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
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I am running into this with more and more vendors every day.
THIS. For instance, I loved Gubagoo. Their support fell apart and soon after so did their product. Very disappointing.
Sad to hear - I worked with them quite a bit before their acquisition and their support was always top notch, as was the service.
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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