- May 1, 2006
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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 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
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