The Calterdon BMW dealership in Inverness, Scotland, implemented SMS to communicate with its customers and has since seen significant cost-savings through eliminating missed service appointments.

Text Messaging Centre (TMC) is powering the SMS service. Via the service, the BMW dealership has significantly reduced telephone bills by switching to SMS correspondence.

?Using SMS saves a significant amount of the phone bills previously consumed by calls to customers for bookings, updates and reminders,? said Brian Bailey, after-sales manager at Calterdon Limited, Inverness, Scotland.

?Time on the phone is cut down by a lot ? time is money ? this allows for staff to look after and attend to staff in-store at the time when they are being served,? he said.

Benefits of SMS
The Calterdon dealership is seeing various benefits from its implementation of SMS.

Together with the cost-savings already being realized through the use of the SMS system, Calterdon is also seeing an impact on the speed and success of its customer communications.

When customers are out of signal, instead of spending time trying to call them up, the dealership can send a text to them instantly to be received as soon as they become available within their network range.

Not only is SMS cheaper than telephone calls but Calterdon is already seeing huge cost-savings just through appointment reminders alone.

Fewer cancellations
SMS is being used frequently to remind customers the day before to collect their cars. There have also been much fewer cancellations per day, from about 5-6 per day down to about one cancellation per day.

Calterdon?s BMW dealership also uses SMS to send customers a courtesy message after their car has been serviced.

SMS is used to inform customers that their car is ready for collection or parts are in stock.

An additional benefit of text message communication is its instant nature, meaning that Calterdon can receive timely responses from customers for any additional work that is required on their car while it is in the workshop. This ensures any necessary work on the car is completed in one visit, delivering an all-round more efficient service for both customers and staff.

?There have been no refusals of using text to contact the customer,? Mr. Bailey said. ?BMW has the customer fill out a satisfaction sheet to complete after work has been done, which asks if they would like to be contacted to find out how the car is doing after approximately two weeks.

?Customers have always selected SMS,? he said.