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VinSolutions issues

Matt,

At this point if you can get me in touch with a dealer advocate I can move forward with them. Being that I've launched over a month ago and Donna Stearns still hasn't had a chance to call me i'm going to ask for someone more on top of their accounts. Please also get me someone who know's your product and is on top of their game because I can't deal with any more " let me check into that" and then when I ask again 2 weeks later it's like we never spoke about the issue. Can you do this?
 
Matt,

Working with Jon Beachner and Bobby Holmes on this. When we signed up with the products full version (including service lane) several months ago we were told that it already had this functionality. Shame on me for not actually making sure I saw it in action before signing the contract.

When the trainers came in we were basically made aware that the service lane that we were being billed for monthly did absolutely nothing. One trainer told us we should not be billed for that feature yet, but we had been.

Going back to our "account advocate" and his supervisor, we have since been given 4 separate dates where this feature would go live and we have waited (not so patiently at times), but we hung in there. Jon and Bobby have repeatedly dodged my calls and the only way I ever get updates is to take to twitter and complain in front of everyone(it may sound like fun but I despise this). Jon very matter-of-factly updated me this morning that the date was now pushed to October 4th and that we should be good to go by then.

I in turn gave Jon the word that we would be canceling as soon as we can integrate with another product. I am confident that my dealer group and several of my peers will follow suit as a result.

I still believe Vin has the best product, but apparently your growth has made it difficult to support engaged clients in the manner that they deserve. We spend way too much money to have calls ignored, etc. for days and not get updated about things. With your product being months ahead of your competitors, I don't understand why your company feels the need to make promises or claims that it can do things when they are only in a development stage and may or may not work.

I am going to demo iMagicLab(who I think is the front-runner) and possibly a couple of other products today and if I see that service functionality in action it would be my guess that I will be faxing over cancellation today.

How can I "Be One With Vin" when they aren't honest and they don't return calls? That's just the ABC's of a business relationship where this many dollars are tied up in monthly service. I got better service from Cargigi yesterday who I spent a whopping $300 monthly with.
 
Matt,

Working with Jon Beachner and Bobby Holmes on this. When we signed up with the products full version (including service lane) several months ago we were told that it already had this functionality. Shame on me for not actually making sure I saw it in action before signing the contract.

When the trainers came in we were basically made aware that the service lane that we were being billed for monthly did absolutely nothing. One trainer told us we should not be billed for that feature yet, but we had been.

Going back to our "account advocate" and his supervisor, we have since been given 4 separate dates where this feature would go live and we have waited (not so patiently at times), but we hung in there. Jon and Bobby have repeatedly dodged my calls and the only way I ever get updates is to take to twitter and complain in front of everyone(it may sound like fun but I despise this). Jon very matter-of-factly updated me this morning that the date was now pushed to October 4th and that we should be good to go by then.

I in turn gave Jon the word that we would be canceling as soon as we can integrate with another product. I am confident that my dealer group and several of my peers will follow suit as a result.

I still believe Vin has the best product, but apparently your growth has made it difficult to support engaged clients in the manner that they deserve. We spend way too much money to have calls ignored, etc. for days and not get updated about things. With your product being months ahead of your competitors, I don't understand why your company feels the need to make promises or claims that it can do things when they are only in a development stage and may or may not work.

I am going to demo iMagicLab(who I think is the front-runner) and possibly a couple of other products today and if I see that service functionality in action it would be my guess that I will be faxing over cancellation today.

How can I "Be One With Vin" when they aren't honest and they don't return calls? That's just the ABC's of a business relationship where this many dollars are tied up in monthly service. I got better service from Cargigi yesterday who I spent a whopping $300 monthly with.

I'm sorry that our software didn't provide the exact functionality you were looking for. Sales may have told you it does it because we do it a slightly different way although it isn't exactly what you are looking for. This functionality you are looking for is something we have been planning to do for a long time. So sales may have also told you we did it because it was coming soon.

So now you are frustrated because our software doesn't do a specific piece of functionality. Our support team has no way to know when that functionality will be released. It isn't possible for them to keep up on the status of all the things in development. So therefore it is hard for them to tell you when it will be completed. Which probably leads to you feeling like you are not getting responded to. I would hope that otherwise our support team has done a great job for you.

The good news is the feature is developed now and is being released next week. We are also working on giving our support team more visibility to the status of these types of requests. The even better news is we just hired a bunch of people for the development team that will allow us to get more of these types of requests done much quicker than we have been. The rate at which we make system improvements is about to accelerate a lot. I know that doesn't solve the problem that it should have already did it when you signed up. But the most important thing is we are listening and we continue to strive to have the best products and customer service possible.
 
Matt,

Sorry I bust your balls all the time. I dont expect an invite to your party at DD though,

but I saw this coming:

http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f44/only-6-vendors-rule-them-all-2015.html#post16407




Bigger companies move a little slower but most usually provide a more stable product. Larger companies also have problems smaller companies don't have. When you have 100 customers and a few employees you don't have to worry about massive server infrastructures, security, performance, testing, support documentation, training employees, customer issues, etc. You also don't worry about what your legal department thinks because you don't have one... When you get to 1000+ customers and have a lot of employees, it is a whole different ball game. VinSolutions is starting to have resources and manpower I could only dream of years ago. AutoTrader has provided resources where we needed it and stayed out of the way where we didn't need help.
 
Andrew - be sure come update the DR community with your results.

I know of several dealers that have the same issues with VIN (Sharrett). Due to Matt and his former/not so former ways of taking advantage of the forums by promoting and shameless plugging, I usually get an earful from VIN users thinking that DealerRefresh is "aligned" with VIN. Which we of course of NOT.

So hold VIN to the fire and get your issues resolved.

Actually I haven't posted much in these forums all year until recently and haven't posted much at all about VinSolutions except in topics about us and the person asking CRM API integration capabilities the other day.
 
I'm sorry that our software didn't provide the exact functionality you were looking for. Sales may have told you it does it because we do it a slightly different way although it isn't exactly what you are looking for. This functionality you are looking for is something we have been planning to do for a long time. So sales may have also told you we did it because it was coming soon.

So now you are frustrated because our software doesn't do a specific piece of functionality. Our support team has no way to know when that functionality will be released. It isn't possible for them to keep up on the status of all the things in development. So therefore it is hard for them to tell you when it will be completed. Which probably leads to you feeling like you are not getting responded to. I would hope that otherwise our support team has done a great job for you.

The good news is the feature is developed now and is being released next week. We are also working on giving our support team more visibility to the status of these types of requests. The even better news is we just hired a bunch of people for the development team that will allow us to get more of these types of requests done much quicker than we have been. The rate at which we make system improvements is about to accelerate a lot. I know that doesn't solve the problem that it should have already did it when you signed up. But the most important thing is we are listening and we continue to strive to have the best products and customer service possible.

Matt, I am not leaving over the functionality I am leaving over the dishonesty and the constant run-around and poor service. I absolutely can't believe that nobody over there has thought to assign my account to someone interested in saving it. Someone a little more on top of things who kept me posted might have kept me on as a customer but I am always having to raise hell just to find out what is going on with my account.

Tell me why after 4 prior milestone dates and being promised that this was already a feature when I signed up that I should believe anyone over there who says I will have it on the 4th of October? Why should my GM believe me when I tell her at this point? Your company has really embarrassed me within my own store. I gave my GM, service manager and service advisor my word that I would be back there in September working with them on service marketing and digging into the service application and now I have lost credibility with the team back there.
 
Vinsolutions,

You have a lot of irritated and frustrated dealers. The problem is two-fold. One part is the over abundance of issues. The other part is the lack of help from your team to resolve these issues.

I feel that it is excessive to have to be on the phone with support daily (literally) resolving each new problem that surfaces. It is so frustrating to find something broken that was just working, then when that gets fixed again, two more problems arise. This has been going on for months. Maybe you could do additional testing before releasing updates to identify all the other areas that might be adversely affected. I need to be talking to customers, not your support team.

As I mentioned, the second half of this is the lack of customer service.
  • It is not good customer service to have the protocol of a service ticket to be first: deny there is a problem, second: if the customer calls back - tell them it is something on their end, third: if the customer calls back, blame a third party, forth: if the customer calls back again, say it was a one-time glitch unless 3 more examples can be produced, fifth: close the ticket as resolved, sixth: if the customer calls and says its still an issue- reopen the ticket and start at step one. This sounds ridiculous, but I have an email folder full of correspondence showing that this is not make-believe.
  • It is not good customer service to provide a support chat and email function that no one responds to in any timely fashion (if at all)
  • It is not good customer service to have your customers on hold for almost a half hour only to be hung up on, forcing them to call back and wait another 30 minutes to hopefully reach someone.
  • It is not good customer service to have a tech tell you that something that previously worked and is now broken was "never supposed to work" because he didnt know what he was talking about.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Please hold some internal training on what the process of handling an issue should be with a focus on good customer service. Please also educate your service techs before throwing them to the wolves. They need to, at minimum, know how the program is supposed to work to be able to effectively listen and understand a dealer's concern(s). You are going to continually lose dealers unless this improves.


Emily Moore
Sharrett Automotive (#3837)
 
I must be living in a different world than the last couple of posters. I have very few issues with Vin. I call support maybe once every month or so and get a fix usually the same day. Their support is awesome! The product is the best I've ever used as an ILM/CRM. I do admit we do not use the Service Functionality so I can't speak of that but from a sales perspective it is by far the best I've ever used and the best I've ever seen with improvements constantly being implemented. There is no PERFECT program as every dealer has different processes so no program can do everything every dealer wants it to. Vin Solutions comes as close as possible.
 
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Just an update, looks like Vin is taking some level of action as a result of my rant here. It's a shame that it has to happen now because it may be too little too late.

I do want to say for the record that I appreciate Matt Watson from the board here jumping in and trying to make something happen. It may have made a difference if you had been involved sooner and from the call yesterday it sounds like the progress that was made was as a result of your efforts.

I have had a great experience with Vin for the most part outside of this issue. I realize(and I have stated previously) that this is probably the slickest system out there. I generally use the live chat when I have minor issues that I can't solve on my own and I have had good luck with that. The problem is that this is a major feature that our dealership wanted to utilize and one of the key factors that sold my GM on using a CRM tool in our store. Her hope was that I would be able to work in fixed ops this month and get them taking advantage of opportunities. Several people stated on several occasions during the sales process that it did what I wanted it to do. After learning that it didn't, I have now been strung along for several months and constantly told that "it will do that in a couple of weeks", or days or whatever.

I will update everyone on how things shake down.

On a side note I would like to acknowledge Kiley O'Brien over at Dealer Socket for taking notice of my issues and calling me to demonstrate how their system DOES have a great solution in place for fixed ops right now. I was very impressed that she took advantage of that opportunity.