Big Brother to service your car

Fiat Chrysler Australia wants to introduce what it claims to be an industry-leading ‘big brother’ ability to communicate remotely with its cars as part of its drive to keep customers happy.

New FCA boss Patrick Dougherty revealed the strategy as part of an improved customer experience – the automotive industry buzzword of the moment – seen as necessary to retain the rapidly growing pool of buyers the group is accumulating.

Led by Jeep, with Fiat also growing strongly off a much smaller base, FCA group – which also comprises Chrysler, Dodge, Alfa Romeo and Fiat Professional – sales have grown 33 per cent year-on-year in 2014 to the end of November.

The ability to retain those buyers for servicing, after-sales and multiple vehicle purchases is at the core of the drive for all manufacturers to improve ‘customer experience’.

Volkswagen in Australia, which has had a huge surge in sales in recent years, is widely seen as the poster child for poor ‘customer experience’. It has finished last in the JD Power’s Australia Customer Service Index Study for the last three years.

Dougherty says he is conscious FCA’s quick growth could cause similar issues and he is keen to avoid them. Part of that concern also stems from the more expensive model mix FCA will be selling as Alfa Romeo’s range expands and heads upmarket in the next few years.  

“We are looking at how you make a complete package around the purchase that takes care of the customer on the service side as well,” he said.

Dougherty told motoring.com.au that Fiat Chrysler now has more than one million vehicles on the road globally with embedded cellular technology that gives it the ability to track them remotely. Included in that are the Jeep Grand Cherokee and latest Cherokee and the Chrysler 300

While Dougherty says FCA wouldn’t share that information, he said the cellular (wireless) connection meant servicing would become a more pleasant experience for customers.

“We have the ability to do so much when you show up at a service lane,” he explained. “We will have the ability on an iPad device for a service adviser to say ‘Hey Mr Smith just showed up with his Jeep Grand Cherokee’ and your name and address will already be done, what the vehicle is saying which service it is ready for, if it has any fault codes in it saying it needs to be flashed and updated for software or whatever.

“When people see you with an iPad and there is something on there, it adds a lot of credibility when you are trying to say ‘well here’s the factory maintenance schedule that is laid out for this vehicle’.

“It is just a lot more credible than sometimes the person saying this is the factory maintenance schedule. Instead it’s ‘let me show you’. So you can do those things, especially where the customer data populates the device.

“So that’s the vision of where we would like to go.”

While this technology is yet to flow into any FCA dealerships globally and Dougherty wouldn’t talk about local timing, a more basic plug-in application dubbed Wi-Advisor is in use in 1000 dealerships in North America.

“We are more advanced than any other manufacturer in that regard,” Dougherty declared “Our system reads diagnostics and actually tells you about the vehicle.”

Dougherty said introducing a uniform experience across the Australian dealer network was much easier to achieve via technology than asking different dealer groups to align to a corporate identity.

“That’s very hard to do because each entrepreneur is different, they have already invested in the facility. So if we wanted a service lane to look a certain way it would be challenging to change someone’s structure.

“So the easiest way to do it is through technology – make the technological experience similar.”