Should your dealership have a phone charging station?

The wait is long, and the phone is the whole wait

A dealership is one of the few retail buildings where a customer is asked to sit still for hours. During a service appointment there is nothing to do but work, scroll, take calls and wait for a text saying the car is ready. All of that runs on one battery, and none of it is under your control.

When that battery dies, the person in your lounge stops being occupied and starts being stuck. They cannot take the work call, cannot answer their kid’s school, and in the worst case cannot receive the message you send when the car is done. The wait has not got any longer, but it feels twice as long — and that feeling is what ends up in the survey.

What a station actually changes

A rental station holds portable power banks. A customer scans the code on the machine or uses the app, takes one power bank, and carries on — in the lounge, out on the lot, or in the coffee shop across the road while the car is up on a lift. They return it to any station in the network, which may or may not be yours.

The difference from a wall-mounted charging dock is that nothing is tethered to a corner of the room and no phone is left unattended. It also travels with the customer, which is the part that matters here: a person who can walk away from the chair is a person who is not counting the minutes in it.

Where it goes in a dealership

A dealership has more square footage than almost any venue in this category and most of it is the wrong place for a machine. Put it where people are already sitting still.

1. 1Service lounge — the default, and it is not closeThis is the room where people wait longest with the least to do. If you only ever put one machine in the building, it goes here, in sight of the chairs rather than around a corner by the vending machines.
2. 2Service write-up or drop-off desk — good secondEveryone passes it, and it is the moment a customer realises how long the morning is about to be. Works well when the lounge is down a corridor and not visible from check-in.
3. 3Showroom near the sales desks — situationalUseful where deals take hours and a customer is sitting across from a salesperson through financing. Less useful in a showroom people only walk through.
4. 4Parts counter or the lot — usually notPeople are moving, standing, or outside. A machine there is a machine nobody stops at.

The three ways to get one

Vendors describe these differently, but almost every arrangement in this category is one of three things. Know which one you are being offered before the meeting ends:

1. 1HostedThe operator owns the machine, installs it and services it. You provide the space and an outlet, and share in what it earns. No capital from you, and the least control over the unit.
2. 2PurchaseYou buy the station outright and keep the rental income. Highest return per machine, and the money is yours at risk if the location turns out to be wrong for it.
3. 3LeaseA fixed monthly cost with no revenue-share arithmetic. Predictable, easy to budget, and you are paying whether the machine is busy or not.

There is no universally correct answer. A store with a full service lane most days does better buying; a single-rooftop dealer testing the idea does better hosting.

What it costs you in practice

Beyond the model above, the real costs to a dealership are a bit of lounge floor space, a power outlet, and the attention it takes to point a customer at it occasionally. There is no plumbing, no build-out, no wiring job and no connection to your network — these machines run on cellular rather than venue wifi, which also means your DMS, your guest wifi and your IT vendor are not involved.

What it does not cost you is advisor time. If a vendor’s answer to “what does my service desk have to do” is anything other than “nothing”, that is a different product than the one described here.

Seven questions to ask any vendor

Including us. A vendor who is uncomfortable with these is answering the question anyway.

1. 1Who owns the hardware, and who fixes it?Get the answer for both, in writing. They are not always the same party.
2. 2What happens if a power bank is not returned?Specifically: is my store ever liable? The answer should be a clear no.
3. 3How long am I committed, and how do I end it?Ask about removal, not just term length. A machine you cannot get rid of is a fixture you did not agree to.
4. 4Can I see the actual unit first?In the finish I would receive. Photos of a different model do not count.
5. 5What is on the screen?Every one of these machines has a screen. Find out whether you get to put your service specials on it, whether third-party advertising can appear in your building — including a competing brand — and how many slots you actually get.
6. 6Does it touch my wifi or my DMS?It should touch neither. If it does, your IT vendor and whoever runs your dealer management system need to know before it arrives.
7. 7What does the install day look like?Who turns up, how long, and what has to be signed before it happens.

When the answer is no

A charging station is not right for every store, and it is worth saying so plainly. If your service department runs express-only appointments and nobody sits down, if you shuttle every customer home rather than keeping them in a lounge, or if there is genuinely nowhere a machine can stand where people will see it, you will not get much out of one — and a machine nobody uses is a piece of furniture with a logo on it.

The places where this works are the ones where people stay a while: franchise service departments with a real waiting room, stores where financing runs long, and used-car operations where a customer spends the afternoon deciding.

How Ampz does it

Ampz supplies the stations and runs the network behind them. Customers scan the code on the machine or use the app, take one power bank, and return it to any station in the network. We install and service the machines; your advisors do not manage batteries, troubleshoot the unit, or add anything to the write-up routine.

There is no service area and no waitlist — if you want a station, that is where one goes. Start at hosting a station, see the dealership overview, or own a station if you are thinking about running machines yourself.

Want one in your service lounge?

Tell us about the space and we will tell you straight whether a station makes sense in it — including when it does not.