Driving up car service appointments through an immersive digital experience
When it comes to cars, the driving experience is what's most exciting – not the maintenance, repairs and search for new tires. But the feeling of driving away with new, reliable rubber and parts to take you on the open road is what makes it all worthwhile.
Sullivan Tire, a national chain in the auto service industry, wanted to make the online booking experience for consumers a more seamless one. Life is stressful enough. Scheduling time for your car to be serviced shouldn’t be too.
The Insight
The cost, confusion and unpredictable time commitment of car maintenance and repair makes a necessary process, painful. If Sullivan Tire’s experience was more consumer-first, they could become people’s first choice for tire replacement and more. For this to happen, their online booking experience needs to be simpler, more accurate and more intuitive – particularly on mobile.
Exemplifying founder Bob Sullivan’s trademark phrase to “Treat everyone, customers and fellow employees, as you would a member of your family”, a revamped website, with a mobile-first approach, would change the way consumers interact with Sullivan Tire – for the better.
The Solution
Genuine helped change how customers interact with Sullivan Tire. Through a site modernization project and website redesign via Sitecore, we made their consumer experience more personal and immersive. Sullivan Tire was using a few different data storage systems and Sitecore was the perfect fit to integrate those systems and allow real-time changes to the site to promote new products and discounts.
In addition to leading the technical CMS evaluation process and UX & visual design for a mobile-first experience, key features included:
- Building an appointment booking capability that offers customers more control over their time commitments and schedules.
- Adding personalization features that remembers customer vehicle information and preferred locations.
- Building a Tire Selector Tool that connects to the point of sale system to search the Sullivan Tire database of tires and compare & contrast features.
- Creating an auto service classroom, enabling consumer learning and making the site less transactional.
The Results
- 48% increase in average tire replacement and auto service appointments per day
- 36% of appointments are made via a mobile device (a feature that didn't exist prior to the redesign)
- Post-launch, sentiment on social exploded with hundreds of positive comments about the new booking functionality
