It's amazing how many products are brought to their knees by a lack of proper human support.
I am running into this with more and more vendors every day.
Is anyone using Autoalert CXM?
- Thread starter Jared Balfour
- Start date
I am running into this with more and more vendors every day.
- Dec 19, 2018
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- Bill
THIS. For instance, I loved Gubagoo. Their support fell apart and soon after so did their product. Very disappointing.
- Dec 19, 2018
- 862
- 883
- Awards
- 8
- First Name
- Bill
DriveCentric is the absolute best CRM that I've used and it's not particularly close.
Sad to hear - I worked with them quite a bit before their acquisition and their support was always top notch, as was the service.
- Dec 19, 2018
- 862
- 883
- Awards
- 8
- First Name
- Bill
It really was. I was also fortunate to have the same great rep for a long period. After he left, it was a disaster. He never quite said why he was leaving, but I kind of gathered that it was because of the acquisition. I've also struggled to find a quality replacement. I've tried 4 separate services now and they have all been lackluster.
- Apr 11, 2025
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- Jacqueline
AutoAlert has a CXM (what they call their CRM) and it has a desking tool. ELead is severely limited in comparison to Vinsolutions and AutoAlert. There are many issues with Elead including reporting issues. It has no capability of giving proper customer detailed reports and elead can't create customizable reports like vinsolutions or autoalert can. Furthermore, if you have multiple brands under one CRM with elead or Vinsolutions, you must have your stock numbers separated per brand in order for elead and vinsolutions to route the leads to the proper department especially with certain 3rd party integrations. Further, both vinsolutions and elead have duplicate lead generating issues where it doesn't effectively identify duplicates and skates. AutoAlert CXM allows a profile to link all related people for proper lead tracking as well as datamining tracking. Elead isn't capable of a wishlist like VinSolutions and AutoAlert have. Elead is limited to only query new vehicles and not used vehicle perimeters and further limited to only sending 1 notification and if the lead is still open for up to 60 days. VinSolutions and AutoAlert have full wishlist capabilities down to color, price, trim, odometer and both setup an editable timeframe to send out notifications if a vehicle comes into service or inventory to alert the sales staff and can setup automated emails to inform a customer if a new or used vehicle is in stock for that customer. Elead nor VinSolutions is capable of selecting the person that generated the lead from any outside 3rd party program for datamining such as AutoAlert. Ex: Multiple salespeople are using AutoAlert or mastermind for datamining. Any third-party program being used to push to VinSolutions or Elead will not allow each person working it in the 3rd party program to automatically be assigned and must all be done manually and this is more work in elead than VinSolutions. In Elead, there are more manual steps required to assign the tasks to people as primary than in VinSolutions. Elead and VinSolutions can only assign the weblink lead to a department that can round robin or to a single person. Neither is capable of assigning to the various person that was doing the lead from a third party. VinSolutions version of datamining is like double paying for services you already have access to. VinSolutions and elead have a lot of 3rd party integration limitations and problems. VinSolutions is far superior to elead in too many ways to count, but Brian Skutta was involved in both AutoAlert and VinSolutions. He was at VinSolutions first expanding and maturing the business that led to its acquisition by autotrader.com. Eleads merging duplicates is severely limited as well as VinSolutions. If a duplicate is made and they are merged only one person can receive their followup. VinSolutions has a place under the customer profile that allows staff to put special notes so you don't have to look far into history for certain information. Elead doesn't have this option at all. You have to click each previous completed task to try and sift through any valuable information. Also Elead has the option of trying to create a profile that lists two people on the same record which is completely incompatible with Dealertrack or any other program that dealerships use and is completely pointless. Elead you can't search for a customer by their nickname. Elead is very difficult to track down a previously sold lead by searching the vin number. Vinsolutions has the capability to push a trade vehicle over for appraisal into programs like first look. Elead doesn't have this option. Autoalert's CXM can do what Vinsolutions can do and then some. In elead if the customer's cellphone number is listed wrong in error and you send out an opt in text, there's no way to correct it and to re-send it out to the correct number. If a customer opts out in elead you can't use the text feature to send them anything moving forward even if the customer changes their mind (per elead on a ticket nothing can be done except create a new profile for the customer and it may or may not allow you to send an opt in text.) VinSolutions and AutoAlert you can opt a customer back in. Elead has trouble with url links getting flagged by email service providers as spam. AutoAlert doesn't have this problem so much. Elead self-validates from DealerTrack as long as the information matches. VinSolutions does too but requires a manager to go in and manually correct the ones that information was changed in the business office when they go to finance, and it doesn't match VinSolutions profiles. When you contact Elead for support, you are most likely speaking to someone that barely understands how the program functions. You will run into severe problems getting actually good support to fix things followed by the system can't do this or can't do that. VinSolutions and AutoAlert totally the opposite. You contact them for support, and you get people that know their programs and AutoAlert has live support people not bots that you are talking to. Further, elead nor VinSolutions is capable of having two leads open simultaneously being worked for the same profile. Thus, the duplicate profiles that have to be created and then once sold if merged back to one profile, any previous salesperson will lose their follow-up tasks. Here are a few examples of things going on with AutoAlert, VinSolutions, and Elead from real experience with all three.
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Hello to everyone,
This is my first posting!
I'm having issues with AutoAlert's CXM:
• The email client does not have the ability to forwards, cc, or bcc, which is mindboggling! They say that adding these features is in the pipeline but it's been over a year.
• There is also no integration with Outlook and given the absence of the features mentioned above, it's almost impossible to get our Sales people away from it. Henceforth, most of the emailing is done outside of CXM which is a huge inconvenience when you're trying to monitor what they're doing.
• It does not come with click-tp-call unlike, for example, other CRMS such as ActiveX. Other CRMs sometimes charge $20-$30 per user for click-to-call so given the size of the dealership where I am employed we would only need it for 8-10 people. This is not an option with CXM so instead you have to subscribe to a service such as Carwars for around $1,000 per month which an absurd amount to pay for an extra that's already included with some other CRMs. Since we do not have click-to-call, our Sales people rarely log their calls manually. So not only is most of our emailing done outside of CXM, but most of the calls are not logged.
• You can't tag, or copy someone, when adding a note or logging a call, which is EXTREMLY frustrating! This mean having to constantly check profiles to see if there have been any developments. They say this is also in the pipeline to be added but I don't have faith give how long it's taking to add the aforementioned basic features to their email client. You can "invite" someone when making an appointment, or creating a task, but evidently it's extremely complicated to move this feature over to logging notes and phone calls.
• Our vehicles do not display properly so for each lead, showroom up, or phone pop. I have to adjust the vehicle manually so it displays properly which is both time consuming and maddening! Once again, correcting this is supposedly in their pipeline to be corrected.
• The app sucks and looks like something out of the 90s. Since it's not intuitive, it has been very challenging to get our Sales Team to use and even I struggle with it. There is also no video integration which is astounding given that this is 2025.
• Although this is minor, there are no Emojis for texting.
I've since asked people within our industry about their experience with AutoAlert and the consensus is that it is notorious for its inability to correct things.
Henceforth, I have little of no faith that any of the aforementioned issues will ever been corrected.
Please do not hesitate to share your experience with AutoAlert's CXM.
This is my first posting!
I'm having issues with AutoAlert's CXM:
• The email client does not have the ability to forwards, cc, or bcc, which is mindboggling! They say that adding these features is in the pipeline but it's been over a year.
• There is also no integration with Outlook and given the absence of the features mentioned above, it's almost impossible to get our Sales people away from it. Henceforth, most of the emailing is done outside of CXM which is a huge inconvenience when you're trying to monitor what they're doing.
• It does not come with click-tp-call unlike, for example, other CRMS such as ActiveX. Other CRMs sometimes charge $20-$30 per user for click-to-call so given the size of the dealership where I am employed we would only need it for 8-10 people. This is not an option with CXM so instead you have to subscribe to a service such as Carwars for around $1,000 per month which an absurd amount to pay for an extra that's already included with some other CRMs. Since we do not have click-to-call, our Sales people rarely log their calls manually. So not only is most of our emailing done outside of CXM, but most of the calls are not logged.
• You can't tag, or copy someone, when adding a note or logging a call, which is EXTREMLY frustrating! This mean having to constantly check profiles to see if there have been any developments. They say this is also in the pipeline to be added but I don't have faith give how long it's taking to add the aforementioned basic features to their email client. You can "invite" someone when making an appointment, or creating a task, but evidently it's extremely complicated to move this feature over to logging notes and phone calls.
• Our vehicles do not display properly so for each lead, showroom up, or phone pop. I have to adjust the vehicle manually so it displays properly which is both time consuming and maddening! Once again, correcting this is supposedly in their pipeline to be corrected.
• The app sucks and looks like something out of the 90s. Since it's not intuitive, it has been very challenging to get our Sales Team to use and even I struggle with it. There is also no video integration which is astounding given that this is 2025.
• Although this is minor, there are no Emojis for texting.
I've since asked people within our industry about their experience with AutoAlert and the consensus is that it is notorious for its inability to correct things.
Henceforth, I have little of no faith that any of the aforementioned issues will ever been corrected.
Please do not hesitate to share your experience with AutoAlert's CXM.
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