The automotive industry faces mounting pressure to modernise its service delivery model. Traditional dealership-centric operations create significant friction in a world of increasing expectations around customer convenience. This directly impacts both customer experience and business performance.
Our client's automotive services platform transforms the vehicle ownership experience by connecting dealerships with customers through digital solutions. Their platform enables in-car and virtual coaching appointments where experts demonstrate advanced vehicle features — particularly important for high-tech Electric Vehicles — and troubleshoot any issues to ensure complete customer satisfaction. These experiences can be delivered in-person or remotely based on customer preference.
When a car service is required, our client's system enables dealerships to schedule their own staff or agents to valet vehicles from any location convenient for the customer. This flexibility reduces appointment cancellation rates and significantly improves customer satisfaction with the service experience. By removing traditional friction points in vehicle maintenance, the solution we delivered helps dealerships build stronger long-term relationships with their customers while creating new revenue streams through these enhanced service offerings.
The drive for business transformation
Our client faced critical challenges in achieving their vision of becoming the leading automotive services platform. Beyond just technical requirements, they needed a comprehensive solution that would:
Provide a scalable foundation that could rapidly onboard new automotive brands
Support comprehensive workflow automation for complex automotive services
Deliver real-time mobile capabilities for service delivery
Enable full platform ownership and reduce dependency on legacy systems
Build internal technical capabilities to drive business agility
Our client selected Elixir, Ash Framework, Phoenix LiveView, GraphQL and React Native as their core technology stack, leveraging their reliability and cost-effectiveness for high-traffic applications. This choice enabled them to build a scalable automotive platform while minimising operational complexity. To execute this vision, they partnered with Alembic for our expertise in building high-performance tech platforms in their chosen tech stack.
The outcome: a transformed tech platform that is fuelling growth
The partnership between Alembic and our client delivered transformative outcomes that fundamentally changed how they operate. Leveraging Ash Framework's capabilities, we built a solution that combined technical excellence with business impact.
A scalable platform for growth
Ash Framework's domain-oriented architecture provided the foundation for our client’s evolving business needs. The development team leveraged Ash's flexibility to create significant customisations for each automotive brand. This flexible codebase enabled tailored implementations including brand-specific REST APIs, web UIs, and email notifications.
The developers modelled configurability directly in the domain, with each campaign designed with custom templates and external integrations. Ash's domain modelling capabilities allowed developers to elegantly express the configurability required for each vehicle brand and campaign. This enabled the solution to meet unique requirements through purposeful code changes while facilitating a cleaner separation of concerns and more maintainable code.
The architecture delivered predictable estimation of effort required for each brand onboarding, based on the amount of customisation required. This predictability, coupled with the flexibility to prioritise which brand would be onboarded next, gave our client strategic control over their business growth. The system maintained consistent performance regardless of how many brands integrated with the platform.
The platform productised a standard set of features for different service appointment types and was deployed to multiple car brands and their dealerships globally. This modular approach enabled our client to offer specific features to brands based on which appointment types were needed for a given campaign, creating a clear value proposition for each potential automotive partner.
Comprehensive workflow automation
The platform integrates with industry standard service schedulers to assign available agents to valet customers' vehicles to and from service centres. This integration provides agents with structured workflows to document vehicle condition before and after service, recording any customer belongings left in the vehicle.
Customers receive timely notifications in the days leading up to appointments, ensuring vehicles are ready and safe for transport. The platform's real-time location tracking allows customers to monitor their vehicle's journey and confirm return times. Agents receive in-app notifications when assigned to appointments or when departure times approach, keeping the service process flowing smoothly.
Automated assignment of agents to appointments based on location and availability freed dispatchers to focus on higher-value tasks like resolving customer cancellations and providing updates when traffic conditions caused delays. By letting the system handle routine tasks, dispatchers could maintain consistent service quality across all locations, regardless of service volume or complexity.
Real-time and offline mobile capabilities
Agents in the field used a React Native mobile application designed for the demands of automotive service delivery. The mobile app was capable of completing required workflows offline — capturing photos, collecting customer signatures, and marking tasks as complete — then syncing results to the server when network connectivity became available.
Real-time location tracking was implemented for customers to monitor their vehicle's journey through a dedicated web page, providing transparency throughout the service process. Appointment management functionality was available to dispatchers through the back-office system, allowing them to effectively coordinate service activities.
The platform prioritised improved customer satisfaction through enhanced communication. Agents could securely contact customers while maintaining privacy using masked calling. This approach ensured customers remained informed while protecting their personal information, contributing to higher overall satisfaction with the service experience.
Removing dependencies on legacy systems
One of the primary goals of this project was to modernise our client’s core legacy systems, which gave our client the ability to quickly and confidently enhance the system under changing market demands. The new system also enabled our client to bring on new car brands to harness the power of the technology and customer service model.
By replacing legacy systems with a custom solution built on the Ash Framework, we transferred complete ownership of the platform to their team. The new architecture provides our client with full visibility into all system components. This modernisation resulted in not only cutting costly licensing fees, it removed the innovation bottleneck that hindered them from responding to customer needs and market opportunities.
Building internal technical capabilities
Through our partnership, we supported our client building the internal expertise required to take ownership of the platform. We did this through collaborative development centred on Ash Framework's domain-driven approach. The framework's clear separation of business logic from implementation details makes knowledge transfer intuitive, even for engineers new to Elixir. Ash's consistent patterns and extensive documentation accelerated the team's learning curve, while its declarative nature makes business rules explicitly visible rather than buried in code. Through pair programming and mentoring, we helped their team master not just the technology but the architectural thinking that makes Ash powerful. This enabled them to independently extend the platform as their business evolves.
The power of partnership
This partnership demonstrates how the right technology strategy can transform business operations and accelerate growth. The choice of Elixir and the Ash Framework as core technologies has proven instrumental in this transformation, delivering the performance, reliability, and maintainability needed for a mission-critical automotive platform. We love this client because they have a fearless approach to doing what's right for their customers and for their systems.
About Alembic
Alembic specialises in delivering scalable solutions that enable business transformation. We partner with forward-thinking companies to build robust, efficient systems that drive operational excellence and revenue growth. Our expertise in modernising legacy mission-critical systems, combined with our mastery of powerful technologies like Elixir and the Ash framework, makes us an ideal partner for organisations looking to accelerate their digital transformation journey.
Contact us to learn how we can help transform your business operations and accelerate your growth trajectory.
