CIMA Systems Blog

by : Sandi Jerome

Can you replace your employees with robots? For every dealer who has had to fire an employee for theft or misconduct – I’m sure they were excited with the recent prediction by Bill Gates that robots will lead the next major technology front. He forecasted that the robot industry will grow the way computers did 20 years ago and be accepted in most homes and businesses.

I had read Gates’ article in Scientific American before going to NADA this year and I was amazed to see new technology that was performing very robot-like. The first was a new vehicle inventory and tracking solution. Anybody who has taken a physical used inventory in Minnesota in January (like I have) would appreciate sending a robot out to do that job. MyDealerLot (www.mydealerlot.com) has developed a real-time wi-fi vehicle tracking solution that uses radio wave technology (RFID) in conjunction with a dealership’s existing wireless network infrastructure, to provide an “always-on” view of a dealership’s inventory. What this means for you is that MyDealerLot tracks the inventory on your lot so you don’t have to send humans out there to do it. Tags affixed to your vehicle’s rear-view mirrors beacon signals back to a wall-mounted device that creates a graphical map of your dealership lot online. You can check it from anywhere and at any time – even from home. The system helps your sales staff locate vehicles, tells you when a vehicle has been taken out for a test drive and can even help with audits by showing the exact date and time a vehicle was sold and out of your store. It also provides marketing tools and analytical reports for future forecasting – another thing that humans hate doing.

Few employees like making follow-up or telemarketing calls, and nobody likes stuffing envelopes or typing e-mails. CIMA Systems (www.cimasystems.net) has automated this process to enable you to continually communicate with your customers in the method the customer prefers, by e-mail, phone call or text message. The system draws customer information in from a DMS and uses it to send automated marketing and service campaigns to customers in their chosen communication style. If the customer prefers a phone call, CIMA will automatically call the customer with a pre-recorded message.

E-mail? An e-mail will be sent with the information. It can even text message a cell phone if that’s the way the customer wants to be contacted. Better yet, customers can then schedule their next service appointment online or over the phone; all without having to wait on hold for your overworked service advisor or receptionist. In addition, using CIMA ServiceDriver, customers can pick and choose the services they need completed in the service bay from an online menu that does everything from tabulate the estimated cost of repairs to run audio/video clips of different procedures. Does this mean that CIMA will replace our service advisors? Probably not yet – but for the busy customer, this new technology will do to service write up what ATMs did for bank tellers.

Not many of your employees like to write, so creating a newsletter is a painful chore. To solve this problem, IMakeNews (IMN) (www.imakenews.com) sends dealerships pre-written lifestyle content articles in e-newsletter format. The dealer can either accept the articles as-is or enter his own customized dealership articles. After approval, they upload the list and voila – IMN sends the dealership-branded newsletter to each customer. The system even enables a customer to opt out of future mailings and takes them off the list. In addition, the system gives customers buttons such as “Schedule a Service Appointment” or “Schedule a Test Drive” throughout the content, giving dealerships additional leads from right within the newsletter, with no work needed on the dealer’s part.

I still remember when I was an accounts payable clerk and brought a big stack of checks into my boss’s office for signing. He would complain about having to sign all those checks without even thinking about how much effort it took for me to type (yes, before check writer software,) tear apart and later post into the computer. A new system on the market, Zevez,(www.zevez.com) enables you to not only automate the check writing process, but eliminate signing them too! With a new interface to your DMS system, Zevez will pay vendors automatically via your credit card. The best part is while you’re automating your payables, you’re racking up credit card reward points. This means that instead of staying late to sign checks, you’ll be jumping on the next flight to the Bahamas.

Are these new automated processes the start of Gates’ forecasted robot generation? Let’s hope so. I never enjoyed being an accounts payable clerk, but I did love the jobs that made profit for the dealership – like F&I and fixed operations manager. If we can automate the positions that are hard to recruit, train, and retain staff for, we can trim our employees down to only those who generate gross profit and love what they do. Bring in the robots!

Sandi Jerome is a former controller, CFO, system administrator, F&I, assistant GM, and fixed operations manager with over 30 years experience in the automotive industry. She is the owner of Sandi Jerome Computer Consulting.

Gary Nixon brings to CIMA over 30 years of automotive industry experience. As CEO, Nixon has directed CIMA’s Systems overall strategy, as well as sales and service efforts, significantly contributing to CIMA’s emergence as the leader in interactive communications and customer relation solutions for the automotive industry.

1. Please tell us about the customer-communications technology that CIMA Systems offers dealers.

Our patent-pending process enables dealers to automatically and interactively communicate with their customers whenever and however their customer desires; whether by phone, email or text message. For example, we can actually capture data from a dealer’s Dealer Management System (DMS) about a customer and/or their vehicle and automatically communicate a relevant message to the customer in a two-way format. So if a dealer’s customer prefers email and there’s a recall on their vehicle, our system sends an email about the recall, and then allows the customer to click from the email into CIMA’s automated appointment system to make a confirmed service appointment. CIMA then contacts the customer the day prior to remind them and we inform the dealership if they confirmed, changed, or canceled the appointment. It’s a communication solution that sends two-way targeted messages to customers in the way they prefer to be contacted.

2. Which specific dealership segments do your products serve?

The nice thing about CIMA is we can capture any data that resides in the DMS. That means that we can send out anything, all the way from a prospect marketing piece to a customer satisfaction index (CSI) survey. For example, a dealership can use our system to send prospects in their database a promotion via a phone call or email, depending on the customer’s preference. If the dealership sends an email, they can include a video of the General Manager thanking the customer for coming in and explaining the benefits of buying a car from their store. Basically, the communications message to the dealer’s customers are only limited to the dealer’s imagination. Messages range from: “Happy Birthday” to “We noticed you declined services the last time you were in the drive” to “We notice that you decided not to get an extended service contract.” CIMA can also bring customers back into the dealership service drive by sending targeted, automated coupons or even send automatic special order parts notifications upon the parts arrival at the dealership. Basically, we automate the entire dealership.

3. What is the most compelling reason for a prospective customer to choose CIMA?

Number one, the dealership’s response rate increases. We can go into dealerships with our process and communicate with the dealership customer using their preferred method. Which means the dealership is not communicating with customers in ways that annoy them.

Number two, we help dealerships consolidate all of their communication solutions into one system. CIMA does surveys, videos, e-mails, phone calls as well as service and sales appointments. Many of our dealers have found CIMA replaces anywhere from one to four vendors, saving them time and money.

And three, we have developed a product designed specifically for automotive dealers and their customers based on industry knowledge from key automotive expertise at CIMA. When Lee Iacocca saw our system he was so impressed, he agreed to sit on CIMA’s Advisory board. We also have Bob Reilly, who was the President of Isuzu and a senior partner at JD Power and Associates. We’ve taken automotive technology knowledge and combined it with our tremendous development team (including three PhDs) to come up with the advanced product we offer today.