REVIEW GoTo Connect for Automotive - worth a look!

[Alex Snyder]

Go to GoTo for your own demo.

Every dealer I know pays attention to phone calls. We record them, we grade them; plenty of us cut a check to a phone-training company to sit there and score how our people handle inbound sales and service calls. It's a real expense, and most stores just accept it as the cost of doing business.

While all that money and attention goes to the phones, your team is also texting and emailing customers all day long — and almost nobody is watching any of it. The calls get graded. The texts and emails go out into the void. That blind spot is exactly what caught our attention when Jeff and I sat down with the GoTo team for a demo of GoTo Connect for Automotive.

The overview
They walked us through the platform at a high level first. The short version: it ties phone, text, and email together per employee, so everything a given salesperson or advisor sends and receives lives in one place. Nothing revolutionary on the surface — plenty of tools promise "one inbox."

Where it got interesting was the layer on top of it.

The thing that actually got our attention
GoTo Connect has an AI that watches and scores how well your people communicate. Not just "did they pick up the phone," but how the whole conversation with the customer is being handled, whichever way it happens.

Think about what that replaces. Right now a lot of stores are paying a consultant to monitor calls and calls only. Or they want sales managers to spot-check a few calls. This captures both texts and emails, along with calls. It watches the communications and automatically flags where your team is dropping the ball. For most dealers, that's a set of communications they've never had consistent eyes on before. Jeff and I both kept coming back to that — it's the first tool we've looked at that closes the text-and-email gap instead of pretending it doesn't exist.

Two things that made it easy to like
First, it doesn't care what phone system you're running. You don't have to rip out your current setup to get the monitoring and the visibility. That lowers the barrier a lot. And the barrier is further lowered because it integrates with major CRMs.

Second, it works with your employees' personal phones. Anyone who's tried to get a sales team to stop texting customers from their own cell knows what a problem that is — the conversations happen off the books, and you never see them. This pulls those into view too.

Our honest take
We came away thinking about this as an affordable way to get a full picture — and real control — over all of your dealership's communications, not just the slice you happen to record today. If you're already spending on call monitoring, it's worth pricing this against what that's costing you and asking what you're getting for the texts and emails you're currently not watching at all.

Learn more and Get a Demo for yourself

 

[Ryan Everson]

I had to do a double take. For a second there, I thought @Dan Sayer was the one giving the GoTo Connect demo.

 

[Dan Sayer]

I had to do a double take. For a second there, I thought @Dan Sayer was the one giving the GoTo Connect demo

I mean, Taylor's a good looking dude so I can see the confusion!

As for GoTo, I think they’re a company worth watching.

Like every vendor at NADA, there were some pretty ambitious promises made at their booth this year. In fairness, I think Sales got a little ahead of where Product actually was in Q1 and even into Q2. That’s not uncommon in our industry, but it did create some disconnect during my evaluations after NADA.

The strategy itself makes a lot of sense, though. Historically, I viewed GoTo primarily as a PBX provider. About three years ago, when I led a group-wide phone system evaluation, they were near the top of my list. The challenge at the time was that I’d still have needed a separate call tracking platform (CallRevu, CallSource, etc.) plus an integration partner like PurpleCloud to bridge SMS into DriveCentric. We ultimately selected TotalCX because it gave us PBX, tracking, and a native DriveCentric integration in one package. Either way, I saved the group $200,000 annually over a legacy Momentum Telecom agreement! Check your phone invoices people!

Fast forward a couple of years, TotalCX PBX and Tracking became part of CallRevu, we migrated onto their tracking platform, and today we’re a CallRevu customer. To their credit, they honored our legacy TotalCX pricing, which ended up being substantially better than current retail pricing.

After NADA this year, our owner came back excited about what GoTo was pitching around consolidating the entire communications stack. Frankly, I think that’s exactly where the industry is heading. PBX, call tracking, SMS, AI coaching, reporting, CRM integrations… dealers don’t want to stitch together five different vendors anymore if one platform can legitimately do it well.

When I dug deeper, though, I found some of the capabilities weren’t quite production-ready yet. The new tracking platform, the CRM integrations, and some of the SMS functionality were still maturing, and there seemed to be some differences between what GoTo was communicating and what DriveCentric understood was currently supported.

One thing I will absolutely give GoTo credit for: once Jeff Cook, their Director of Product, became involved, things moved quickly. He was responsive, transparent, and several items I had raised started getting addressed. That gave me confidence they’re listening to dealers.

At the time, however, I wasn’t interested in being an early adopter for something as mission-critical as our communications platform (especially around TCPA). When you’re supporting multiple rooftops, “should work” isn’t quite enough.

That said, GoTo remains on my Q3 review list. I want to revisit the platform, verify the current state of the direct DriveCentric integrations, confirm the tracking and SMS capabilities have matured, and see how the overall platform has progressed. If they’ve closed the gaps from earlier this year, I think they’ll deserve another serious look.

On the other side, CallRevu has been a solid partner for us. Their reporting and tracking continue to be strong, their AI call coaching tools are not bad, and we’ve generally had a positive experience. My biggest criticisms today are more around the user experience. The PBX interface is still the old InteractiveTel dashboard, and the mobile app has been frustrating-particularly for our Android users. I’d also like to see more consistency around SMS security and opt-in/opt-out compliance as the regulatory landscape continues to evolve.

One thing I don’t think gets discussed enough is UX/UI. Dealers spend hours every day inside these systems, and that matters. GoTo’s interface is genuinely one of the better ones I’ve seen. If they can pair that user experience with a mature, reliable feature set that stacks, they’ll be an extremely compelling platform.

It’s encouraging to see real competition in this space because it pushes everyone to improve. As dealers, we’re ultimately the beneficiaries when vendors are forced to innovate instead of simply maintaining the status quo. Thanks for posting the review demo!