[CFrentzen]

To anyone using Dealer.com's LeadMachine:

Are your sales guys having issues with adding leads? More frequently than I thought was possible, the attempt to add a new lead into the system (or edit existing information) leads to a timeout and the information is not saved. Has anyone run into this? Is there a fix? What's the issue?

Dealer.com has been less than stellar at answering this type of question. Are there minimum system requirements to effectively use the backend tool? One sales guy's laptop here is old, but the others are fairly new and still run into the problem.

I can't tell you how frustrating it is to have to convince people that aren't used to recording their contacts in a system like this that this is how dealerships need to be run (with their sales guys recording their contacts) when the system keeps 'losing' the information being put in to it.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Alex Snyder]

I brought this thread to their attention.

[CFrentzen]

Thanks Alex.

Also looking to see if anyone else has ever had this issue.

[CFrentzen]

To be clear: this is not a slam on Dealer.com and I've been in touch with them. Both myself and Dealer.com are having trouble re-creating this specific issue but it's all I've heard off and on for about a week and a half now. Could be user error on my sales guys' part, still looking into it. I am only trying to see if anyone has ever had this issue.

[Alex Snyder]

Originally Posted by CFrentzen

To be clear: this is not a slam on Dealer.com and I've been in touch with them. Both myself and Dealer.com are having trouble re-creating this specific issue but it's all I've heard off and on for about a week and a half now. Could be user error on my sales guys' part, still looking into it. I am only trying to see if anyone has ever had this issue.

Not too many people on DealerRefresh, who are Dealer.com customers, still have a separate ILM and CRM or only use an ILM as a CRM tool. Leadmachine is an ILM only. I am probably the heaviest user of LeadMachine on here (that I know of) and that isn't saying much. We only use it for grabbing credit applications and reporting - no actual everyday usage in that scenario. But to answer your question we have not experienced any issues with it.

However, you mentioned the person having issues at your store is on an old laptop and you wanted to know hardware specs....

I would say a computer that can run FireFox all day long is a must. It would need at least 2GB's of RAM on Windows XP and more on a newer Windows operating system. Processing power isn't as big a deal as the RAM is. First thing I'd check is to see if the harddrive is close to full, and run a bandwidth test on that machine >> Speakeasy Speed Test

If the RAM is less than 2GB, or the harddrive only has 10GB's of freespace left, or you're getting a download/upload test result of less than 1MB (1,000kbps on that site), then I'd get the hardware straight. If you found any of those 4 criteria to be off, then you probably have a minimum hardware problem. By the way, I'm spit-balling what I think is a minimum hardware spec for ONLY running a heavy web application like Dealer.com's Control Center (including LeadMachine). Personally, my hardware preferences are much higher than what I've put here.

Now, you may have the biggest issue of all time.....user error. I wish there was a fix for that ....and user error with sales agents is the worst! They're trained in not conceding and will seldom admit to making a mistake. Sometimes the best answer is to retrain one on one and see if that individual continues to complain. If they move onto whatever their next gripe is, after the training, then you've fixed their issue. Don't expect a thank you.

[CFrentzen]

Much appreciated Alex - I agree with your off the cuff analysis of minimum hardware specs and I'll check into the speeds/hardware tomorrow.

User error has my vote at this point. Attempting to solve that tomorrow.

As always, thanks for the advice/point of view. Very useful

[lfinney]

Make sure you are using Firefox with Control Center in any format. I have used the ILM and all my staff that needed to get in have Firefox loaded. I think this is a mis=step by Dealer.com but like Alex, we no longer use it for a CRM system. It is great little tool for a small Internet department or user.