’s Sales Pipeline, so that all staff are aware at any given time of a specific vehicle’s hygiene record and importantly when it was last cleaned and by whom in digital format.
•Checking in and out
There is now a simple check in/check out option on all lead records to document when clients visited the dealership, to help track who has come into contact with staff and other customers, fulfilling contact tracing requirements in-hand with the COVID-19 disclaimer.
AutoPlay plans to release another new module empowering dealerships’ to administer contactless vehicle engagements like test drives, with the full exchange of information and authorisation taking place digitally between the customer and the salesperson via their own respective personal devices.
Following this, AutoPlay will be providing a new digital visitor logbook for dealership use across sales, service, and parts departments.
AutoPlay head of product and operations Matt Darby says these new features vital to good business operations.
“The logbook has some great features: you will have an immediate live view of who is onsite at your dealership, who is scheduled to come in, and who has come and gone,” Darby says.
“The best thing with both the logbook, as well as all of the new features we are developing, is that they integrate seamlessly with our existing lead management platform for ease of use.”
“It’s no secret that aftersales – and in particular, the service lane – plays a major role in our recovery as an industry. We think it can be extended further,” says AutoPlay Australia general manager Brendan Bates.
“Smart digital tools such as the contactless digital appraisal form will allow diligent salespeople and valuers to profile customers and their vehicles in the service lane,” Bates says.
“The investment in increasing appraisals of good quality retail stock in your service driveway today will pay off as lead volumes continue to regain lost ground and those new leads automatically match in AutoPlay to your previously appraised service vehicles.
“It is like you have rolling stock you have not had to buy yet that you can use to potentially make matches to on new and existing leads. Our technology will assist in these vital dealer processes right now while improving contact tracing and compliance especially on the ever-important test drive stage of a lead’s life,” he says.
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