And we are back! Took longer than originally anticipated but way shorter than the second estimate. Anyhow, signups and logins are all working again so it is all good. As far as we can tell everything is working normally again but if anyone notices something that is amiss, please let us know.
SB
We are still working on our changes so we have temporarily blocked login and signup access. Hopefully we wont ever have to do this again but it is software and these things happen. The ETA for new signups and logins in currently tomorrow mid-morning. Hopefully this is not causing too much consternation!
SB
We are currently making some changes to the system that involve shutting down the application. It may be up and down overnight but hopefully not longer than that if all goes well. So… if you try to signup and/or login and the result is not what you are expecting that is probably the likely culprit. Sorry for this but these things have to happen sometime and now is one of them.
SB
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.
So the tour is up. Finally. No more “Coming soon.” We wanted to wait until enough of the site was done that the screen shots that make up the tour are actually what you, our user, can expect. We also hope that it gives you a good sense of what you can do with ServiceBeacon and how to use the software, add cars, look at what maintenance is coming due on your car or cars, how you will see (and find) a recall on your vehicle, where your maintenance history is stored, how to book a service appointment with your car dealership (or any service provider/garage) and more. Anyhow, pretty exciting - as exciting as a tour can get we suppose. Anyhow, if you havent checked it out, take a look at http://www.servicebeacon.com/tour/ and let us know what you think.
Up next: We’ll be loading up a ton of dealerships as well as adding support for 2008 model cars (as we have already started to get requests). We’ll do a post on how these 2 upgrades affect ServiceBeacon once they get added over the next week or so.
