Car Clinic Recruitment with Olivia

Car clinics are the backbone of automotive market research. Whether you are evaluating new models, testing design concepts, or gauging brand perception, the success of a car clinic depends on getting the right participants into the right sessions on time. Olivia handles every stage of the process, from initial setup and recruitment through on-site check-in to post-clinic reporting.

Setting Up Your Car Clinic

Olivia structures every project around three core building blocks that map naturally to car clinic workflows:

  • Modes for session types: Define each type of session your clinic requires, such as focus groups, in-depth interviews (IDIs), quantitative evaluations, or test drives. Each mode carries its own duration, which automatically flows into PDF invitations so participants know exactly how long their session will take.
  • Products for vehicles: Add each vehicle as a product. Whether you are comparing a Tesla Model 3, a BMW i4, and a VW ID.3, or testing internal prototypes, each vehicle gets its own recruiting targets and can be assigned to specific time slots.
  • Quotas per vehicle and session type: Set a target quota (how many participants you need), a total quota (target plus an over-recruitment buffer to account for no-shows), and an open quota that counts down automatically as bookings are made. This three-tier system gives you full control over recruitment volume for every vehicle-mode combination. If you need 100 evaluations for a vehicle but expect 10% no-shows, set the target to 100 and the total to 110. The open quota starts at 110 and decreases with each booking.

Screening the Right Participants

Car clinics demand participants who match precise criteria: vehicle ownership, driving habits, brand loyalty, income bracket, purchase timeline, and more. Olivia gives you two question types to capture this:

  • Open text questions for free-form answers such as current vehicle model, annual mileage, or reasons for considering a new purchase.
  • Single choice questions with predefined answers for structured criteria like brand preference, fuel type, vehicle segment, or ownership status.

Mark any question as required so recruiters cannot finalize a respondent's profile without answering it. This prevents incomplete participant records from reaching the clinic. Questions can be reordered via drag-and-drop to match your screening flow and exported or imported between projects, which saves significant setup time if you run recurring clinics.

Short versions of questions serve two purposes. They become concise column headers in the Excel export instead of the full question text, and they become dynamic placeholders in PDF invitations. For example, a question with short version Incentive lets you use {{Incentive}} in the invitation template to print each participant's individual compensation amount directly onto their letter.

Scheduling Across Multiple Days

Car clinics often run over several days with hundreds of time slots across different session types. Olivia offers two ways to build your schedule:

  • Form-based creation for slots with special requirements. A focus group limited to owners of a specific vehicle, for example: select the mode, set the date and time, name the slot "FG 1 - BMW i4 Owners", choose how many identical slots to create, and restrict to the BMW i4 product. All slots are created in one click.
  • Excel import for high-volume slot creation. Download a project-specific template, fill in dates, times, and modes, and upload it. This is ideal for quantitative sessions where hundreds of back-to-back appointments need to be created quickly. If a mode name in the Excel file does not exist yet, Olivia creates it for you.

Combine both methods freely. Use the form for focus groups with product restrictions and Excel for the bulk of your quantitative schedule.

Slots can also be created in a blocked state. Blocked slots cannot be booked until an administrator unblocks them. This is useful when you want to hold capacity in reserve and release additional appointment times only if recruitment is ahead of schedule or a vehicle needs more evaluations.

Recruiting with Multiple Recruiters

Booking follows a fast three-step flow: select the vehicle, pick a time slot, and enter the participant's name. After completing the booking, the recruiter lands on the respondent detail page to fill in contact information, demographic data, and screening answers.

When multiple recruiters are working simultaneously, Olivia uses database-level locking to prevent double bookings. A selected slot is temporarily held while the recruiter completes the entry. If the hold expires, the slot is automatically released back to the available pool. If two recruiters reach for the same slot at the same moment, only one succeeds. The other is redirected to pick a different slot. No manual coordination, no shared spreadsheets, no conflicts.

Tracking Participant Status

After booking, each participant's confirmation state is tracked through a status system visible on the dashboard:

  • Default: Just booked, no confirmation yet.
  • Confirmed (Self) or Confirmed (Request): The participant has confirmed attendance, either proactively or after a reminder call.
  • Request Change: The participant wants a different time slot or day.
  • Cancelled: The participant has dropped out.

Statuses are color-coded on the dashboard: green for confirmed, yellow for change requests, red for cancelled. If a respondent needs to be replaced, an admin can delete the respondent from the slot, which resets it to open status and makes it available for a new booking.

Communicating Changes to the Team

Project messages let administrators post a rich-text notice that appears at the top of the booking page. When screening criteria change, a vehicle is added or removed from the study, or a quota is closed early, every recruiter sees the update before their next booking. Messages are versioned, so you have a record of what was communicated and when.

PDF Invitations with QR Codes

Once a participant is booked, generate a professional PDF invitation from a fully customizable template. The WYSIWYG editor handles formatting, and your company or client logo sits in the header. Dynamic placeholders fill in automatically per respondent:

  • {{respondent}}, {{salutation}}, {{address}} for personalized addressing (with separate salutation options for male, female, and other genders)
  • {{product}} for the vehicle name
  • {{appointment}} and {{duration}} for scheduling details
  • {{recruiter}} for who recruited them
  • {{QRCode}} for a scannable QR code used at on-site check-in
  • Any question with a short version, such as {{Incentive}}, to include individual values

Paper size (A4 or Letter) and language (English or German) are configurable. Templates can be exported and imported across projects so you do not have to rebuild them for every clinic.

On-site Check-in and Clinic Management

On the day of the clinic, Olivia's Study Live dashboard replaces paper lists with a real-time operational view:

  • Check-in table: Shows all upcoming appointments within a configurable time window (15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, or 2 hours). Rows are color-coded for urgency: red for participants who are past their appointment time, yellow for those arriving within 15 minutes, white for those further out. Each row shows the exact time difference (e.g., "in 12 min" or "5 min late") so you can prioritize follow-up.
  • Check-out table: Shows all currently checked-in participants with elapsed time since arrival. For timed evaluations, this tells you at a glance who should be finishing soon.
  • QR code scanning: Enable the camera on any laptop or mobile device and scan the QR code on a participant's invitation to instantly check them in or out. No typing, no searching, no reception bottleneck.
  • No-show marking: Mark absent participants directly from the dashboard. The slot status updates immediately and the clinic statistics recalculate in real time.
  • Respondent labels: Optionally prompt for a label or internal ID at check-in (e.g., "P001" or "Station 3") for on-site tracking, matching participants to evaluation stations, or bridging to external systems.
  • Auto-refresh: The dashboard updates every 30 seconds so the view stays current without manual reloading.

Real-time Statistics and Clinic Status

Olivia provides a comprehensive analytics suite so you always know where your clinic stands:

  • Recruiting status: A detailed table showing target, gross invitations, current bookings, and open slots per vehicle and session type. You can instantly see which vehicle is lagging behind quota and which is oversubscribed.
  • Clinic status: A live operational view showing show, no-show, and screened-out counts per vehicle with a chance percentage that tells you how likely you are to hit your target based on remaining open appointments. If the chance percentage is dropping for a vehicle, you know to activate backup participants or extend recruiting.
  • Recruitment timeline: Bookings over time grouped by vehicle, so you can spot slowdowns, identify which days had the most activity, and adjust outreach accordingly.
  • Mode mix over time: How bookings are distributed across session types. Useful for confirming that your mix of focus groups, IDIs, and quantitative evaluations is on track.
  • Recruiting efficiency: Average and median time-to-book and lead time to session. Rising time-to-book values may signal recruiter fatigue or a tightening participant pool.
  • Recruiter throughput and leaderboard: Bookings and show rates per recruiter. Identify top performers and address low show rates before they affect your sample.
  • Target forecast: Projects when your recruiting targets will be reached based on 7-day and 14-day booking averages. Essential for deciding whether to extend recruiting or reallocate effort between vehicles.

Excel Export for Reporting

Export all booking data to a styled Excel file at any time. The export includes participant name, contact details, gender, date of birth, address, vehicle evaluated, session type, appointment date and time, slot status, respondent status, check-in and check-out timestamps with calculated duration, all screening question answers, recruiter name, label, and notes.

Admins see all data across the project, including admin-only notes. Recruiters see only their own bookings where all required questions have been answered.

This gives you a complete dataset for post-clinic analysis, client reporting, incentive reconciliation, or import into your preferred analysis tool.

Team Collaboration

Add as many team members as your project requires. Car clinics frequently involve large teams of field recruiters, project managers, and on-site staff, and Olivia places no limits on team size:

  • Owners have full project control including the ability to delete the project.
  • Administrators manage project setup, slots, quotas, questions, invitations, statistics, and team members. They see all bookings and can perform bulk operations on up to 50 matching slots at once for schedule changes or status updates.
  • Recruiters focus on booking participants and managing their own respondent profiles. They cannot access project settings, statistics, or other recruiters' data.

Invite members by email. Those with existing Olivia accounts are added immediately. New users are guided through account creation and land in your project ready to recruit.

Olivia covers the full lifecycle of a car clinic, from project setup and quota planning through multi-recruiter booking, on-site check-in with QR codes, and post-clinic reporting. Instead of coordinating across spreadsheets, email chains, and paper sign-in sheets, your team works in a single system with real-time data visible to everyone who needs it. The result is tighter quotas, smoother clinic days, and faster time to insight for the automotive decisions that matter.