Future of CRM

[john.quinn]

The first company to build a comprehensive suite (phone tracking, CRM, equity and service miner, online chat, etc.) will make a fortune AND hurt their competitors badly.

I respectively have to disagree here... are there actually CRM's who DO NOT have the basic features mentioned above today?

Building features is easy! Building features that streamline existing, sometime intricate processes is a completely different story.

Features that do not seamlessly integrate with the accounting system are quickly tossed-aside. Features that add to an already cluttered desktop are quickly discarded.

I have a small bit of experience in this arena -- here's another truth: talk to 10 dealers about their 10 absolute MUST HAVE features, and you will certainly end-up with a list of 100 features. And these 100 different features will have to work for 100 different processes.... and you start to get the most basic inkling of why the marketplace is so differentiated -- absolutely no such thing as One Size Fits All.

Now... build something so that your customers are using the same set of tools as your staff... my ears perk-up a bit

 

[C Dorman]

Baron Ringler said:

↑

100% a great idea, that last.

As a fairly decent end user I've found that none of the big name CRM companies have the full package when it comes to the full customer experience. e-Leads is starting to work with it but it's so rudimentary as to not be fully useful. On the other side, a company like AutoAlert should have thought about expanding in to the CRM market years ago. That type of full scale system that would be created, along with adding a chat and and phone monitoring system (or as you mentioned customer interfaces right online), would streamline the user experience, streamline the costs, and reduce the number of vendors a store has to deal with (and I don't know of any dealership that wouldn't like reducing vendor count). Then integrate an accounting system in to that? It would be the Mona Lisa of systems and would control the market in short order. But no one wants to take the risk because they are afraid o screwing up a good thing.

Many many years ago, in the mid-90's, Reynolds actually started to build a system with that in mind (CRM, desk, finance, and accounting all in one) but they botched the programming (I was there: it was one of the most amazing screw-ups of all time) and lost a ton of money before they scaraped the whole thing, and they haven't really taken any more risks since then.

They all have paid for systems which are cash cows that no one wants to mess around with, although I will give Dealersocket credit in that their new Bluebird (Blackbird? Not sure) does take a radical departure from their previous system. But it's still mired in old thinking of what a CRM should be.

It will be a startup that makes it happen, not any of the established players.

Click to expand...

Mike Dullea is the owner of AutoAlert and as one of the original founders of Vin Solutions, I don't know if he can start another CRM company. What's telling is that AutoAlert pulls it's data from the DMS, not the CRM, because it's more accurate, but is integrated with the CRM for sales purposes. What's also telling is that AutoAlert has started their own marketing services because dealers are incapable of reaching these leads themselves properly even with their CRMs...

 

[C Dorman]

I respectively have to disagree here...

John, sadly, dealers don't know what they want because they don't know what they should be doing or what's even possible beyond a few buzzwords. Even worse, most new technology discussions regress to asserting authority and social standing than anything beneficial.

Asking dealers for their must have features is one of the main problems. I have yet to meet an Owner or GM that has gone through any real CRM or DMS training. And onsite training doesn't count. There are too many distractions inside a dealership. I mean real, honest to goodness training for at least 5 days to an Admin level offsite. And when you combine the lack of knowledge and expertise with CRM and DMS systems with similar gaps in understanding of digital marketing, you end up with the state most dealerships are in now.

My last dealership purchased what everybody in management thought was state of the art technology. When I asked about reports, I was pointed to all the wonderful "Custom" reports. They were garbage. I was told that it took a week to two weeks to get a new report or anything changed on an existing report. Long story short, our "state of the art" DMS was using Crystal Reports driven by SQL. Admittedly I had to blow the dust off of some of my old skills, but at least I was able to get the data I needed and I was able to help our CFO clean up some messes. With the exception of the CFO, there was nobody in the dealership who really understood the data in either the CRM or the DMS, its quality, how it was gathered or how a report was generated and how that might affect the accuracy of the report.

 

[jscole86]

Last time @Alex Snyder wrote some blog posts on crm related stuff, a new crm popped up not too long after. What's taking so long Alex...? haha

 

[Baron Ringler]

I respectively have to disagree here... are there actually CRM's who DO NOT have the basic features mentioned above today?

Building features is easy! Building features that streamline existing, sometime intricate processes is a completely different story.

Features that do not seamlessly integrate with the accounting system are quickly tossed-aside. Features that add to an already cluttered desktop are quickly discarded.

I have a small bit of experience in this arena -- here's another truth: talk to 10 dealers about their 10 absolute MUST HAVE features, and you will certainly end-up with a list of 100 features. And these 100 different features will have to work for 100 different processes.... and you start to get the most basic inkling of why the marketplace is so differentiated -- absolutely no such thing as One Size Fits All.

Now... build something so that your customers are using the same set of tools as your staff... my ears perk-up a bit

100% a great idea, that last.

As a fairly decent end user I've found that none of the big name CRM companies have the full package when it comes to the full customer experience. e-Leads is starting to work with it but it's so rudimentary as to not be fully useful. On the other side, a company like AutoAlert should have thought about expanding in to the CRM market years ago. That type of full scale system that would be created, along with adding a chat and and phone monitoring system (or as you mentioned customer interfaces right online), would streamline the user experience, streamline the costs, and reduce the number of vendors a store has to deal with (and I don't know of any dealership that wouldn't like reducing vendor count). Then integrate an accounting system in to that? It would be the Mona Lisa of systems and would control the market in short order. But no one wants to take the risk because they are afraid o screwing up a good thing.

Many many years ago, in the mid-90's, Reynolds actually started to build a system with that in mind (CRM, desk, finance, and accounting all in one) but they botched the programming (I was there: it was one of the most amazing screw-ups of all time) and lost a ton of money before they scaraped the whole thing, and they haven't really taken any more risks since then.

They all have paid for systems which are cash cows that no one wants to mess around with, although I will give Dealersocket credit in that their new Bluebird (Blackbird? Not sure) does take a radical departure from their previous system. But it's still mired in old thinking of what a CRM should be.

It will be a startup that makes it happen, not any of the established players.

 

[C Dorman]

100% a great idea, that last.

As a fairly decent end user I've found that none of the big name CRM companies have the full package when it comes to the full customer experience. e-Leads is starting to work with it but it's so rudimentary as to not be fully useful. On the other side, a company like AutoAlert should have thought about expanding in to the CRM market years ago. That type of full scale system that would be created, along with adding a chat and and phone monitoring system (or as you mentioned customer interfaces right online), would streamline the user experience, streamline the costs, and reduce the number of vendors a store has to deal with (and I don't know of any dealership that wouldn't like reducing vendor count). Then integrate an accounting system in to that? It would be the Mona Lisa of systems and would control the market in short order. But no one wants to take the risk because they are afraid o screwing up a good thing.

Many many years ago, in the mid-90's, Reynolds actually started to build a system with that in mind (CRM, desk, finance, and accounting all in one) but they botched the programming (I was there: it was one of the most amazing screw-ups of all time) and lost a ton of money before they scaraped the whole thing, and they haven't really taken any more risks since then.

They all have paid for systems which are cash cows that no one wants to mess around with, although I will give Dealersocket credit in that their new Bluebird (Blackbird? Not sure) does take a radical departure from their previous system. But it's still mired in old thinking of what a CRM should be.

It will be a startup that makes it happen, not any of the established players.

Mike Dullea is the owner of AutoAlert and as one of the original founders of Vin Solutions, I don't know if he can start another CRM company. What's telling is that AutoAlert pulls it's data from the DMS, not the CRM, because it's more accurate, but is integrated with the CRM for sales purposes. What's also telling is that AutoAlert has started their own marketing services because dealers are incapable of reaching these leads themselves properly even with their CRMs...

 

[john.quinn]

You really have to chuckle when you step back and really see the silos through which these systems were built.

So it came to pass that God created the Internet Lead... (LOL). and 100 of these leads would hit the sales department every month. And if you were really good, you could close 15 of them. DMS has absolutely zero provision for managing this type of interaction/communication... so Lead Management and automotive's own version of CRM is born, basically so we can sell 15 cars a month...

Meanwhile, 100 people every day are calling the Service department -- and 90 of them "close." So many phone calls that we have to make a choice: answer the phone OR take care of the people in front of me. Rough.

But Service/Fixed wasn't sexy... so it came to pass that still, today, the telephone predominately serves as the path of least resistance to gain entrance to the Service Department.

Nuts

 

[john.quinn]

You really have to chuckle when you step back and really see the silos through which these systems were built.

So it came to pass that God created the Internet Lead... (LOL). and 100 of these leads would hit the sales department every month. And if you were really good, you could close 15 of them. DMS has absolutely zero provision for managing this type of interaction/communication... so Lead Management and automotive's own version of CRM is born, basically so we can sell 15 cars a month...

Meanwhile, 100 people every day are calling the Service department -- and 90 of them "close." So many phone calls that we have to make a choice: answer the phone OR take care of the people in front of me. Rough.

But Service/Fixed wasn't sexy... so it came to pass that still, today, the telephone predominately serves as the path of least resistance to gain entrance to the Service Department.

Nuts

 

[TeddyJTurner]

Who's going to break the log jam Alex? All of the established players have a proven track record of sucking at developing software. They all basically grew through acquisition and manage their products like cash cows. Even if a new competitor emerged, one of the old guard would just buy them and the status quo would continue. Salesforce is the leading CRM system outside of automotive, but given their current user license fees, developing an automotive version would be cost prohibitive. So unless something drastic happens, we're going to be stuck with what we have for the foreseeable future.

Exactly right. Issue is the CRM's are dominated by monopolies who are going to manage CF's vs focusing on developing a disrupting, more nimble CRm/DMS. You can't blame them...they are making decisions that they should make. No need to dev something when they are making plenty of money with what they have and there are no real substitutes for dealers and even if they were, they make it so prohibitively expensive and time consuming to switch that it's not even worth the "Switching costs"

 

[Baron Ringler]

Mike Dullea is the owner of AutoAlert and as one of the original founders of Vin Solutions, I don't know if he can start another CRM company. What's telling is that AutoAlert pulls it's data from the DMS, not the CRM, because it's more accurate, but is integrated with the CRM for sales purposes. What's also telling is that AutoAlert has started their own marketing services because dealers are incapable of reaching these leads themselves properly even with their CRMs...

I don't think you can run a non-compete that many years (it's been at lease 12) unless there is a paid for codicil. But the point is take. As someone mentioned elsewhere in this thread. why should these vendors spend money on something new when they can successfully milk what they have. Again, Reynolds tried that around 96-97, and it failed so miserable and if I remember the number right, the loss was more than 40-million dollars. The reason it failed is another story, but funny as hell.

But I don't see anyone trying it again. An independent will make something great, which will then be purchased.