Alok Sharma
All work

2024-25 · Tekion

Rebuilding appointment booking setups to account for all resource capacities

Brain behind dealership appointment booking systems, helped reign in chaos, increase resource visibility & predictability, prevented revenue losses

Overview

About Tekion and Product

Tekion is an automotive cloud-based Dealership Management System (DMS) that provides a unified experience across every department in a car dealership.

Scheduling/Appointment product vertical (also called Digital Service Experience) allows dealerships to create & manage appointments, check-in and manage communication with customers.

Project Details

Team
Product Designer (Me), Product Managers (2), Partner Success Managers (2), Engineers (5)
My Role
Redefining problem statement, secondary & supporting research, ideation & exploration, interaction design, internal & post-launch feedback analysis

Impact

83%

Efficiency in navigating & updating 1 capacity change, down from 30 min to under 5 min

~74%

Adoption amongst Service Directors, Managers & Advisors

4 weeks to 2 weeks

Setup to operational peak time

Kickoff & Open Questions

I discussed the problems facing the current application and the needs of its users with the PM as part of the kickoff. We identified 3 initial challenges.

I had some questions and gaps of my own that I tried to resolve with various research methods as part of my design process.

Challenges raised at kickoff

  1. One daily cap covered the whole dealership — the only limit it could express.

  2. It ignored the resources a booking actually draws on: advisors, BDC agents, transportation, shops.

  3. Users could not find where to set that limit due to deep nesting of settings

Open questions after it

How does it work today, and where are its gaps?

Application audit · Discussions with PMs

Who are the users across the whole process?

Journey mapping · Persona analysis

Where do they expect this to live in our system?

Discussions and validations with PSMs

What factors affect appointment booking?

Secondary research

How do others solve this, inside and outside automotive?

Competitor analysis · Secondary research

Design Process, Research & Insights

The open questions mentioned earlier guided the research methods as part of this project's design process. The insights gathered became the bedrock of explorations, eventually converging towards the shipped designs.

Define

  1. Brief → Scope

    Identified knowledge and requirements gaps

  2. Re-defining the problem

    Validated the issues, scale, identified user personas & agreed scope with PM

Design & ship

  1. Explorations

    Explored 2-3 ideas for each level of design decision making

  2. Final designs

    I designed interactions, user-flows, edge cases including downstream impacted flows.

  3. Pre-launch

    Updated designs after analysing internal & customer feedback from PMs, PSMs, Others.

Learn & fix

  1. Post-launch

    Analysed user feedback via LUS, Support Tickets

  2. Phase 2

    Roadmap planning in progress

Who are we designing for?

I mapped out a compact user-journey of the appointment booking & setup process. This helped me identify 4 key sets of users. In the end, we decided to design primarily for Service Department Leadership while taking into account the impact on other users.

Service Department Manager/Director

Makes workflow decisions for the Service department at the dealership

Service Advisor

Keeps the shop running with an efficient flow from check-in to delivery

BDC Agent

Book appointments, confirm appointments, and reach out to customers due for maintenance

Customer/End user

Get an appointment without a long hold or back-and-forth, ideally outside business hours

What did we learn after the research?

Based on the research, discussions with PMs and other stakeholders, we agreed and narrowed down the scope to these pillars. The ideas, design explorations and eventually the final designs incorporated these insights.

Users

Primary Users
Service Managers & Directors
Service Advisors
Secondary Users
BDC Agents
Indirect Users
Customers/End-Users

Resources

Service Advisors
Key persona for service, limited time availability
Transportation Types
Limited availability
Shops
Limited servicing capability, other resources linked to shops

Mechanisms

Maximum no. of appointments
Time slots per day/week & for each resource
System enforced prevention of overbooking
Capacity visibility
Five research boards overlaid: user stories for the Service Manager and Service Advisor; factors affecting appointment booking across automotive, healthcare, restaurants and service/repair; the human and non-human constraints for Tekion; the finalised resources for appointment constraints; and a competitor study of XTime, CDK, myKaarma and Tekion.

Explorations & Key Design Decisions

The overall challenges faced by dealerships and users was multi-fold. We had to break down the complete scope into levels and make design decisions for each level.

The four levels of design decision, each depending on the one above Placement — where the settings live — was decided first, at the top. Resource and capacity follows, then granularity — how granular the settings go — and finally other touchpoints, the other surfaces to reach it. Each level depends on the level above, and the explorations are presented in this order. decided first Depends on the level above 01 Placement where the settings live 02 Resource & Capacity how users navigate it easily 03 Granularity how granular the settings go 04 Other touchpoints other surfaces to reach it

Where should the settings live?

Hardcoded values

  • Not scalable even within a dealership and across multiple dealership customers
  • No flexibility for Service Managers to make quick changes

Discarded

Standalone capacity settings

  • Not reasonable to build new setup applications
  • Higher engineering and maintenance costs
  • Not recommended to build a single-use settings app for a very specific use-case

Discarded

Modify/redesign scheduling settings

  • DSE is an existing SKU that includes a Scheduler + Scheduling Settings.
  • Service Managers’ mental model already expects the 2 to be tied together
  • Users need visibility and quick access for everything

Selected

How users navigate & find relevant settings?

Option A – Adding ‘Capacities’ section in existing application

Pros

  • Lowest engineering effort

Cons

  • High cost of discoverability
  • Inefficient navigation between resources and capacities
  • High interaction cost of back & forth navigation & editing

Discarded

The Scheduling settings panel open over a dealership screen, listing General, Shops, Transportation, Capacities and Summary in a left-hand nav.

How users navigate & find relevant settings?

Option B – Separate resources & capacities settings

Pros

  • Better discoverability of resources & capacities
  • Easier back & forth navigation between resources & capacities
  • Easier accessibility for granular settings
  • Lower interaction cost long-term

Cons

  • Highest engineering effort
  • Slightly higher learning & training costs

Selected

The Scheduling settings panel with Resources and Capacities expanded, each listing Service Advisor, Transportation and Shops, with Dealership under Capacities and Consumer Scheduling below.

How Flexible or Granular the configuration should be?

Option A – Slot/Hourly Capacities

Pros

  • Ability to assign daily maximum appointment limit for each resource
  • Ability to assign hourly appointment limit for each resource
  • Bulk actions for easier setup

Cons

  • Highest engineering effort
  • Higher initial learning & training costs

Selected

The Slot Capacity dialog for Express Shop: a grid of half-hourly time slots against the days of the week, each cell holding a capacity number, with a Bulk Update panel for applying one maximum across selected days.

Testing, Feedback & Final Designs

We tested the designs with both internal stakeholders and some users. Based on the feedback, I updated the designs to add some features and fix some missed ones before development work started.

  • Add bulk update for slot capacities
  • Time blocks in Advisor schedules to account for holidays, lunch breaks etc.
  • Adding & authorising BDC Agents for booking appointments
  • Error/warning states when changing time slots
Final design walkthrough — daily capacities for Service Advisors and Shops, and slot capacities set in bulk

Outcome

Qualitative Impact

After the launch, we received customer feedback via PMs, PSMs and other stakeholders.

This feedback was largely positive, with some feedback indicating that customers needed some help getting up to speed.

We began updating our Service Schedule Settings to provide greater efficiencies, less advisor stress, and an overall better guest experience. I was very impressed with the ability to customise scheduling by advisor, days, time slots, labor op’s and etc.

Service Director, Everett Chevrolet

Please let me start by saying ‘THANK YOU’ for your teams recent updates in the appointment system with regards to capacity settings. The system is now both user friendly and convenient to edit and form around out [our] store.

FixedOps Director, SERRA Chevrolet-Buick-GMC

As time has gone by and we’re more familiar with the system, we’re now looking for ways to utilise Tekion’s technology… And from beginning to end we rebuilt our entire scheduling setting in less than two weeks.

Service Director, Everett Chevrolet

At first glance, *** at *** was very excited with the new capacity settings and daily capacity adjustments in appointment screen. He said this is exactly what they wanted and their top scheduling requests! I told them to fully test it over the next week for more feedback but initial reaction is very good.

Partner Success Manager, via Slack

Source: Feedback collected by Product Managers, Product Specialists and Customer Success teams via Slack messages, emails, calls etc.

Quantitative Impact

I used some internal applications to view and analyse Support Tickets, Customer complaints etc. I also looked at user session recordings via Pendo Analytics.

83%
quicker in making & applying a single capacity update, down from 30 min → 5 min
~75%
reduction in steps to access capacities
(eg. transportation from 4 actions → 1 action)
~74%
adoption amongst Service Directors, Managers & Advisors
4 weeks → 2 weeks
setup to operational peak time

Source: Pendo analytics, Pendo session replays, support ticket analysis, customer feedback

Remaining Gaps

3-6 months after launching the update, there are some gaps that users mention quite often. Unfortunately, these have not been planned for any roadmap, yet.

8%
of all Scheduling/Capacity related tickets are about training/self-usage issues.
14%
of all Scheduling/Capacity related tickets are about changes not taking effect immediately without an explicit action to ‘Run Scheduler’.
14%
issues related to gap between Capacity integration with Consumer Scheduler compared to ARC.

Source: Live user sentiment & support ticket analysis

Reflection

No bad ideas

Ideate as much as possible without worrying about engineering or other constraints. Every idea leads to the destination.

Understand and negotiate constraints

Discuss constraints with engineering, product and other stakeholders beyond typical org structure and processes. These discussions and collaborations lead to better solutions.