Where does Dealer.com's CRM fall in terms of quality?

[mattwatson81]

With Dealer.com's ILM I can keep a contact list and use it to send bulk emails to customers, keep track of where they are in the buy cycle, maintain contact, etc. Isn't that what a CRM tool does? Or is it that a CRM tool does it more efficiently and has a desking tool? Still not quite certain what a desking tool does - makes the financing part of the car buying process simpler/more efficient?

Desking is sort of hard to describe. I guess I would say desking tools are used to structure deals, and create customer proposals. Instead of perhaps hand writing deals on a 4 square. Most desking systems also allow you to run credit bureaus, send the deal to DealerTrack, RouteOne and even push the deal to your DMS system. Desking systems can be used to obtain higher front end grosses and speed up the time it takes to work a deal.

I attached a pdf to this post of a sample customer proposal showing multiple loan and lease options on the same car. This is just one example of the type of proposals/worksheets desking systems can create.

 

[mattwatson81]

With Dealer.com's ILM I can keep a contact list and use it to send bulk emails to customers, keep track of where they are in the buy cycle, maintain contact, etc. Isn't that what a CRM tool does? Or is it that a CRM tool does it more efficiently and has a desking tool? Still not quite certain what a desking tool does - makes the financing part of the car buying process simpler/more efficient?

How was the demo?

 

[CFrentzen]

How was the demo?

Very good. Shawn actually took it a step further and sang the presentation to me - it was very melodic.

Seriously though, great stuff. I need some time to do some more digging and discuss a few things with everyone here and then I will most likely sit down for a more in depth demo.

 

[Tomikaze]

I don't post on here very often but I jumped on to see what people were saying about the new CRM. I have it. It was installed in October. Previously used Autobase. The pencil tool was promised to work on 11/1. Still doesn't work. The data we pulled over from Autobase was all but lost in translation. Frustration does not begin to describe how we feel. After the demo I was blown away by what I saw and what I was told the system will be able to do. Problem is the program isn't anywhere near being finished. Just my opinion. Dealer.com will tell you something completly different. We knew signing up for it that it was still in development. I jsut don't think we fully knew how much development was still left.

 

[Alex Snyder]

I don't post on here very often but I jumped on to see what people were saying about the new CRM. I have it. It was installed in October. Previously used Autobase. The pencil tool was promised to work on 11/1. Still doesn't work. The data we pulled over from Autobase was all but lost in translation. Frustration does not begin to describe how we feel. After the demo I was blown away by what I saw and what I was told the system will be able to do. Problem is the program isn't anywhere near being finished. Just my opinion. Dealer.com will tell you something completly different. We knew signing up for it that it was still in development. I jsut don't think we fully knew how much development was still left.

Thomas - thank you for reaching out.

It is my understanding that two Dealer.com representatives have been trying to reach out to you all day and that they were surprised to find this post as there were a few hours between their phone calls and the timing here. They, and I, simply ask that you call them back.

We will take care of all your concerns and will continue to do so. I know you have my email address and phone number. You are more than welcome to reach out to me if you ever feel we are not getting the job done for you.

 

[Dave Erickson]

I don't post on here very often but I jumped on to see what people were saying about the new CRM. I have it. It was installed in October. Previously used Autobase. The pencil tool was promised to work on 11/1. Still doesn't work. The data we pulled over from Autobase was all but lost in translation. Frustration does not begin to describe how we feel. After the demo I was blown away by what I saw and what I was told the system will be able to do. Problem is the program isn't anywhere near being finished. Just my opinion. Dealer.com will tell you something completly different. We knew signing up for it that it was still in development. I jsut don't think we fully knew how much development was still left.

I just got a demo on Thursday and they were very straight forward about their development status. I'd need it to be further along than it is now, but the guys I was working with at Dealer.com never came across as trying to promise it could do something it wasn't ready for yet.

 

[paulray]

Just for the sake of thread clarification. Thomas is referring to the not yet fully released dealer.com CRM that is still early in the development cycle. Not the dealer.com ILM tool that the first post ended up referring to.

I too felt in my demo that it was pretty clear that they still have a ways to go before it is fully operational. When we signed Auto base we were promised full push pull ADP integration in the first quarter it came 2 years later and still has lots of bugs after 4 years, so missing a release date by a couple months doesn't seem so bad , but perhaps my view is skewed by all the over promising dealer vendor reps I have worked with over the last 6 years...


I am curious as to the Autobase conversion complications you ran into though and what parts of the pencil tool are not yet working because we are seriously looking at this option.

 

[GrantG]

I just got a demo on Thursday and they were very straight forward about their development status. I'd need it to be further along than it is now, but the guys I was working with at Dealer.com never came across as trying to promise it could do something it wasn't ready for yet.

I have also demo'd CRM. I absolutely love what I've seen. @JQuinn, thanks for your help today, much appreciated!

On a scale of "DAY 1 to FINAL RELEASE" where does CRM fall today? When will pencil be live?

 

[Walt Kustra]

I don't post on here very often but I jumped on to see what people were saying about the new CRM. I have it. It was installed in October. Previously used Autobase. The pencil tool was promised to work on 11/1. Still doesn't work. The data we pulled over from Autobase was all but lost in translation. Frustration does not begin to describe how we feel. After the demo I was blown away by what I saw and what I was told the system will be able to do. Problem is the program isn't anywhere near being finished. Just my opinion. Dealer.com will tell you something completly different. We knew signing up for it that it was still in development. I jsut don't think we fully knew how much development was still left.

Thomas,

Hopefully coming from a fellow dealer some of the insights I can provide from our transition from iMagiclab to dealer.com CRM can be helpful. We too struggled at first with a lot of the same concerns and growing pains you describe. Compared to iMagiclab there certainly are a lot of things that our previous CRM did that we would like to see eventually with DDC (especially in terms of search and reporting). However, more and more what I find as I learn the system is that the same information is available but just displayed in a different way and when things change its always hard to adapt. My conclusion after a few months using the new CRM is that we definitely made the right move. While iMagiclab was great we felt it was not a very personalized tool. Dealer.com has been working diligently with us to make sure we see some of the ideas we have for the CRM come to light and the customer service has been top notch. All in all from a desk managers standpoint the information that is displayed is much more pertinent to selling cars than ever before. Where there was a general dashboard for iMagiclab we have a newer more detailed dashboard with DDC displaying customer interactions more clearly than ever before. It has made it much easier for us to get involved with leads early in the sales process being able to see incoming emails and outbound phone calls right in front of our eyes. Yes, its different and yes there is still a lot in the works, but in the long run we always want to be on the cutting edge of our field and DDC is heading in the right direction. Eventually I am sure we will all be more than satisfied. Please feel free to contact me at any of my contacts below if you would like to discuss anything at all. We have had a lot of time to adjust to the pencil tool and the new layout so i would be happy to help any way I can. You made the right decision by switching.

 

[jscole86]

I don't post on here very often but I jumped on to see what people were saying about the new CRM. I have it. It was installed in October. Previously used Autobase. The pencil tool was promised to work on 11/1. Still doesn't work. The data we pulled over from Autobase was all but lost in translation. Frustration does not begin to describe how we feel. After the demo I was blown away by what I saw and what I was told the system will be able to do. Problem is the program isn't anywhere near being finished. Just my opinion. Dealer.com will tell you something completly different. We knew signing up for it that it was still in development. I jsut don't think we fully knew how much development was still left.

Another dealer perspective here... Regardless of which CRM we've used in the past, our CRM is the heart of our variable operations, and has been for 8+ years. We are on the new DDC CRM. We've been on it for less than a month and I can say I know we made the right decision, and more importantly, all of our managers and our sales team know we made the right decision. It's clear that there's been lots of thought put into the design of the system to be simple for people to use.

I'm excited for our store to grow with DDC CRM as it gets more powerful and more refined. They have some great talent up there in Burlington (especially from here at DR) and I'm betting on some awesome ideas and integrations happening in the future. Support has been stellar for the few minor things we've needed it for, and they are open to hearing ideas for the system. There needs to be some more reporting aspects from the system and some more credit/ DMS push integrations, but I believe the rumor is that those are in the pipeline. The pencil tool is incredible - 100% accurate, extremely fast, and very simple- The 3 requirements for our desk mgrs! All in all, I can say this is the 1st CRM that everyone in our variable ops has actually loved using.

Thomas feel free to contact me also if you want, I'd be happy to help!

The only disappointing thing about DDC CRM is that JQuinn didn't wear his purple tie to the install...