Tully Williams has spent years building a disciplined fixed ops department for The Niello Co., which owns mostly luxury dealerships in California.
Now he’s found another step of the process to improve: Monitoring MPI videos.
Driving the news: Williams has required multi-point inspection videos on 100% of repair orders for years. But he began to worry about the quality of those videos because monitoring each and every one isn’t reasonable.
“I'm not gonna look at 10,000 videos,” Williams told Daily Dealer Live host Sam D'Arc. “My service managers are not gonna look at 10,000 videos…I [didn't] sleep at night [thinking], ‘What are we sending our customers every day?’”
He found the solution in TruVideo, which already powers 26 million videos a month as the OEM-integrated tool inside Xtime and CDK. TruVideo recently added AI analysis, and Williams jumped on it.
Between the lines: Williams worked with TruVideo to customize scoring criteria to fit Niello's standards, rather than a generic template. It also scores whether videos follow the same process every time.
The system flags items such as whether technicians raised the car, showed brakes and batteries, checked filters, greeted customers by name, and mentioned the store.
Four weeks in, Williams says the biggest issue is consistency.
"The process of doing it the same way every time? That's gonna be our biggest fix," Williams said. "And to me, that's an easy fix."
He said the group’s first full deep-dive scores were expected this week.
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Looking ahead: Right now, the tool analyzes videos in batches. Williams wants real-time feedback, a score before the video ever reaches the customer.
"What I would like is that we do a video, it gets analyzed before we send it out," he said. TruVideo aims to offer that service soon, he said.
Why it matters: Williams said during a previous Daily Dealer Live visit that customer retention is the guiding metric for his stores. And, Niello now boasts 72% customer retention across the group, up from his target of 70%. He attributes that to trust that starts with the inspection.
"The quality of videos is gonna help you drive retention and have that honesty and integrity," Williams said.
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