Name: Elevating your customer transportation with Uber for Business
Uploaded: 2026-03-26T18:46:08.085Z
Duration: 29 min 50 s
Description: Elevating your customer transportation with Uber for Business

Transcript for "Elevating your customer transportation with Uber for Business": Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's webinar, elevating your customer transportation with Uber for business. So if you are a service manager or fixed ops manager at a dealership, you know that the customer transportation section of it is wildly important. Everything can go perfectly smooth with the actual repair of the vehicle, but if a customer gets left waiting at the dealership or they don't have a loaner car and they're waiting around for a shuttle that has been on the road for a while, it can kind of ruin their entire experience, even if everything behind the scenes goes perfectly smooth. And we're kind of in a world now where CSI scores are directly affecting bonuses, manufacturing relationships, and long term retention is really starting to become something that people are focusing on. So today we're going to walk you through exactly how we can help you guys fix that and make it as smooth of a process as possible. So we're going to talk about why transportation matters so much, show you how to build a modern transportation program using our product, Uber Central for dealerships. And then we're going to bring in Mike Toledo from Audi Riverside over in California. And he's going to talk about his real world experience and how his experience has been using Uber for Business so far for his dealership. So just a little bit of background about myself. My name is Alex Dietzen, and I am an account executive on the automotive team here at Uber. I've been here for about eighteen months or so, and I handle our Southern California and Arizona markets here. So before we dive into everything, we're going to do a little bit of housekeeping. For everyone on the webinar, if you want to submit a question, there is a Q and A section tab that's on the right hand side of the screen. And then we're going to be answering them in real time if we can get to them. And then, if you don't hear back, we'll do our best just to get to it afterwards. And then if you want to learn about Uber for business and explore, actually signing up and using us, you can look at the content under the docs tab. And then there's going to be a click demo button there at the top of the screen. And then what's going to happen from there is that we have a different local Uber rep for every part of this country and then as well as Canada as well. So your local rep is going to get in touch with you and you can get a demo set up with them and they can get you set up in about five minutes if you did want to start using the platform. So before we get into the walkthrough of the platform and about how we can help make your guys' customer transport a lot more efficient, I want to get into kind of what the issue is and what is currently broken with the transportation of dealerships. So historically, dealerships have had a few different options and a few different methods for how they're going to transport their customers. They have the shuttle and obviously that has been used for decades and it comes with a lot of issues. There's a lot of hidden costs as well. So with a shuttle, the cost baked into it, there's a lot of different things and they're kind of hidden on there. So there's the cost of the shuttle. There's the cost of employing the person and their benefits. There is the gas for it. There's the maintenance for it, the depreciation of it. And then one thing that is kind of priceless is the liability of it as well. So because it's you guys and one of your employees that is transporting that customer around, if anything were to happen in the vehicle, the dealership would be liable. And with us, the rides are actually going to be insured through Uber. So that is a huge piece of it as well. So some data points to kind of back that up we have on the slide here. So the number one friction point in the dealership journey, wait time. Wait times are about five point two days on average for a service appointment. And dealerships are at a disadvantage. Average wait times during maintenance is about one point six hours, while 64% of after market locations complete service in under an hour. And that's been a big trend in the car service industry over the past few years as a lot of franchise dealerships are losing their business to a lot of the independent service centers. Just because of these wait times. I mean, these guys got smaller shops and they can drop it off pretty quick and just get their car picked up more. They can pick it up quicker. So that's been a big trend in the industry and franchise dealerships are having to do what they can to try and win this business back and slow some of the loss that's happening. So how do we decrease wait time, raise customer satisfaction rates and CSI scores and increase the likelihood that a customer makes it back to the shop either for maintenance or to buy a car. That's one of the reasons why we built the Uber Central platform. All right. So this here is the Uber Central platform and this is what your advisors or anyone else you'd want at the dealership to have access would have bookmarked. What's great about it, it's super simple. It's pretty much just the Uber app on your phone that everyone's used to using, But there is a few bells and whistles on there that are handy for you guys to have as dealerships and as somebody that is booking ride for somebody else instead of yourself. So we'll just go through a sample ride here. You're going to first put in their name and their phone number. And the customer that's receiving this ride, they do not even need to have the Uber app to get it. So if you send them a ride, it's just going to text them all of the information that you would normally see when you book an Uber ride on your phone. So we'll have some pictures that are going to show an example of this. But it's going to have the driver name, the car make, model, license plate, the color, the driver's name, when the vehicle's arriving. It just texts them everything directly right onto their phone and it's really, really simple. You go ahead and put in the addresses here. We're going to use the dealership that is jumping on the call with us later. Put in the drop off address. Great. And then you'll see once you put in the addresses, it's actually going to show you the ride amount for what it's going to cost you guys. And what's great about this, it does not have any added fees on top of it. So the platform is completely free to have. You only pay for the ride to book and then that's it. So even if you're using it as like a supplement to your shuttle, no downside to that at all because you're not paying any subscription fees. And it's not going to waste if you guys just have it ready to go for those emergency situations. There's going to be two different ride types here. So pickup now is just the standard ride that it would be like when you called it yourself. The Uber will just come to you as soon as possible. Future ride here is a great option because it's going to just send them a link that we call a flex link. And it just has all the info pre put into there. But it sends the customer a link. And whenever they're ready to go, then they just click that link and then the ride will show up to wherever they are. So this is great for example, if the customer is coming back to the dealership. Obviously, it's kind of hard to time it and call the ride right when you know that they got their shoes on and they're ready to go. You can just send them this flexible link. Whenever you give them the heads up that the car is good to go, they can just click that whenever they're ready and then they will be on their way back. People also use this quite a bit for service, or sorry, for sales deliveries. So instead of like a chaser car, they will just have a FlexRide ready to go for whoever it is that's delivering the vehicle. They drop it off to the customer's house and whenever they're ready to go, they just click that and they come back to the dealership. This is a really great feature that we have. It's a little bit of a newer side to it that we've added recently. You can now designate a ride as either warranty or non warranty. So that is going to be tracked on every single one. And we have this because a lot of the OEMs, they actually offer warranty reimbursement for rideshare in this part of their reimbursement for alternative transportation. So for example, Stellantis, Hyundai, Kia, they do $38 each way for warranty. And then GM does an amount and some of the luxury brands also do some as well. But this is a huge, huge money saver if you are able to track these correctly. And you have your warranty admin logged in on there, then they can easily go back and find those eligible rides. It can literally be thousands of dollars at the end of the month. It's also going to have you choose the ride type here. It's going to default to the standard Uber X, which is just the one that you probably normally call in your personal life. But there's some other options on there too. If someone brings their dog into the dealership, you got the pet friendly one. Comfort, if you're just looking to book a vehicle with a little bit more room. XL, if someone has their whole family on there. And then we have some assist ones too for people that have a disability or something like that. And then as you go down here, the last thing that you put in is you're just going to tie in the repair order number. That field will be mandatory and that just makes it so the tracking is going to be really, really clean on your guys' end. And we can get into that after this. But every single ride is going to tell you the repair order number. It'll tell you the pickup drop off, the distance, the exact price it was, the customer name, who was the dealership that booked it. It'll keep track of anything that you would possibly want to have on there just with all these different fields that are mandatory to be filled in. Also built within the central program, we do have a parts delivery feature as well. And it's, like I said, in the exact same spot, instead of doing single ride, which would be for a person, you're just going to hit the delivery feature here. And it's going to look very similar, but instead of putting the name of the customer that is getting in the car, you're just going to put the name of the person that's receiving the package. So they'll get those texts about when the drivers on the way and all those different details that they need. And it gives you some customization here. You can meet the person at the curb, you can have them meet you at the door, pick it up in the lobby, and then you can add any relevant instructions, just maybe info about where it is that they should be meeting the person. These are instructions for the driver. Any relevant information that they would need just to make it a smooth process for you guys. And it has some safety features on there as well. You can have this option selected for requiring the pin upon delivery. So the driver and the person receiving the package, they are both going to have this security PIN. So you know that it's not going to be delivered to the incorrect person. And these packages, technically the limit on them is 30. Basically any it's kind of a hotshots parts delivery service. And it's for anything that we say we like to say anything that can fit in the back of a Camry, you could use the parts delivery for. And what's great, the rides are cheaper than how it would be if you were just to send a customer. Parts delivery rides do run a little bit cheaper on that end. Last couple of features I'll show you guys on Central. As you start to book rides, you can keep track of everything that's going on under waiting pickup or in progress authority in the vehicle. You can also go and review activity at any time too. So most dealerships like to have these tied into their internal ROs. The advisor, the books that are anyone there, they can go back and look at these rides and this updates in real time. So they can click on it. They can see what the RO was on it. They can see the customer name, the pickup drop off address. Anytime you guys need to review stuff, you can do it there and we'll show it to in a second. But you can even just print that out into a giant spreadsheet to make it easier for you. So that is really it for the central product. Anyone that has that, they can just book the rides directly on there. And it's very, very easy for people to pick it up. 95% of people, I think, have booked an Uber ride in their personal life. And it's basically the same thing, but just with a couple of different options. Anyone who is an admin on your guys account, they will have access to this page right here. And this is just going to be all the back end stuff, all the tracking. You can add or move people on your team and review activity. Under this activity tab here that we had mentioned earlier, this is where you're going to be able to see any ride that's happened. And then you're going to be able to filter it by the warranty or the non warranty options on there. So if you want to see the rides that are eligible for that reimbursement from the OEM, really easy for your admin just to narrow it down to those. And then they can click on it, see the pickup drop off. It has the name of the person that booked it, the addresses, and then it's going to have the RO tied in as well. So the only thing that the OEMs need from us is just a screenshot of this. And that's the only thing you have to submit on our end from it. And then you can also add or remove people on to the dashboard. You're going to be able to separate it into sales department and service department to make reporting really easy on your guys' end. And you can also add a lot of different rules. So I know a lot of times people are a little bit worried about spending a bunch of money if they're getting this set up with the dealership for the first time. But there's a bunch of different rules that you can put into place on there, such as you can cap rides at a certain price or distance. So if you want to start this program up, but you don't want to book a ride for say anything over $30 you can have advisors capped at that price so they can book anything under that. But managers can have an override feature where if they did want to send a customer a little bit further, then they have the ability to do that on their end. And then we also have the same ability to do that with the location restrictions. You can do a mile radius on there if you'd like, yeah, we have the mile radius or we have the price caps on there. And then we can also add some safety features as well. We can make it so the ride is required to be tied into the dealership address. So whether it's going to be the pickup or drop off, the dealership address has to be tied in. And that just helps prevent any misuse of somebody using in a way that they shouldn't. Yeah. So this is how everything is going to work for the customer. Like we were talking about, there is not a requirement for the customer to have the Uber app. It's just going to send them all the information in a text message and it's really intuitive for them to be able to find that driver when they come. So it just sends everything to them right there and it's going to confirm the details with all the info about the ride. And now we're going to have a fireside chat with a client of ours, Michael Toledo over from Audi Riverside. So he's going to be joining us now for a little bit of a discussion about what it's been like for him to use Rideshare at his dealership instead of shuttles. And just his general experience with using, Uber for business and being a client with us. Hey, good morning. Thanks for having me. Yeah, of course, man. How's everything been going with you? Awesome. We've been busy. Every day we're getting a little bit busier. I think we're getting some of that tax return clientele coming in. So it's been picking up. People are doing more maintenances, more services. Yeah, we're doing good. Awesome, man. Good to hear. Good to hear. So I just kind of want to hand it off to you to start. I just have you give a little bit of an introduction about yourself and the dealership. So yeah, do you want to tell everyone about what you do there at the dealership and a little bit about you guys? Yeah, so I'm the service manager here at Audi Riverside. We're the premier Audi location in the Riverside County. I've been here since October, but I've been in the industry for about twenty years. Prior to this, was with Ford, spent quite a bit of time at Ford, prior to that I was with Lincoln, and then prior to that I was with independent shops, Firestone, and yeah, I've been in the automotive industry for quite a while, but I've been here with Audi and it's been nothing short of surprising and kind of a fun journey. Awesome, man. Good to hear. You've been you've been all around every pretty much every OEM at this point. Oh yeah. Yeah. I've been in the game for a while. I know you mentioned that at some of the previous dealerships you were at, you did have a shuttle that was in place. Could you go a little bit into the main differences that you see just with like efficiency, customer experience, and just from your guys' side, what it is like to be using Uber at the dealership instead of the shuttle? Yeah, I mean, I couldn't even imagine a world where we would ever go back to using a shuttle. The process is just it's unreliable, right, because you have customers and clients that are from all over town. I mean, there's really no good way to operate like a multi shuttle service department. So we would have customers waiting for an extended amount of time. You know, if a customer left something in the car, we'd have to go back. Taking multiple customers at once if they were in the relative same area, which always led to some sort of complaint or customer dissatisfaction. So yeah, definitely having the Uber platform has been a godsend just for the simple fact that it's on demand, no one really waits that long, and if there is a situation where the wait is a little bit long, we can just reorder the ride and it seems to be fixed right away. Yeah, I couldn't imagine going back to the shuttle at this point. Yeah, definitely. I've talked to a few dealerships that are just in your guys' general area around LA and using a I mean, probably the worst traffic in the country. That's got to be an absolute pain to have that. It could easily get caught on the road for multiple hours just doing like a 12 mile trip over there. Exactly. Yeah. And it's, again, it's kind of like a relic of the old system, right? And I mean, there's really no good reason to even to do that at this point, you know? With most dealerships, any dealership I've been to, we have sufficient enough business and traffic to facilitate meeting on demand solution. So yeah, I couldn't imagine going back to that. Yeah, definitely. And then do you feel like customers react a lot more positively to just being able to get an Uber immediately instead of having the classic shuttle system in place? Absolutely. I think after COVID where a lot of dealerships shut down their shuttle program, they weren't really forward thinking in terms of putting into place an on demand option to satisfy the demand. So even today when we tell customers, oh, we can get an Uber for you, they're like, oh, you have to do it myself? And it's like a it's like a good surprise, you know? Yeah. I think customers really appreciate it. And used to the process, they're used to the product, you know, so it's not like we're trying to like offer them anything that they're not familiar with, you know, and customers are so used to the product. I even had a customer recently where, we ordered the Uber for her and she was, Keith told me the license plate, name of the driver and all that information is available live. Already had the process down on her end. So when we did it on our end, super familiar. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, that is a good point. It's not anything that's out of the ordinary by any stretch for pretty much every customer. Mean, there's very few people you've talked to that haven't taken an Uber at all in their personal life. And the process is really no different from them. They just get everything texted to them that they would see on the normal Uber app. And then there's one plus side is it's not being built to them in that scenario too. Yeah, and not only that, but like, I think even just in general, when you talk about rideshare or you talk about like a ride hailing service, it's Uber. So the brand awareness is there. And I think people relate that with like a higher end experience already. So when we offer them an Uber, they're just like, oh, that's that's nice to you. You know? Oh, great. That that's good to hear that that that the brand recognition is is there for them. Oh, yeah. So Mike, how often are you guys offering customers an Uber from your side? And then what does it generally look like from there once that offer is made? Typically do about anywhere from 150 to 200 rides a month. That's, I mean, us, that's pretty substantial considering the fact that we have a pretty robust loaner car program as well. But the truth is a lot of times just getting a customer either into one of our in house loaners or a rental through one of our partners takes longer than just hailing an Uber ride, right? So typically we'll give customers the option of selecting what kind of alternate transportation works for them. A lot of times the customer will just, they'll just request it, they'll say, Hey, can you just Uber me home? Once we get that request, I mean, a matter of minutes, right? It's anywhere from on the low end, three minutes I've seen people pull up and take care of our customers, to worst case scenario, seven to ten minutes. So in any case, however you slice it, it's still a whole lot faster than even our in house loan to car process. That process alone can take anywhere up to twenty five-thirty minutes between validating the insurance, getting the deposits, getting the contract signed. All those things take a significant amount of time. I think when we have customers that are in a tight enough radius and they're in a hurry, the Uber program kind of fulfills that spot that we need to be in. Yeah, definitely. I mean, the biggest thing is people want to be in and out of the service center as fast as possible. And a lot of times, kind of like you said, mean, just filling out the paperwork for a loaner or a rental, that is probably more time than if they were just to get an Uber and go home. It probably would be done within the same amount of time. And yeah, that's a big thing that I know everyone's trying to get as efficient at is just getting a customer in and out of the service center as quick as possible. Yeah, exactly. And the fact that Uber is such a large base of drivers, we're never waiting. It's pretty instant. You know, when we're using one of your competitors prior, sometimes we'd have to wait, you know, fifteen, twenty minutes just to find the appropriate ride for our customer. And a lot of times we would have to cancel and try to reorder or, you know, but then we'd see on the back end, we still get charged for the ride or we have issues with billing and that's not a problem I'm seeing with Uber. The last question I just want to ask you is what would you say to a dealer that is considering moving over to Uber for business and using us for their courtesy rides at the shop? What I would say is, hopefully you get Alex, right? You made the process so simple. I mean, all my guys, once you came in and you got everyone on board, I haven't had a single question as to, you know, how to operate the platform, how to, you know, retrieve any kind of reporting. Everyone from the moment you left has been on the same page and I think you did a stellar job. I mean, everyone here left saying, Man, I wish you would have signed up with Uber sooner. I think you left that kind of an impact. Just you personally, right? So the product speaks for itself and then when you have people like you that come in and kind of are a good face to put to the product, it just makes it like a win win. I would definitely recommend anyone at least take a look into the product. The customer support is phenomenal. The relationship I think that we have built here is great and it's just a 10 out of 10 for me. Awesome. Well, thank you. I've got a couple of things to say in response to that. One, we didn't pay Mike to say that. And two, have Mike's territory, but if you are thinking about signing up, we have a rep in every region of the country and we're always on-site and we're always in your area getting new people set up or visiting existing customers. So yeah, if you ever do want to get set up, chances are we will have someone that's going to be in your area probably within the next couple of weeks at the most we have our designated area. So if you will have your go to person and we can help you get set up in real time and get your advisors trained just like Mike was talking about. So yeah, we do make that process really easy to get set up and going on here. And it's a very, very small lift on your end. Yeah, I love it. That's not one thing. Love the fact for the service guys out there that may be watching this, I love the fact that you're able to finally separate the sales portion of the platform from the service side. I mean, nothing bothers me more than having to give my sales guys price all day and that goes to my policy, right? When it should be separate, so now with this platform, we're able to separate those two things. And I know for a lot of service managers out there, they're probably jumping for joy like, finally, these guys stop leaching off of us. Definitely. That's a nice thing, it's a good thing. Good. Good. Yeah. That is a huge thing with us is if we just get those separated and make the reporting easier, I think you could just tell somebody that and then they honestly don't need to hear the rest of the pitch. They're just happy with hearing that. Oh yeah, every guy I know in the service department is just like, how are you tired of having to give price to the salesman? Because we never see that back. So it's really nice. I like it. I love it a lot. Awesome, man. Great to hear. Well, cool. Mike, thank you again for joining us, man. It was fun. And I'll stop by next time I'm in town to see you. Awesome. So if you do want to get set up, the process is really, really straightforward. Usually people just get set up with a credit card and then they have that on file and they do their billing with that. But we can also do ACH or we can do checks as well. But when you get it set up, once you get the card on file, you can really start using it within five minutes and you're good to go on there. And like I said earlier, we have a rep in every region. So you would have a dedicated account manager here on the Uber team. And then we can either do a Zoom training or we can a lot of times just come in person and spend about an hour or so and take a couple minutes with each advisor when they're not busy with the customer. And that probably takes about two or three minutes with each person because we get them logged in, give them a really quick walkthrough of it, and then they're good to go from there. And then if any questions do arise or if there's any small issues that come up, like if someone leaves something in a car, for example, you can just get in touch with us directly anytime. And we'll be able to help you with that, help with the question and expedite any lost items or things like that. Great. So thank you all for joining us. I hope you enjoyed the webinar. If you do want to get in touch with us and get set up or look into it, you can hit that request demo option at the top of your screen and we'll get in touch with you as soon as possible.