At NADA, the Canadian auto dealer team caught up with a handful of DMS providers to get a sense of what’s new in their world.
Every year at NADA, our team likes to talk with the leaders in the dealership software space to get an update of what they are working on and what they are hearing from dealers.
The last few years have seen a lot of movement in the DMS space as the providers try to modernize their platforms, and provide better integration with dealerships’ online tools like digital retailing and other emerging tech tools. The traditional DMS leaders are also facing renewed competition from cloud-based, or what is now sometimes called “cloud-native” DMS providers like Tekion who continue to make waves and inroads with dealers.
In our chat with CDK Global, we heard from Greg Wallin, the company’s VP Sales Canada, Automotive; Steven Walker, their Senior Product Marketing Manager; and Amber Good, their Lead Product Manager.
“This year supporting innovation is number one, especially for the Canadian market,” said Greg Wallin during an interview from the show floor in Vegas. “One of the big things is improving workflows on the retail side. From supporting someone shopping at home, to using that same process in the dealership. About three quarters of the dealerships we’ve talked with say it takes buyers two hours plus to buy a vehicle. Customers don’t want that, it’s too long of a process,” said Wallin.
Steven Walker, CDK’s Senior Product Marketing Manager, says dealers are looking for more streamlined, unified workflows. “One of the big solutions that we’re rolling out is our new modern retail desking platform. There’s not any worry for the dealer in the dealership that there’s going to be any mismatch of pricing or anything might be misaligned. This marriage of CRM with the digital retail platform, allows all that information to be carried over and can be ready for the customer when they’re sitting in the dealership,” said Walker.
The company says during the pandemic consumers made it clear that they didn’t like to have to repeat in the dealership what they had already calculated online. Even though some of those compressed timelines might have been partly driven by the need to avoid prolonged exposure times in public spaces, the expectation has struck. “It’s the perfect marriage of consumer and dealer experience,” said Walker.
For her part, Amber Good said CDK is excited to have just launched their CRM product in the Canadian market. “This is super exciting,” said Good. “The really exciting part for our tool right now is that we’re trying to connect the dots and we’ve successfully been able to connect the dots across our platforms to help fix those pain points for the dealers and for the consumers.”
Over at PBS Systems, it’s been a growth story on both sides of the border, implementing about 300 new dealerships a year. We caught up with Kevin Preston, the company’s Vice-President, Sales at the PBS booth at NADA. “Right now we’re running a 73 per cent close ratio. So literally almost three quarters of everybody that looks at us — buys,” said Preston, adding that the company has had to invest in more training and traveling roadshows to ensure customers all stay up to speed on the upgrades to the company’s products.
Preston said part of the appeal of the company’s story for dealers is the ability to reduce the number of software vendors they have to deal with. “We still lean on the core functionality where we do a lot of vendor reduction by having a single data structure.
We are really good at taking the dealership enterprise, whether it’s five, six, ten, twenty or thirty stores and consolidating that into one customer database,” said Preston.
Preston said even though the company continues to grow, they act upon dealer feedback at dealer events and user groups to help ensure their product and development roadmap are relevant to dealer needs.
“We’ve kept this culture that has always differentiated us, where users have ownership over the product,” said Preston. “We’re still nimble and we’ve got the capacity to handle what the market needs.”
We also dropped by the Reynolds & Reynolds booth where we talked with company president Chris Walsh.
Walsh said the addition of the AutoVision inventory management platform was a big focus at this year’s show, which lets dealers merchandise their used vehicles more efficiently.
As with many software providers at NADA this year, AI and machine learning were a part of the conversation. Walsh likens AI to a digital assistant that can help automate key tasks that help a consumer stay connected and get valuable information from a dealership.
The company was also promoting their new acquisition deskit, which was a Canadian company, but has been absorbed into Reynolds.
“It’s got great functionality, which is obviously why we bought it, but we’ve embedded it into our deal flow process so deeply that it’s a great workflow for a Canadian dealer,” said Walsh.
In terms of what they are hearing from dealers, he said it’s all about more efficiency gains. “They’re hungry for ways to improve workflow in their dealership. How can I be more efficient and kind of effective but still do all the things that I need to do?” he said.
He said tools used by service techs to help provide visualization to customers about work being performed is a good example of technology improving workflows. “How can I get customers through the process, get my advisor to get the customer out of the service drive and the vehicle in the bay, get a technician turning wrenches and get the customer to the cashier?” he said. “How do we make that as smooth as possible?”
Walsh said the company’s ERA-IGNITE platform helps deliver on some of those issues. “The investments we’ve made help them better manage cash and expenses,” he said, adding that many dealers are still looking for more information about their docuPad system that helps digitize the F&I experience at the dealership.
Reynolds said there were many dealers at NADA dropping by this year to learn more about what their DMS was all about. “That tells us that the things that we’re doing are the right things. It’s resonating with the market and they want to see what we can do to help them be successful. I think that’s kind of like a core mantra for us as an organization is really focusing on our customer’s success,” said Walsh. “What are the speed bumps that are preventing them from getting where they want to go? That’s where I really want us to insert ourselves and have those kinds of conversations.”
