An invention from Sharebox has been allowing garages in Norway to service customers’ cars without any contact.
Until now, the auto repair market in Scandinavia has only offered drop off/pick up for their customers in opening hours, meaning clients have to take off half a day at work or use their lunch break to collect their cars. Some repair shops did offer other alternatives such as hiding keys in secret locations, but it has always been a bit risky as no other alternative before now has reportedley been approved by the insurance companies.
So far Sharebox has mostly been know as the popular key exchange service used in the sharing economy industry where private people rent apartments from each other on different platforms such as Airbnb and Booking.com, to name a few.
However, the company has now introduced the S18-Safe ServiceStation to allow contactless pick up/drop off of vehicles 24/7.
Arne Eivind Andersen, CEO at Sharebox, explained: “Being in the pandemic outbreak of COVID-19 we saw a unique business opportunity for our newly developed S18-Safe ServiceStation and sat in all sales in order for the insurance approval to go through. We already had a lot of interest prior to the COVID-19 situation, as the S18 cabinets offer great convenience for the consumers. In the beginning, auto repair shops were pre-ordering the S18 because they wanted to provide an extra service for their clients by offering 24/7 drop off and pick up of their cars.
“The COVID-19 situation has dramatically boosted the interest for our new S18-Safe cabinet, especially because it allows employees to fix the cars without ever having physical contact the clients. After the insurance approval came through, we immediately sold out of our first two batches and are now working closely together with our Danish supplier in order to increase the capacity to keep up with the demand.
“The new S18-Safe Service Station has more features than just exchanging keys. The real value in the cabinet is embedded in the software, where integrations with external systems that are being used in the car industry, such as payment and booking systems, all come together. We constantly focus on optimising the software and adding new integrations to keep our S18-Safe ServiceStation the best in the market.”
Sharebox has its own front and back-end technology, designed with features that allow for opening/closing lockers, gates, ports and aims to simplify all aspects within industries focusing on check in/out solutions with or without payments.
The solution digitalises the whole customer experience from dropping off the car keys, servicing the car, payment and all the way to collecting car keys again, after the car is ready.
The S18-Safe ServiceStation has been developed in collaboration between Sharebox, Mekonomen Group and Innovation Norway and has already been installed at several repair shops, such as Meca, VW, Audi, Toytota, Skoda and Nissan, that have started using the new system to handle drop off/pick up of cars.
Arne concluded: “Now we are looking forward to helping even more repair shops in the rest of Scandinavia in the following months. We are actually ready for delivery world-wide.”
