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DealerSocket, get your act together (RANT)

NTIV10

Peel'm off the Ceiling
Dec 23, 2009
36
0
First Name
Nick
I am stuck in the spot of being just one internet department director in a huge organization where we're all required to use dealersocket.

I can NOT put up with no Mac support, and no support for non-IE browsers on Windows ANY LONGER! COME ON people this is 2010. Is your entire development team asleep at the wheel?

Internet Explorer is the WORST browser available. Even the newest version available is not even close to as standards-compliant as any of the popular alternatives.

DealerSocket needs to address the following, and needs to do it fast. It horrifies me that my company spends so much money with them when there are so many glaring faults with their system. Prove me wrong, DealerSocket. At least let us know you're working on this stuff.


  • Firefox is the #1 browser in use right now with 46% of the market. How can you possibly justify not supporting the MOST COMMON PLATFORM??? Firefox has a 10% market share than all three current versions of Internet Explorer combined. Browser Statistics
  • Chrome usage is up dramatically to over 11%. Google is #$^%$#%ing huge. Again, how can this company/browser be ignored?
  • IE is dramatically losing market share. You can see a significant drop month-by-month: Internet Explorer Browser
  • 76% of users have higher than a 1024x768 resolution: Browser Display Statistics Why are we trapped in this tiny viewport? The attached file shows how ridiculous this website looks on my home computer. Granted, not many people are using a 27" iMac with its 2560x1440 resolution, but the point is that the user interface does not scale at all. I use a 1900x1200 screen on my work PC and most of the computers we have are 1280x1024. Note that while I can log in to DS on my Mac, most of the site's links/buttons/etc don't work properly or at all.
The daily headache that I encounter from using DS is starting to really get to me. If I could switch just my store to some other system, ANY other system, I'd do it in a heartbeat. The problem is that the people who make the decisions on where to spend the money have little if any reason to actually use this garbage so they can't see how inferior it is to the other options out there. And I simply don't have the time to explain to my entire organization why it's the wrong choice.

Is anyone listening at dealersocket??
 

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While I agree that ds should work 100% in other browsers, what problems are you having using safari?

Dealersocket works fine for me in safari ( not on my iPhone or iPad, just mbp or iMac. ) off the top of my head, the only two things I can't do in ds on safari is mark a customer lost and click on the open Internet leads icon on the left of the screen (but the open internet lead button on managers dashboard works fine)

Have you reached out to your ds rep about the timetable for Firefox compatability?
 
While I agree that ds should work 100% in other browsers, what problems are you having using safari?

Dealersocket works fine for me in safari ( not on my iPhone or iPad, just mbp or iMac. ) off the top of my head, the only two things I can't do in ds on safari is mark a customer lost and click on the open Internet leads icon on the left of the screen (but the open internet lead button on managers dashboard works fine)

Have you reached out to your ds rep about the timetable for Firefox compatability?

Changing "event status" doesn't work, most images don't work, filters in employee dashboard are messed up, text formatting is a disaster to the point that some pages are unreadable, etc. It's just crap. I have resigned myself to using VMWare Fusion and Windows 7 for the time being, but I do so very reluctantly. It's ridiculous that I should have to go to that much effort to make it work properly.

I've asked several times about firefox, macs, chrome, etc. Never heard anything back.
 
I passed this thread on to a buddy of mine at DealerSocket. This is definitely something they should be hearing. I haven't really looked at the product since we were last in the market for a CRM, but they struck me as one of the more progressive CRM companies out there. I'm surprised to hear they don't do the basic of writing for at least FireFox. That is a big deal, and maybe we should compile a list of the products that only work in Internet Explorer on a PC.

If you know of any products that only work in a specific browser or operating system post those here: http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f44/auto-technologies-force-ie-windows-865.html
 
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I'd also like to note that the lack of support for iPhone/iPad/mobile devices and Macs would not be nearly as big an issue if DS allowed for responding to emails directly from your own email address (a la iMagicLab). Sure, you have their address but nothing gets logged and then you start a new thread of messages that aren't going to populate in the CRM.

Why can't I respond to the notification from my email and have DS servers figure out where it needs to go, create a new event in the system, and put the correct reply-to on it? If I had this option, I really could use my iPhone for most everything. I'd really only have to use the site for merging/marking lost/updating info rather than for simple email correspondence.
 
I'd also like to note that the lack of support for iPhone/iPad/mobile devices and Macs would not be nearly as big an issue if DS allowed for responding to emails directly from your own email address (a la iMagicLab). Sure, you have their address but nothing gets logged and then you start a new thread of messages that aren't going to populate in the CRM.

Why can't I respond to the notification from my email and have DS servers figure out where it needs to go, create a new event in the system, and put the correct reply-to on it? If I had this option, I really could use my iPhone for most everything. I'd really only have to use the site for merging/marking lost/updating info rather than for simple email correspondence.

So, my phone pings this morning as I'm driving in, and when I get here I see the dealerrefresh Twitter notice about this thread and came on over to check out what the current rant about DS is.

I'm going to have to disagree with the quoted post above...
In the what's new section of DS, you will see:
2/3/2010 Mobile Device Lead Response

This was a disaster to me as I come from GM's world of 24 hour response requirements and could not fathom not using a blackberry to respond. I now get an email that has this:
DealerSocket Outbound call link: Click here to log an outbound call. (I've disabled the link so that no one logs a call on this actual lead.)
All I have to do is respond to this same email from a mobile device or my email that it's delivered to and it logs a copy in the lead. It also applies a new subject line so that I don't have a funky "re: Lead Source lead notification from DS" as the subject line.

What I'm looking forward to is of course the Firefox compatibility, the auto correction for screen resolution (I use a netbook at home- I need a magnifying glass to read, yet they told me this info during the install process) and I agree that at times it seems that the program writers are asleep at the wheel. I run into merging nightmares- I wish it was harder for the sales reps to duplicate existing clients and when I merge them, I have had issues with the scanned in drivers license being wiped out at other locations using DS. I REALLY miss my simple reports that AVV/WebControl offered me for doing my monthly ROI- I don't understand why DS makes you have to "build" reports that do not offer details. I have to build the report, get the numbers, determine if I want to "key off the event date" or "key off the last activity date" and I don't get consistent numbers and can't tell if they are right. I know I'm an over analytical analyst, however the reports that DS gives you top my realm of analytical b.s...lol! I would love for the service phone calls to route to the service manager, same with the parts calls, and I would love for Call Measurement to not have such a delay in posting to DS, however these are growing pains
These are really minute cons to a system that is worlds better than LMCC, Contact Manager and a few others.

I do wish the programmers would get on the ball and get more aggressive with being inline with the current social realm- they use chat internally at DS and that could so be part of their software with the right tweak of the code- man to send a chat message to the GM while I'm on the phone with a customer trying to close a deal would be AWESOME! To have the features released by another forward thinking CRM system that offers matching the customer lead info with the social networks that they use would be a simple writing of code by the programmers. To have a newsletter that is something similar to what Outsell offers would be a simple writing of the programmers as well...there's a lot of areas for DS to grow, and I'm happy to be able to grow with them. If we can give the pointers, it's really cool when they release the updates and we know we suggested them....
 
Hmm... I tried to reply to the message when that feature was first announced (to a test lead I sent in) but it never went through. Tried it again today and it worked (same lead). Guess I'll start using that. Still (obviously) not ideal.

So, my phone pings this morning as I'm driving in, and when I get here I see the dealerrefresh Twitter notice about this thread and came on over to check out what the current rant about DS is.

I'm going to have to disagree with the quoted post above...
In the what's new section of DS, you will see:
2/3/2010 Mobile Device Lead Response

This was a disaster to me as I come from GM's world of 24 hour response requirements and could not fathom not using a blackberry to respond. I now get an email that has this:
DealerSocket Outbound call link: Click here to log an outbound call. (I've disabled the link so that no one logs a call on this actual lead.)
All I have to do is respond to this same email from a mobile device or my email that it's delivered to and it logs a copy in the lead. It also applies a new subject line so that I don't have a funky "re: Lead Source lead notification from DS" as the subject line.

What I'm looking forward to is of course the Firefox compatibility, the auto correction for screen resolution (I use a netbook at home- I need a magnifying glass to read, yet they told me this info during the install process) and I agree that at times it seems that the program writers are asleep at the wheel. I run into merging nightmares- I wish it was harder for the sales reps to duplicate existing clients and when I merge them, I have had issues with the scanned in drivers license being wiped out at other locations using DS. I REALLY miss my simple reports that AVV/WebControl offered me for doing my monthly ROI- I don't understand why DS makes you have to "build" reports that do not offer details. I have to build the report, get the numbers, determine if I want to "key off the event date" or "key off the last activity date" and I don't get consistent numbers and can't tell if they are right. I know I'm an over analytical analyst, however the reports that DS gives you top my realm of analytical b.s...lol! I would love for the service phone calls to route to the service manager, same with the parts calls, and I would love for Call Measurement to not have such a delay in posting to DS, however these are growing pains
These are really minute cons to a system that is worlds better than LMCC, Contact Manager and a few others.

I do wish the programmers would get on the ball and get more aggressive with being inline with the current social realm- they use chat internally at DS and that could so be part of their software with the right tweak of the code- man to send a chat message to the GM while I'm on the phone with a customer trying to close a deal would be AWESOME! To have the features released by another forward thinking CRM system that offers matching the customer lead info with the social networks that they use would be a simple writing of code by the programmers. To have a newsletter that is something similar to what Outsell offers would be a simple writing of the programmers as well...there's a lot of areas for DS to grow, and I'm happy to be able to grow with them. If we can give the pointers, it's really cool when they release the updates and we know we suggested them....