From the customer perspective, booking a dealer service appointment is still often a painful experience. Menu options that don’t make sense, emails or texts that don’t align with actual needs, wait times that aren’t realistic – these are just a few of the challenges. How many service visits are dealers losing due to this dynamic? This session will focus on the ways in which OEMs and dealers are working to make this process more frictionless for customers, specifically through outbound touch points to drive service bookings. This may be through the use of BDCs (we’d like to hear both from those who think BDCs do work, as well as those who don’t), as well as other service scheduling channels, such as online schedulers, in-vehicle prompts, AI agents, and more. How are these being used to increase service retention? Having a quality customer list is key to this process, so we will include that in our discussion. The scope of this session begins at lead generation and ends once the service appointment is booked.