Rick Johnston, VP
Integration, a key theme this year
Rick Johnston, VP
—
The theme of the year has been integration for desking tool service Autovance, which specializes in helping dealers to increase gross profit, lease penetration and Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) scores.
“We’ve been able to take what was already really deep integration and strengthened it even more. We’ve expanded who we integrate to,” said Rick Johnston, the company’s VP. “We’ve been taking what was an app or a product for example, and we’re transitioning it from a tool into a platform. We will be coming to the Canadian market with a whole front-end solution in the next 12 months — it’s in the development pipeline.”
Moving from product to platform is one thing, but Johnston said they are now a platform that is ready to add additional products.
When asked what he has been hearing from dealers at the NADA Show this year, he said the comments haven’t really changed over the years. “I think I’m hearing the same thing that I’ve heard from dealers since I got into the industry, which is we don’t know what the future looks like for us, but we know we need to be able to try different things.”
We need to tools, he said, to allow dealers to do things in different ways. “A lot of the times dealers get frustrated because they have to do things a little bit differently and it’s not a cookie cutter process across the country.”
Johnston said they are deeply invested in the sales process, and to be able to help dealers keep the ball rolling when a customer enters the store. “We have to be able to accommodate for a lot of different styles of selling.”
One way is to reduce the transaction time. Dealers often say innovation is making everything move faster — we need to provide “more speed and convenience to the customer, but not at the expense of my business,” said Johnston.
Return to NADA Show 2019
