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Steve Finell

Refresh Team
Apr 7, 2009
18
0
First Name
Steve
I am becoming increasingly frustrated with XTime as our dedicated service scheduling tool. Monday, we experienced a recurring outage of over 3 hours - on our busiest day of the week! I say recurring as the outage resulted from a "load balancing" server issue which used to affect us several times a week for from a few minutes to an hour or so at a time. A 3+ hour outage on our busiest day, resulting from a fairly easy to correct configuration problem is abso-freaking-lutely unacceptable!

There is so much about XTime that doesn't seem to work right and, coupled with the outage issue, I just can't see how anyone using this product as fully as I would like to could be satisfied with what they're paying for. From my perspective, Xtime is conceptually the best product of its kind I've seen but, functionally, it fails miserably.

While XTime is now an "approved" integrator with ADP (don't know about Reynolds), it started as "hostile" and, I suspect, the product wasn't reconfigured to accept the "friendly" integration paths. As such, it still is dysfunctional in many respects.

Campaigns - a joke. They say the exclusions/inclusions criteria works but, they can't prove it does (ask them to generate the sought after results - they'll tell you they encountered an issue they'll have to submit to their part-time overnight programmer or "engineering" to fix). That's the last you'll hear about the issue. When you call back, you'll have to start from scratch. :goodbye:

My experience with XTime has been frustrating to say the least. I am now looking at UDC's Revolution, Time Highway, @utoscheduler (and it's associated CRM products) and, hopefully, Encompass.

Does anyone have good information on any of the above XTime alternatives? I have some experience with Revolution but, it's been 18 months and not sure if they've improved the interface or functionality in that time.

Does anyone have good contact information or internet search results for Encompass - I'm not able to pull up anything about them?

I'd really like to see others' opinions of their service scheduling software, regardless of their perspective.
 
Steve, this really sucks. We use TimeHighway with MileOne so I have no experience with XTime but hopefully someone here in the forums will have some experience or maybe someone from XTime will chime in and help out.

I would have to say, over all our experience with TimeHighway has been positive but I have to be honest, I have not had my hands deep into this program. They all seem to have their faults.

As for Encompass, if you are referring to the Compass CRM..I believe this is a proprietary CRM solution that AutoNation uses. However, I do know that they just sold the "code" to DealerTrack. Not sure exactly what that means...but I suspect that DealerTrack will be offering their own "CRM" based on the Ncompass CRM product soon if not already pitching it.



In the past I had heard good things about UDC but I also know that the people that I was impressed with over there a few years back are no longer with them.
 
I've also had good experience with TimeHighway and the company really emphasizes support. A couple of our clients used UDC that also leveraged their other Revolution offerings (used their software for their call centers/BDCs, etc). You may want to try TimeHighway...
 
We are also using the @utoscheduler and haven't had any major issues, but mitch is right, autorev isn't much for design or user interface. I'm viewing a demo on xtime next week. glad to hear of the feedback so far. I'm also looking into ADP's online scheduler which also allows customers to view repair progress (a good thing?) and pre-pay their bill online. Would LOVE to hear anyone's comments on their tool.

Brad
Senior Director, Online Marketing
LAcarGUY.com (Sullivan automotive group)