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Want to find a better way to connect with your customers?

Texting is the #1 channel for customer service preferred by customers in the United States. A technology solution that enables texting creates opportunities for better customer communication across your business.

This infographic will cover:

• The state of business to consumer SMS and MMS texting
• The advantages and opportunities that texting customers through a CRM creates
• Interesting data about average customer response times and the effectiveness of texting

Fill out the form to download your copy of the infographic and start improving your business’ customer communications.

If there is one thing that customers, salespeople and dealership management all have in common, it is that everyone wants a fast, efficient and hassle-free car buying process. No one benefits from inconvenience or inefficiency. But for a dealership to run like a well-oiled, car-selling machine, salespeople need to have the right tools for the job. And in today’s digital retail world, that means a mobile app that gives dealership staff the functionality of a desktop computer with all the conveniences of life on the go.

With robust features and an intuitive user experience, VinSolutions Connect Mobile app brings the Connect CRM experience into the mobile application and puts sales activities directly into the hands of salespeople. Here are three ways your sales team can make the most of Connect Mobile.

1. Monitor Lead Buckets

With Connect Mobile, sales managers can use the app to set up multiple lead buckets, separating those interested in new versus used cars, for example. Having access to lead management through a convenient mobile app helps incentivize salespeople to monitor lead buckets more frequently. And it gives them the tools to react quickly to interested buyers, which is a good thing for both customers and sales.

2. Add New Co-Buyers

Connect Mobile makes it easy to add a co-buyer right from the app. A salesperson can simply scan a customer’s driver’s license with their mobile device to add a co-buyer. Or, if both customers already exist in Connect CRM, a salesperson can simply link their accounts. It is a painless process that can be done from anywhere on the lot. And it’s another reason why Connect Mobile enhances workflow and gives dealership staff more options than ever before.

3. Get More Texting Options

Texting is an important part of car sales. Connect Mobile gives your sales team the texting features they need to keep in touch with customers and provide them with a better buying experience. Instead of manually searching for customer conversation histories, salespeople receive push notifications on their phones so they can access and reply to conversations directly from the lock screen. They can also view and complete text message tasks from a task list, and upload videos and photos directly from their phones.

With more than half of car buyers preferring dealership experience over low price, VinSolutions Connect Mobile app is giving dealers the tools to streamline car buying for salespeople and customers alike. Download the app  today to see how Connect Mobile’s features and improved user experience can benefit your dealership.

Everyone knows that the New Year is a great time to make personal improvements. But, did you know that it’s also the best time to find new ways to your dealership more profitable? Here’s a quick preview of the trends you won’t want to miss.

2020 Trend: Text Messaging for Businesses

It’s no secret—texting has become one of the most common forms of interaction and the preferred method of communication for many people. According to a recent study by the International Smartphone Mobility Report, U.S. customers are communicating five times as often through text messages as compared to traditional voice calls. Businesses, however, have had a difficult time taking advantage of the channel due to legal restrictions and some customer resistance. Now, new dealership technologies are making it easier to give customers the communications they want while staying legally compliant.

At NADA 2020, we showcased several new mobile communication technologies for dealership service departments. Text Marketing is a new marketing channel designed to increase customer engagement and overall marketing conversion through TCPA-compliant promotional text messages. Video, which gives technicians and advisors the ability to record and send video to customers to drive increased transparency and dollars per repair order.

2020 Trend: Rideshare

The most surprising technology trend in recent years might just be the explosion in popularity of ridesharing, which grew out of the broader sharing economy. It lets consumers use a mobile app like Lyft or Uber to hail a ride from an ordinary vehicle owner. While almost unheard of a few short years ago, ridesharing services are now used by a full 30% of Americans, according to research company Gallup.

To help dealerships capitalize on this powerful trend, we are introducing rideshare functionality into our technology. You can demo Rideshare which integrates convenient and familiar customer options within our industry-leading service platform. You can offer on-demand rides to customers without the expense of shuttle services and loaner cars. And because Xtime manages the entire transaction, your dealership doesn’t have to worry about any extra contracts, systems, setups, or transactions.

2020 Trend: Voice-Activated Technology

Voice-activated technology is another important technology trend to watch in 2020. The practice of activating and navigating powerful technologies with your voice is widely used by consumers and the trend is expected to keep growing. Digital assistants, including Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Assistant, are being used by huge numbers of people every single day to get little things done more efficiently. According to Adobe, 36% of consumers own a smart speaker and 91% of brands are investing in voice technologies.

We recognized that these voice-controlled technologies could provide major benefits to service technicians, whose hands are constantly occupied, and developed a technology where technicians can go hands-free. A service tech can simply speak voice commands and other information into a headset microphone while continuing to work on a vehicle. This ground-breaking new solution will transform the multi-point inspection process, streamline documentation, improve the quality of service, and promote technician safety. 

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You asked, we listened: A recap of Xperience

By Darrel Ferguson

At Xtime, you are at the center of everything we do. Understanding what is and isn’t working for you fuels our innovation and helps us to make a positive impact for your customers, employees, operations, and bottom line through our products. With this clear priority in mind, we recently hosted Xperience, the first-ever Xtime user summit designed to help you improve your business and take full advantage of everything Xtime has to offer. Here is a quick recap and a few of the highlights of the two-day virtual conference, as well as some key takeaways that you can implement at your dealership.

Full Utilization of Xtime

We want you to get the most out of your Xtime products. The know-how to leverage Xtime tools to the best of your dealership’s ability improves the customer experience, your employees’ engagement, and boosts your bottom line. Full utilization of Xtime means setting processes, looking at reporting, holding staff accountable, and ensuring management sets the bar and leads by example. You’ll be able to improve productivity and retain loyal service customers because you are giving them the experience they expect. The goal of 100% utilization is a process, and your Xtime performance manager is available to help you with your utilization goals as they work with you and your team to improve your service department.

Dealer Panel

One of the best sessions from Xperience was our dealer panel, which brought together representatives of three different dealerships from throughout the country to discuss fixed ops. The panel shared ideas on everything from offering rideshare options to text messaging as a way to improve the customer experience and more efficiently follow up on declined services.

One common theme throughout the panel discussion was the importance of adapting to a constantly changing industry. New technologies and tools are designed to make life easier for customers and service department personnel, and implementing those new technologies almost always involves some learning curve. In the end, the panel concluded that fixed ops can’t fall behind other industry experiences that are being pioneered by companies like Amazon and Apple. Today’s customers demand efficiency and a superior service experience. As new technologies make their lives easier, dealerships have to be willing to adapt.

Thought Leaders

During the event, Xtime performance managers and industry leaders shared their thoughts on a variety of topics impacting fixed operations. Isabelle Helms, vice president of research and market intelligence with Cox Automotive, delivered a particularly fascinating presentation on “winning the war for talent” and the impact of employees in fixed ops. 

Her message to dealers: hiring and keeping top talent is more difficult than ever. In fact, nearly 50 percent of service advisors turnover within a year. Even worse, 1/3 of dealership staff employees are not engaged or excited about their jobs. In this climate, it is more important than ever for dealers to connect with their employees. She suggests 10 key drivers to improve employee engagement.

1. Nurture a workplace environment that supports employees’ ability to be successful. 
2. Ensure that employees feel valued for their work through recognition and rewards. 
3. Give employees an opportunity to be heard and take their ideas seriously. 
4. Promote an environment that makes employees proud to work for your company.
5. Help your employees see that your company is headed in the right direction.
6. Give employees everything they need to make a lifelong career at your company. 
7. Nurture a workplace environment where people like and trust their fellow workers. 
8. Offer competitive pay.
9. Give back to the community. 
10. Promote the enjoyment and opportunities of working in a rapidly changing environment.

Our Priorities

Perhaps more than anything, Xperience underscored our top priorities as a company: listening, innovating, and partnering with you to ensure your success.

1. Listening – Our first priority has always been to listen to our dealer partners. As our experienced performance mangers meet with you, they help you to implement and utilize innovative technology to reach your business goals. But they also listen to your feedback so that we can find ways to improve our offerings to better meet your needs. We always encourage you to send your feedback. It’s the reason we send out frequent Xtime surveys. It’s also the reason we recently implemented a Dealer Advisory Board to discuss the challenges in fixed operations that you face.

2. Innovating – We don’t just innovate for the sake of innovation. We evolve and create so you can meet your customers where they are and grow your fixed operations. When we design new solutions, we ask ourselves one question: Does this improve the customer experience? For us, improving the customer experience must focus on 1) customer retention, 2) customer expectations, and 3) dealership productivity. As long as our innovations check all three boxes to give customers a reason to return, facilitating a better customer experience, and leading to a path of increased efficiency and profit for dealerships, we’re doing right by you.

3. Partnering – We are in this together. Your success is our end goal. From our increased client support efforts to events like Xperience, we are dedicated to giving you timely responses to your questions and concerns. We are incredibly passionate about working with you to to grow service revenue, our performance mangers invest time with you individually and our company continues to invest in studies and research to help shed light on industry trends to move you into the future.

If you weren’t able to join us, or if you want a quick refresher on some of the information discussed, you can enjoy Xperience on demand.

Burlington, Vt., October 16, 2019 – Dealer.com, a Cox Automotive brand, recently teamed up with Cartender, a provider of digital marketing technology, to announce a new opportunity for dealers to leverage video advertising to more effectively communicate and engage their car shoppers. With the growing shift away from television toward smartphones and tablets, Dealer.com and Cartender deliver high quality video advertisements to an engaged audience at scale for dealers across these digital platforms.

Video advertising is a consistently undervalued channel, especially given 20% of the population is no longer reachable through television as people continue to obtain information elsewhere and find other forms of entertainment[1]. A major hurdle for dealerships is finding a scalable creative solution, to turn over new video assets every month. With this enhanced technology, Dealer.com seamlessly provides the details that dealerships want to highlight, such as their incentives, vehicle imagery and branding. Cartender will then take that information and transform it into compelling video templates.

“Dealer.com takes pride in finding undervalued modes of advertising channels for our dealers and removing barriers of entry to those channels,” said Mark Bernstein, associate vice president of advertising, Dealer.com. “We’re thrilled for this new venture, as video advertising gives dealers the ability to build brand and inventory awareness by connecting Facebook and YouTube audiences with their dealership in a dynamic and engaging format.”

Dealer.com works with dealers to identify their specific goals, build creative, and automate monthly video updating to alleviate the time burden for dealers managing video assets.

“Video advertising is an effective way to communicate and engage with customers, but getting the content to market in a timely manner has been a major challenge until now,” said Collin Davis, CEO and co-founder of Cartender. “Working with Dealer.com is the perfect combination of video production expertise, technology solutions, and the most comprehensive vehicle dataset in the industry. Dealers can now target automotive shoppers with a video solution that saves them time and resources by getting their brand to market ahead of the competition.”

Nearly half of auto shoppers who used online video for research said that it helped them discover a vehicle they weren’t previously aware of or considering[2]. However, many automotive dealers have been slow to invest in digital video. The typical dealership lacks digital video assets for content, or they have not previously invested in television or video advertising due to its high cost of entry.

Digital video should be considered an essential component for dealers’ digital advertising strategies because 97% of consumers either visit a dealership, search for inventory or conduct further vehicle research after watching in-market video content[3].

Dealer.com continues to provide multiple creative solution options to help deliver the highest quality and scalable creative content to dealers. For dealership seeking custom video content, Dealer.com also offers an Advanced and Premium level video solution that combines store footage, branding, running vehicle footage and monthly offers allowing dealers to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

To learn more about Dealer.com’s video advertising capabilities, visit https://www.dealer.com/products/advertising/video/.

About Dealer.com
Dealer.com is the premier digital marketing solution for the automotive industry. Providing an integrated platform of Websites, Advertising, Digital Retailing and Managed Services, Dealer.com allows OEMs, dealer groups, retailers and agencies to leverage advanced digital technology, data and insights to deliver the shortest, fastest and most personalized path to customer engagement. The company practices a deep commitment to its culture of progress, with a focus on community, health, and wellness. Based in Burlington, Vermont, Dealer.com is a Cox Automotive brand. For more information, visit www.dealer.com.

About Cox Automotive

Cox Automotive Inc. makes buying, selling, owning and using cars easier for everyone. The global company’s 34,000-plus team members and family of brands, including Autotrader®, Clutch Technologies, Dealer.com®, Dealertrack®, Kelley Blue Book®, Manheim®, NextGear Capital®, VinSolutions®, vAuto® and Xtime®, are passionate about helping millions of car shoppers, 40,000 auto dealer clients across five continents and many others throughout the automotive industry thrive for generations to come. Cox Automotive is a subsidiary of Cox Enterprises Inc., a privately-owned, Atlanta-based company with revenues exceeding $20 billion. www.coxautoinc.com

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[1]   Business Insider Intelligence, Future of TV Report 2017.

[2]   Ipsos/Google, U.S., “Digital’s Influence on In-Market Auto Consideration” study, Aug 2018.

[3]   Business Insider Intelligence, Future of TV Report 2017.

Are you ready to give your customers an all-access pass to your service lane? Watch the video to see how Service Tracker, available as an add-on to Inspect, can improve service lane efficiency and reduce the number of phone calls to your service advisors.

Ready to see how it works?

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How do your customers view your dealership? Do they consider you a trusted advisor, ready and willing to help with any automotive question, concern or need? Or, do your customers think of you as a retailer, facilitating a transaction and nothing more?

Today, consumers are shying away from businesses that take a self-centered approach to customer service. Instead, they seek out companies that are willing to create more consultative relationships with their customers.

In this whitepaper, which includes new research from the VinSolutions Technology and Transformation of Retail Study, you’ll learn how new artificial intelligence and automation technology can help you build those consultative relationships and boost your dealership’s bottom line.

See how artificial intelligence and automation technology can benefit your dealership.

Consumers are constantly bombarded by mass marketing, and many are frustrated by being inundated with messages that don’t apply to them. Personalized digital marketing and sales, however, provide an opportunity to set yourself apart with customers by treating them like the unique people they are.

Customers are tired of one-size-fits-all retail experiences, including car buying. According to the Cox Automotive Future of Digital Retail Study, 90 percent of consumers prefer a unique, personalized car buying journey. Additionally, customers’ expectations of the buying process have changed significantly. Nearly two-thirds of car buyers want to complete more of the purchase steps online than the last time they bought a car, according to the 2020 Cox Automotive COVID-19 Consumer & Dealer Impact Study.

If you’re ready to give your customers the kind of car buying experience they want (and increase profits for your dealership), here are three steps to personalize your automotive digital marketing and sales efforts.

Step 1: Collect Your Customer’s Data

When it comes to collecting customer data, automotive CRM systems really matter. With robust customer data stored in your dealership CRM, as well as other software platforms, you can start the process of segmenting your customers based on individual interests. From there, you can tailor a sales approach that is more likely to capture each individual customer’s attention. This approach to marketing helps prevent miscommunication between dealership and customer. And when your customers receive information (sales-related or not) that is relevant to them, it increases their trust in your dealership.

If you’re part of a dealer group, it is also important that you’re able to view customer data across stores. Wouldn’t it be good to know if the customer you’re speaking with just came from a sister dealership? This cross-rooftop data sharing enables you to identify possible brand defections and maximize profits with better visibility into a customer’s negotiations with other stores. 

Again, this all hinges on the type of data you have. Real segmentation that leads to real personalized messaging comes from moving beyond basic demographics. For example, paying attention to your customers’ online browsing history and recording it in your CRM, like the VinLens integration between Connect CRM and Dealer.com does, can help you segment audiences based on key behaviors.  

Step 2: Know the Buying Signals

Reading your customer data can sometimes feel like a foreign language. Not only do you have to collect the right type of data, you have to interpret that data to deliver the right marketing messages. And once again, technology comes to the rescue. CRM artificial intelligence tools like Connect Automotive Intelligence can quickly analyze huge volumes of customer data, identify trends and flag customers that may be ready to talk. Then, you can take a more proactive sales approach to deliver both timely and relevant marketing that will catch your customers’ attention.

You can learn a lot about your customers based on the equity they have in their current vehicles, for example. But unsurprisingly, some of the most insightful buying signals come from your customers’ browsing behavior, including their budget, the makes/models they’re interested in and the frequency/timing of their browsing.

Step 3: Hit the Mark with Your Marketing  

Automated technologies like website analytics and your CRM can give you insight into customer behavior — especially when the two technologies are integrated like they are with VinLens. But now that you’ve used those tools to gather and interpret data, it’s up to you to make a personalized marketing offer. Know your customers’ interests. And deliver messaging that’s warm, welcoming and lets them know you know where they’re coming from and what they want.

Naturally, you’ll use the data you’ve gathered about your customers to guide you through the process. Is a group of customers looking for similar prices, vehicle sizes and features? This information will help you customize pricing and vehicle options and make relevant product suggestions. And it helps you develop authority and rapport with your customers.

With the right technology tools, you can take a more personable and proactive approach with your marketing efforts. And when your customers see that you’re trying to give them information and offers they actually want, they’re more likely to value your suggestions and remain loyal to your dealership.