Tag: Dealers

4 Reasons Your Dealership Should Be Digital Contracting

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We all know that digital contracting is the wave of the future and that its big-picture benefits include speeding up funding, increasing accuracy and compliance, and virtually eliminating re-contracting. But how about the everyday improvements you’ll enjoy when you use less paper in your contract process?

1. No one’s ever gotten a paper cut from an iPad

Let’s face it: paper is a hassle for you and your customers. You have to make sure you have every document with the copies collated in the right order. Do it correctly and all your hard work will be greeted by heavy sighs when your customers see a giant stack of paperwork in front of them when all they want to do is drive off in their new vehicle.

If there’s a mistake, all that effort goes to waste and you have to print even more copies and start over from scratch.
Digital contracting has the advantage of being mobile, so you can use a tablet to get signatures anywhere in the dealership. And it puts all of your documents in one place with no need for hard copies.

2. ‘PC Load Letter’? What does that even mean?

Then there are the printers. They’re fine when they’re working properly, but it never takes long before you have to clear a paper jam or try to troubleshoot the connection from your computer. Sometimes you can handle it yourself, but other times it takes an expensive repair call and frustrating downtime before you can start printing again. Even routine replacement of an ink or toner cartridge can turn into a messy ordeal – and those supplies are costly.

With digital contracting, your battle with the printer comes to an end. You gather electronic signatures and all contract documents are securely sent to the lender online – no paper needed.

3. Wide open spaces

How much square footage at your dealership is taken up by filing cabinets? It may be a while before digital contracting completely replaces paper, but imagine how great it will be to reclaim that space for other uses!

Paper files are bulky and retrieving old files can be a challenge. Digital contract data can be stored in a single “virtual” deal jacket in a way that’s highly secure but easily accessible when needed. Plus, electronic transactions are encrypted and more secure than sending paper in the mail, so customer data is protected throughout the process.

4. Stay right where you are!

Being steered to a desk to tackle a stack of paper contracts puts a dent in any customer’s excitement about their purchase. With new remote signing technology, you can bring them a tablet to review and sign their contract from the comfort of the showroom or even the driver’s seat of their soon-to-be new vehicle. A car buyer can even use their own device to read over the contracts and sign from home.

With the ability to upload stips and deal documents, add signature and date fields to create eSignable forms, and set up a secure connection to a mobile device, you can create a single signing session for your customers no matter where they are.

The future is now
Digital contracting offers a better connection with lenders, less paperwork, a more flexible customer experience, and faster funding. The best time to get started is now!

Learn more about how your dealership can start benefiting from digital contracting today.

The Future: Open, Integrated Systems

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The Internet of Things is here. Consumers are starting to expect that their refrigerator can talk to the stove and their GPS knows where to take them based on calendar appointments. These innovations require software services and devices to communicate with different systems. With open systems comes efficiencies, convenience, and ultimately a better customer experience for all of us. That same logic applies to the technology stack in a dealership. The modern dealership needs all their software solutions—more than 8 per dealership on average—to communicate with each other without the need for custom code, integration fees, or downtime.

Open Platforms Comes to Automotive Retail

What does that mean for car dealerships and their technology stack? It means that a more effective and expansive way of selling and servicing cars starts with sharing secure data, accessible between key partners—all via an open platform.

Indeed, a perfect example is the experience at Big Two Automotive Group. Fed up with their DMS provider’s lack of service and capabilities, they switched to Dealertrack DMS and soon discovered that the power and immediacy of an open and modular platform was required to keep their operation thriving.

Overall, the Group moved toward an open and accessible platform to run their operation due to several key benefits, including:

  • Quick access to relevant data: The ability to apply data in real time made decisions more fluid and efficient, meeting customer expectations and helping to create a more productive and nimble environment. For example, data such as customer information, vehicles, and VINs, employees, parts inventory and transactions (ROs, deals, parts tickets, etc.) can help to do one very important thing: use data to better meet the needs of customers and create process efficiencies.
  • Common system versions for all employees: Having all employees—from sales to service and accounting—on the same version helps to ensure accuracy, reduce confusion and the cost of miss-timed upgrades.
  • Availability for all important vendors and services: The concept of dealer control and open access to ALL vendors creates efficiencies across the entire group. This is perhaps the most challenging aspect to open and accessible platforms: it must be secure enough to protect the dealership, yet open to all third-party sources of information and service. It’s also an area in which dealers are often taken advantage of, by vendors seeking to charge them for the use of their own data. It’s vital that dealers retain control of their own data!
  • Convenience of integration points that matter: Integrated data across vendors and store systems helps to eliminate manual data entry – such as name and address – as well as provide timely and proactive reminders about service and more. Of course, remember too that the point of integrated systems is to work with humans to provide better-than service through technology. In fact, a recent study by Price Waterhouse Cooper found that the majority of consumer wanted integrated and automated technology to improve the human customer service experience – not replace it.

Big Two Automotive Group discovered that closed systems and restrictive policies were about as effective and convenient as roll-up windows on cars. Indeed, most retail operations are now realizing the same thing: closed systems symbolize the status quo and a static and frozen picture of automotive retail—not the evolving and growing reality of the business.

Learn more about open and integrated DMS systems in this blog post, Demand More from your DMS: Open Integration.

 

Success Story: Straub Automotive

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Superior customer experience is at the core of West Virginia dealer group Straub Automotive. In fact, the four-store group boasts high CSI scores, multiple Honda President’s Awards and two Nissan Awards of Excellence. So as customer expectations began to change, Straub Automotive knew their processes had to change with them.

One area of customer experience the dealership knew could use improvements was the F&I menu presentation. Straub had been using an aftermarket product presentation video that wasn’t integrated with the menu presentation, leaving customers with a slow, unengaging experience.

To improve efficiency for the F&I team and improve customer experience, Straub Automotive turned to Dealertrack eMenu for iPad®.

Almost immediately after implementing the new mobile technology in the dealership, F&I profitability rose: an average of $150 in additional F&I profit per deal. Watch the video below to hear more about Straub’s success using this mobile menu selling technology.

Watch Straub Automotive’s success story.

Want to learn more about how to align your F&I processes with customer expectations? Join Straub Automotive’s Kevin Cook and Dealertrack’s Jason Barrie for a FREE webinar on the topic. Register here!

CBA Live: The Time for eContracting is Now

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Andy Mayers, Dealertrack Lender Solutions strategist, recently participated in a panel discussion at retail banking industry event CBA Live. The conversation focused on dealer motivations, eContracting, operational efficiencies and internal dealer issues.

From the discussion, we heard common observations about the future of dealerships and how they need to adapt to the consumer’s desire to enjoy a better experience purchasing a car. However, the common takeaway was to meet today’s customer expectations, the role and purpose of F&I needs to change. One way dealers can adapt is with digital contracting, but there are several factors a dealer should keep in mind when considering making the move.

For insights on these factors, as well as key characteristics of today’s car shoppers, read Andy’s full recap of the panel discussion in Digital Dealer.

Adverse Action Notices: F&I Compliance Tip

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An “adverse action” is, basically, a refusal to grant credit, the termination of an account, or the changing of an account’s terms in a manner unfavorable to the consumer — such as unwinding a spot delivery contract.

Why it Matters

As creditors, dealers are required to give adverse action notices to consumers in three situations:

  1. When a dealer takes a credit application but does not send it to any financing source, typically because the consumer is credit-challenged.
  2. When a dealer unwinds or re-contracts a spot delivery deal.
  3. When the dealer is unable to get the customer financed on terms acceptable to the dealer, or because the customer declines the dealer’s final offer of credit after concluding negotiations.

Auto dealers are viewed as creditors because they are involved in negotiating the credit terms, and are typically named as the creditor on the retail installment sale contract (RISC) – which is later sold to a financial institution. A lender’s adverse action notice does not contain the necessary disclosures that must be given by the dealer. That includes, but is not limited to, naming the credit bureaus used by the dealer and the federal agency that administers compliance.

How it Works

An adverse action notice must do the following:

  1. Inform the consumer of the adverse action either with two to four reasons, or by notifying the consumer who to call at the dealership within 60 days to get the reasons.
  2. Identify any consumer reporting agency that provided a credit report or credit score.
  3. Provide the consumer’s credit score, information about the credit score, and up to four to five “key factors” that adversely affect the credit score (four key factors unless one is the number of recent credit inquiries).

The notice must contain other mandatory language as well. To view a sample notice and get more detail about adverse action notices and more compliance advice, download the free 2024 Dealertrack Compliance Guide.

Learn more about Dealertrack Compliance and register for a demo to find out if you’re meeting Adverse Action notice requirements today.