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Automotive Manufacturers forcing ILM software

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#3
Monster said:
What do you mean by forcing?
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Some manufacturers make a dealership use particular software for varying purposes. One of those purposes is for responding to Internet Leads. The level at which a dealership is "forced" is different.

There was a time when BMW and Honda made you work out of their prospective systems, but both of those OEM's have now partnered with the various CRM/ILM companies and can now get reporting on a great number of things. Response time, customer replies, and other reporting metrics are why they do this.

Of the OEM's I work with, only Hyundai and VW still make you respond to an Internet Lead out of their system. Fortunately, those two recognize that dealerships have CRM's and ILM programs, so they only require you to make your first response out of their systems. Because they aim for a response time of under 4 hours they have not had a need to change this yet. But those of us who think 4 hours is way to long and strive to be at less than 15 minutes, we find having to login to these other systems to slow the process. On top of that, some of these other systems don't play nice with other programs on our computers causing confliction errors that, at best, only close all your browsers - at worst, force you to shut down your computer.....adding precious time onto how fast we get back to an Internet Lead.
 
#4
From my side it seems like more OEM's are starting to recognize that there are better options out there and are starting to allow the dealers to choose from several qualified vendors. The main focus of the factory ILM's is response times and that is about it, most of them are weak at best in terms of follow up and sales process.
 
#5
Alex, for Hyundai you can request that they auto-export to your CRM. The only disadvantage of this is that you no longer have access to the priority quick quotes (the ones everyone gets a shot at after a dealer doesn't answer the lead) We didn't mind giving up this access because most of those customer are upset they were never contacted and think it was your dealership that was slow in getting in touch with them.
 
#6
I have to agree with Shawn. We have 15 brands, and now all of them allow us to use our own ILM/CRM tool. It took some time, but the OEMs appear to be recognizing there are often better options out there for dealers to utilize...
 
#8
Like many large companies - manufacturers are slow to change. A dozen years or so ago it made lots of sense for them to "require" certain tools, applications, and processes.

Today, nearly all of them do allow some flexibility in terms of what tools their dealers us. But many still have an "approved list" of vendors. We for example have gone through many many manufacture "tests" over the years. Enforcing some basic standards still makes sense in most cases.

Unfortunately, because there are SO MANY choices for dealers these days, I totally understand why manufactures would want to try to help dealers avoid vendors that simply "don't get it." I use the word unfortunate because there are literally hundreds and hundreds of "providers" promising to be the next-best thing that simply don't deliver. I have fond memories of teaching a dealer what a browser was before I could sell them our products - difficult to imagine for the younger guys I bet.

Our industry has come along way and still has a long way to go. It's tough to say what the manufactures will-do in the future regarding technology but I look forward to being a part of the change - whatever they are.
 
#9
Jeff,

While the leads from Hyundaiusa.com still go to your hyundaidealer.com portal, you can now hit the export button to push it to your CRM and respond to it from there. You can also request to go on auto-export which will automatically push all your leads immediately to your CRM for you. They don't talk about this feature to much as I am sure they don't want all their dealers on it because they can't monitor the lead as good once if leaves their website.
 
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