Oil Can Henry’s is an Oregon-based provider of vehicle maintenance with more than 100 shops located throughout the Pacific Northwest, California and Colorado. The chain is widely known for its 20-point Full-service oil change.
The Tech Decision
Oil Can Henry’s is unique in that customers remain in their vehicles for the duration of the service. While having the vehicle serviced, cameras are mounted under the car and above the hood, giving customers a close-up real-time view of the maintenance being performed on their vehicles. The screen also shows branding and short video segments about additional services. Prior to this project, this content was updated and provided by DVD for playback.
c3ms Media approached Oil Can Henry’s to offer the company a better solution for both content delivery and to help demonstrate, through the use of the right visual platform, a defined content strategy and better customer interaction through this new tool set. The end result would create up-sell opportunities targeted by the cars’ service history of supplemental products and services. To achieve these objectives, c3ms Media designed and integrated a new touch screen-driven hardware and playback platform anchored by its technology partner BrightSign.
The legacy platform for content delivery and playback consisted of 27-inch LED monitors, analog CCTV cameras and a DVD player. The client outsourced DVD duplication and fulfillment. c3ms Media spent time with the client at the store-level observing the customer interaction with both the staff and the screens.
The Solution
With content and engagement always being the lead, c3ms Media presented the option of considering a larger screen with touch interactivity. This would allow the staff to drive the touch-based content selection, allowing them to better interface with the customer, and to target specific engagement, education and transactional experience.
With the client’s venues being somewhat open to a number of environmental conditions, the hardware would need to be robust enough to hold up to heavy use and to be cloud-based and hosted for ongoing content changes. c3ms Media would manage all facets of ongoing network, content and hardware support. This would help minimize the client’s resources to move this project forward.
Oil Can Henry’s was receptive to c3ms Media’s recommendation to create a touch-based digital signage solution capable of delivering housed video content, live video feeds, and real-time POS information.
c3ms Media outfitted each service bay with an ELO 42-inch interactive touchscreen, connected to a BrightSign XD1132 digital signage media player. The XD1132’s two video decoders output a combination of video and point-of-sale motion content for seasonal service options. To bypass the need for additional video decoders, IP cameras positioned under the car and above the hood output MJPEG feeds at 15 frames per second – a high enough frame rate that the feeds appear very close to true full-motion live video showcasing the true flexibility of the BrightSign media player.
The service technician interacts with the touchscreen to have a visual discussion with the customer showing videos housed on the media players along with an HDMI video pass-through from the point-of-sale system, displaying a list of required and suggested services. The network of media players is hosted on the BrightSign Network, making it easy for c3ms Media to make updates and provide real-time site support. All of the graphic content and presentation properties not provided by the client were created in-house by c3ms Media.
Site installation and support is provided by integration partnerships that c3ms Media has in place throughout the project market locations.
The Impact
The pilot and initial deployment has taken place over the last 24-months. This digital integration was implemented in a subset of Oil Can Henry’s locations to assess its impact on bottom-line financial growth for the company.
The test pilot locations report average total ticket service increases of nearly $22 per vehicle, compared to existing locations that haven’t yet incorporated this solution – this represents an overall increase of more than 20%. This successful pilot helps provide the justification and business economics for further site implementation.
There are a number of additional uses that the BrightSign media player can support that are also being implemented, including Bluetooth audio for portable speaker locations in the car along with tablet support of assets being stored and accessed on the media player. Additionally, the media player will be used for content supporting corporate training and employee communication during off hours of location operations.
This platform has a significant impact on how the end-user sees digital content being used to better the customer experience and drive bottom-line revenue.
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