Eley,
I didn't mean to sound arrogant. I was frustrated when I posted that post. Knowing how it works is not the problem. I am very aware of how things work in Dealer Socket. Hunter, Thank you for the post. I think it's awesome you guys pay attention to these forums and try to help as much as possible. However, everything you posted I have discussed with the dealersocket sales rep, support rep, etc. Since we signed up with DS a couple months ago I have made sure to get the details on this.
The problem lies with GM. They have yet to switch to a "business hours" response time. Furthermore, last month my department received 254 email leads. Out of those leads 84 were received AFTER business hours. If your receiving half your leads after business hours it's impossible to have 2 min to 5 min response times.
However, when I got the report for the dealers response times in our local market more than half of them were between 2 and 4 minutes. I know many of them that use DS. Therefore, they had to be doing one of two things... Using an auto responder in some way that "tricks" the system... or using an overnight response team. If you go back to my original post you will see where I wrote about this ...
Since I posted the comment I have contacted one of the dealers and sure enough they are using a third party company to answer the leads coming in after business hours. In my opinion the $600 it cost is worth it since they use actual people to respond to the leads inside dealer socket. A quick and good quality response to these leads will produce better results and in the long run should pay for itself.
I love the tech side to this business and because of the way I am it was bothering me if someone had figured out a way to "trick the system" That's why I was wondering if anyone knew of a way to stop the clock with an auto responder OUTSIDE of DS since we all know the auto response won't cut it inside the DS crm. You know what's funny about all this....
General Motors offers a lead management tool that is ran by a company called SCI out of Canada. They have made improvements to the tool but it's nothing compared to DS and other crm's. It's just funny to me how you can stop the clock because it's GM's OWN TOOL! The system will send a salesperson a new lead notification to their personal email account. They have that notification sent with a reply-to address that is coded to send a response back to the customer and the SCI tool for reference. So if you have the personal email setup with a "vacation response" it will send the customer an auto reply and it will stop the clock. It's hilarious to me because GM has done all this work to make us manually stop the clock with a "human response" yet their own tool allows you to stop the clock with an auto reply!! Now that's typical...