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.