This is a pretty common question. We actually have another blog post that at least in part addresses this question but in case you missed it, here is the answer. We preloaded around 15,000 car dealerships into ServiceBeacon but that means we still missed quite a few of them. If you cant find your dealer, it is not a problem. You’ll notice that at the bottom of the car dealership selection form there is a checkbox titled “I can’t find my dealer”. Check that box and you will get a blank form. Enter you dealer’s information and you are all set. Note that the same feature exists if you ever need to change your dealer — you will find a button called “Change Dealer” at the bottom of “Manage my Cars” where you can change your dealership which includes changing it to a dealership we may not yet have in the system.

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We are launching the first part of what is essentially the other half of ServiceBeacon - the side that really empowers dealers to use ServiceBeacon to take better care of their customers, market products and services to them effectively, and really create a strong relationship with their customer after the car gets driven off the lot. If you are from a car dealership and visiting our blog for the first time, we encourage you to check out our car dealership benefits page to get an understanding of what ServiceBeacon can do for you and your customers.

In addition, in an earlier post we talked about the fact that we have over 15,000 US and Canadian car dealerships preloaded into ServiceBeacon. If you represent a car dealership, please take some time to check out our map of car dealers (btw - even if you aren’t from a car dealership, the map is pretty cool and fun to play with) to see if a) we have your dealership loaded already, b) the information we have is correct, and c) take the time to get in touch with us and “claim” your dealership within our system. Claiming your dealership is free and will allow us to work with you to ensure that we have the right business name, address, phone, fax, website, contact person and email information for your dealership. We will also be capturing other information like hours of operation and the makes of cars you sell as this information helps control how your dealership appears within ServiceBeacon. If you cant find your dealership at all, we will be happy to add it - we are trying hard to add as many dealerships as possible (hopefully one day all of them), but finding a truly complete list has been next to impossible.

In time, the system is going to have other benefits to car dealers and your customers, but for now, claiming your dealership and confirming we have you correctly reflected in the application is a great start.

Thanks for stopping by the blog.

As always,

SB

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This is the first in a number of blog entries discussing some of the interesting technology and implementation methods used in the ServiceBeacon application.

Recently, we have added a car dealership map allowing people to find their car dealer in the system. To accurately map the locations and place dealership markers, we needed a mapping tool with geocoding capability. For those unfamiliar with the term “geocoding”, it describes the method of converting street address information into a global latitude/longitude combination. Some systems also produce a standardized format of the address which can be loaded back into the calling system. For companies dealing with mapping or with questionable address information, this technology can be a great tool. To provide that functionality for ServiceBeacon, we chose Google Maps and their geocoding functionality.

Why Google Maps? The technology is very powerful, response times are good, and most importantly, it can accurately discern different address formats which is great when your address quality is suspect.

While Google Maps and its geocoding abilities are quite powerful, it does have its own drawbacks. The number of addresses you can simultaneously geocode is limited. If you try to send too many requests (more than 10 in a short timespan), the application will start to respond to those additional locations with an error. This forces you to resend or delay in sending the address information. There is also a limit to the number of geocoding address you can do in a day. We have seen a site report the number is around 15,000 but we have not been able to confirm it. Lastly, while the response time is short, it still takes time to do the work. This means your user has to wait while the page starts to fill with markers as you geocode each location.

These drawbacks may not be problematic for some companies who have 10-20 locations to map but ServiceBeacon already has over 15,000 dealerships across North America and each person can try to view all of them every day. If we didn’t implement a strategy to reduce the data traffic, our site would quickly get bogged down in geocoding calls and maybe hit the upper daily limit.
To reduce the effect of these limitations and increase speed, we implemented an interesting strategy. Given the over 15,000 car dealership locations (and rising) we may have to map on a daily basis, we implemented a “check once, show many” strategy. The database has a flag determining if the address needs to be geocoded or not. If a dealership address has already been geocoded, the accurate latitude/longitude is sent to Google Maps and the dealership is marked. This happens quickly and is a JavaScript call locally to the web client. If it requires geocoding, the system sends the address via a JavaScript call to Google for analysis. Once returned, the information is mapped. Here is the interesting part. The address information including the accurate latitude/longitude pair is sent back to the database via an AJAX call. This allows the ServiceBeacon database to be updated with accurate data and also set the geocoded flag. This means only the first requester of that dealership is slowed down as it is geocoded. All other users will see the marker instantaneously. Another great feature of this model is as new dealerships get added or existing dealerships move, the system sets the flag to needing geocoding and when that dealership is requested, the new data seamlessly updates itself.

If you want to see it in action, try it out here. If you have any comments, please submit them as we are always interested in hearing from our car community.

More technology blogs to come….

The SB Team

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Over the past week we have added a little over 5,000 new car dealerships into ServiceBeacon and so we thought it would be important to talk a little bit about the dealerships we have pre-loaded for our users and how to use the data to your advantage as well as, hopefully, reduce any frustrations you may have should you not find your dealer when you signup and add your car (or cars).

First off, there are approximately 25,000 new car dealers in North America. There are many, many times as many used car dealers. There are even more places to get your car repaired, maintained, serviced, etc… We figured that, as a starting point, we would do our best to have as many new car dealers in the system as possible. One day we may try and add used car dealers and garages, etc… but for now, having a fair percentage of the new car dealers would be a pretty good start. The reason for this decision is that most car owners service their car at their dealer at least for the first few years they own the car (or at least your dealership would really like you to!) although according to some pretty amazing research on the new car industry by Cap Gemini, the drop off rates are pretty surprising - about a third of new car owners stop going to their dealer for service by the end of the first year and almost half of all service is done at somewhere other than the original dealer by year 3.

Anyhow, with all that being said, we have managed to get almost 15,000 new cars dealers listed in ServiceBeacon (so around 60% of the reported 25,000). We still have a list of another 3,000 or so to add — it is a long and painful process to try and clean up and confirm the dealers before adding them but we are working on it. The next set to go in (tomorrow!) will include around 900 dealerships from New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, and Oklahoma.

Despite all the work to try and get the right data into the system, we would be kidding ourselves if we thought we had all the new car dealers (definitely not) or that we did not make any errors either with dealership names, addresses, phone numbers, etc (we tried our absolute best and will not make any lame excuses about how bad the data was or how no one would supply us with a truly good list).

So knowing that the data wont always be right and a user may not find their dealer, we thought we would address what to do if these sorts of things should occur.

Picking your dealer: Assuming we have your desired dealership in our database, choosing that dealership should be pretty easy. The system defaults to a list of dealers near the zip/postal code you set for your account (in the “My Info” area of the application).

You’ll notice some options for sorting the list, like the check box for displaying only dealerships that sell your make of car. Note that this is not an exact science - the system looks for dealerships that have your make in the name of the dealer - e.g. Pacific BMW shows up in the list of BMW dealers because BMW is in the name of the dealership. If BMW wasn’t in their name, they wouldn’t show up (for now that’s how the system works although we may change this down the line as we know this is not perfectly accurate).

In addition, you can search for a car dealer based on other criteria such as the name of the dealership or by a custom zip/postal code.

As we said up above, if you either can’t find your dealership (or whoever you want to service your car with) or you find your dealer but something in our listing is incorrect (we really do suggest checking our listing), you can correct or even add a dealership from scratch by clicking on the appropriate check box below the listings

and that will then bring up a text entry area so you can enter/fix the dealer yourself. The nice thing about this is this process will help us validate and clean up our data as well as get new dealers into our main database that we may not have been aware of.

Once you add your car and have picked your dealership, you can at any time edit and even change the dealership you have associated to this car. You have the ability to do this in the Manage My Cars area of ServiceBeacon by clicking on (you guessed it), the Change Dealer button.

A few final points on dealerships:

1) Every car in ServiceBeacon can have a different dealership associated with it.

2) If you plan to book your service appointments electronically using ServiceBeacon, you should find out the name of the person at the dealership who you should be sending your orders to and get their email address. You can then pre-fill out this info into the dealership area of Manage My Cars for the car you are working on.

Finally (yes, it was a long post), if you work for a dealership (or group of dealerships) and you want to make sure we got all your dealerships listed completely and correctly, please contact us about your car dealership or dealerships and we will work with you to get them added ASAP.

As always, thanks for using ServiceBeacon and thanks for visiting our blog.

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