How many different things do you log into every given day? Whether it be for personal or work, how many different sites or portals must you use to get done what you need to? In a dealership, we often harm ourselves and our team by having simply too many programs to log into to complete our work. This platform fatigue disengages our staff, slows productivity, and interferes with seamless customer engagement and communication.
Training a dealer client recently, and over-the-shouldering their BDC, I saw the lengths they needed to go (and systems they needed to leverage) to “do their job”.
Here are all the “Platforms” one dealership had deployed:
- Their CRM (where all inbound prospects enter or are entered)
- A separate AI tool “integrated” (word used loosely) that the team had to use to communicate with those same CRM customers via text.
- A Outbound Call (read” auto-dialer) platform they had to complete all outbound calls through (pulled from the CRM) that resided outside of the CRM.
- A chat tool they could jump into to engage with and overtake the AI chat agent, yes, separate from the AI tool above.
- Their video tool that they could send videos to customers through.
- The call-monitoring platform to listen to inbound sales calls (different than the auto-dialer) and make sure everything is logged into, you guessed it, the CRM.
- vAuto so they can push trades over to assist the desk.
- And lastly, a ID verification tool to send customers prior to receiving or filling out a credit application.
- These above don’t include the OEM required steps necessary for sales agents to complete with customers at the time of delivery.
In the end, there are 9 separate platforms (read: a toppling tech stack) that the average salesperson/BDC agent must utilize on a daily basis. This is a platform fatigue that automotive vendors have created the environment for, and dealers have welcomed into our stores. We are sold these tools as ways to engage better with our shoppers, but it costs us efficiency and time to do so. With little integration, one must play hide and seek for customer communication data, with each shopper audit being a different trail of breadcrumbs to track.
While these different technologies may be required, certainly you should look to your own CRM to see if they offer their own integrated tools to better keep things under one solution. Platform fatigue leads to confusion, slower responses, and more multi-factor authentication text codes than you can shake an iPhone at. Sure, some help with customer data security, but stop taking customer communication out of the CRM. Make sure, for all the good these separate platforms are doing, they aren’t causing more harm.
