Being able to do everything in one place made it much easier to expand functionality without having our hands tied.
Here's where I'm going to plug my company.
To drive fixed ops retention at my old group, here is the system we built. It was built this way years ago, and I hear has since changed. But in 2011 to 2015 it was:
-Onstation for email marketing
-Demandforce for texting
-Xtime for scheduling
-Factory direct mailer for reminders and lost souls
-Service BDC for inbound and outbound calls
-Forget the name of our rewards program
At Total Customer Connect, we tackle the A to Z, with one dashboard, one login, and more importantly one DMS fee. I'm chatting with the powers that be at my old group to build this scenario:
-Email marketing: welcome email, service reminders, recalls, etc
-Online appointment scheduler that has factory recommended maintenance menus, two way texting, etc
-Those same service menus on tablets in the drive
-Walk around tool, MPI and route sheet
-On demand BDC services for overflow calls, and lost soul calls (most BDC's suck at these calls since they aren't trained and held accountable)
Having one login to schedule appointments, text, show service costs, perform a walk around, MPI, monitor email campaign performance and monitor on demand BDC services, with one DMS fee is pretty slick. I never found that when I was a decision maker in my group. I could get some of it, but not all of it, and when you have people logging in to numerous places and using numerous vendors it turns into cat herding pretty quick.
Our system is meant to be used like the dentist. Once we have you, you're communicated with via email, text and humans to make sure you make the appointment, stick to the appointment, and make the next one.
Hope I didn't commit a forum faux pas but giving the elevator pitch.