Chuck Hoyt, VP of Sales & David Bates, VP Customer Support
Improving life for dealers, consumers
David Bates, VP Customer Support & Chuck Hoyt, VP of Sales
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A major theme at NADA this year was customer experience, as many businesses attending the show discussed improvements in their products that focused on enhancing the consumer experience — and also that of the dealer.
Such was the case for Reynolds & Reynolds, whose team provided information to attendees about products that would help dealers evolve with the changing automotive landscape rather than get left behind.
“We’ve got some products that our customers are excited about that use predictive analytics to try and help move the dealer towards being the dealer of the future,” said David Bates, VP Customer Support, Reynolds & Reynolds. “We’ve got a system that is designed to drive efficiency and effectiveness not only on the operational side of the dealership — but that also changes the consumer experience from a retail perspective.”
Bates said they also have dealers that have started to adopt their graphical user interface solution, and have started getting into the company’s advanced products that link docuPAD and their advanced server solutions. “Dealers are starting to realize those efficiencies and are seeing bottom line results from it,” said Bates.
It’s an important result considering the fairly significant year-over-year sales dip that occurred last year, according to Chuck Hoyt, VP of Sales, Reynolds and Reynolds. “It was still a good year, but the margin compression that dealers are seeing on the sales side — they’re looking for ways to maximize their profit opportunity with every customer, whether it’s the front-end or the back-end of the business. And that’s what our focus has been,” said Hoyt.
Nearly a decade ago the company started to think about what dealers would need moving forward. Then they started to work on this idea, pushing a big developing effort. “We said the systems and the tools that dealers have today aren’t going to help them be better retailers in the future,” said Hoyt.
When they considered the world that dealers live in, they realized that many of them solve problems department by department. “They might get a cool new widget or a little toy to help them drive service traffic or drive something on the front-end of the business,” said Hoyt. “But as they started plugging in all these systems that all have to try and talk to each other, it became not very efficient, not very effective. I was showing this to a dealer and he said: that’s the spaghetti I live in.”
He adds that dealers were also drowning in paper, which is an issue that just about every dealership was struggling with. At this point, the company started to review them systems and began making changes.
“We said: consumers have changed and technology has certainly changed dramatically, and we need to start over and rebuild our system from the ground up,” said Hoyt.
Return to NADA Show 2019
