It went pretty smoothly. A little bit of a wait while the switch occurred but all-in-all, not bad. I think what you will find is the system will respond better and faster and that will make for a better overall experience. The support at MediaTemple was great and if you are ever looking for a solid hosting provider with very good service, we definitely recommend them.
As always,
SB Team.
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
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
We have been laying a little bit low the last couple of weeks as we have been busy working on a number of enhancements and refinements to ServiceBeacon. We thought it might be good to put up a post as we just implemented a pretty significant change, that being a new application menu system. The new one looks like the old one but functions so much better. “How so?” you ask? Well, the old system was a pain in that you in order to get to specific functions like “Add a Reminder” or “Create Service Order” or “Add a Car” you first had to go to a page you may not have wanted to get to like “Manage Open Service Orders” or Manage my Cars”.
The new menu system is a lot more functional and user friendly: Just put your mouse over the main menu item to see see the sub-menu items. Way better, dont you think? Pretty much everyone agrees this should have been done from day one but it just didn’t happen that way.
Hope you like the change and what we did. There were lots of ways we could have implemented this but decided to stick to something relatively simple and not that far off from what we had before. If you have any other suggestions on how to improve it let us know.
Other changes:
1. We changed the font color from gray to black for all emails. Too much squinting going on trying to read the gray text. It looked pretty but if you go blind trying to read the email, who cares that it looks nice?
2. We changed the way the odometer gets updated in Step 1 of create a service order. The way it was working before was causing some consternation because if you entered a new odometer reading and hit enter, you would immediately get pushed to page 2 of create an order when all you were trying to do was update your mileage. The plan is to put this same process onto the Manage my Cars page as consistency is a nice thing to have in an application.
3. On our FAQ page, the instructions on how to retrieve your username and/or password wasn’t working. That’s now resolved.
4. We added the ability to add custom service items within Step 2 of creating a service order. Here’s an example:
This is a sample entry:
This is what it then looks like once it gets posted to the Additional Items area of your order:
5. Checked Opera to make sure it works with the app. It does and worked great. Safari is still having issues though.
6. We made a bunch of other subtle changes but here is one other we made as I wanted to give credit to where we saw this posted. SEOmoz is a really great website that focuses on search engine optimization (something we have just started to work on as ServiceBeacon starts to get good). They had a post on customizing and getting creative with your 404 error page. A 404 error is what you would see if you try and go to a page that does not exist. Anyhow, we liked the post, and here is ours. Hope you like it!
What’s next? Things that are coming over the next few weeks:
1. We are moving to a new server.
2. We have more schedules coming online.
3. We think we are changing our home page.
4. We are adding a dealership mapping and locating tool to the public side of the website.
5. More small fixes like some of the ones noted above (including getting Safari to work).
That’s it! Thanks for reading our blog and if you haven’t yet tried ServiceBeacon, you should really try it out and let us know what you think so far,
SB
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
A couple of new things to blog about this week, one is sort of minor and the other is more significant.
First the minor item: We loaded up a bunch of car recalls. The joy of being a startup is that sometimes things that may seem simple end up being more complex than they probably appear. Over the last few weeks we made some very significant changes to our database structure which gave us a lot more flexibility as we add new schedules and recalls. What prompted our having to make these changes was a significant change in the model of the data we have been receiving from our data provider (no, we don’t create the schedules on our own). Making the changes temporarily delayed our ability to add new car schedules and recalls but now that the changes are done we have a lot more flexibility to adjust to any future changes that may arise (and we have no doubt they will). In any case, this week we added a batch of recalls we received and we expect another batch over the next few weeks.
The more significant change we made this week was the ability to add a 2008 model car. As you’ll see in the example below, a 2008 will still be considered “custom” as we dont yet have any 2008 schedules but the process is pretty straightforward and in most cases any car you add will have a schedule assigned that should be pretty close to the correct one - certainly close enough to have little to no negative impact. Here is the process:
First, when adding any car, the first thing you do is go to My Cars/Add a Car. From the drop down, select Model Year “2008″ and then pick the make of car you are adding which in our example is a Scion. You will then notice that the Model Name drop down wont have anything to choose from. The reason is, as explained above, we do not yet have 2008 schedules. This is not a problem though as you can still add your car by checking on the “Model not here” checkbox which will then also check on the “Engine not here” checkbox and display a drop down box of schedules we have that are a close enough match. You then fill out what car you have which in our example is a tC with a 4cyl, 2.4 liter DOHC VVT-i. Then from the other schedule drop down, ServiceBeacon displayed schedules that are a close match and in this case we selected the 2007 Scion tC schedule. Note that in some cases, a user may see this drop down if we have all other information for the car except for the actual schedule.
Once you complete adding the car, you’ll be taken to Manage My Cars which will confirm that your car was successfully created. You will also see that in the area where it says “Schedule Type” it says “Alternate Schedule”. If it was the 2008 Scion schedule this would say “OEM Schedule”.
A couple of final points on what happens when we get the OEM schedule. Right now the Switch to OEM Schedule button is disabled. This button will become active when we load up an OEM Schedule that we believe is the correct one and will then walk the user through the process of confirming whether you want to switch to the new schedule we have identified.
The other place you will get notified of an OEM schedule being loaded that is a close match for your car on an alternate schedule is on the Dashboard page in the messages area for that car. You’ll notice that right now nothing is displayed as we currently do not have that schedule.
Hopefully this all makes sense. If it doesn’t or our process is more confusing then it should be, please let us know.
Until next time, thanks for reading our blog!
A new set of maintenance schedules went online today along with that promised batch of dealerships (see yesterday’s post). 220 new schedules got added along with IDs for 181 cars. The majority of the new batch was for 2007 model cars. A big upload of recalls will be going online in the next day or so. The other big change that is coming is support for the 2008s so look for that in the coming days/week.
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.
