Sandi Jerome, Editor of Digital Dealer Magazine, introduces readers to the benefits of a Customer Interactive Management Application (CIMA) among other automated frontrunners in the industry.
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.
Read the original article at Digital Dealer online.
