Find new ways to make money from your DMS

With dealer margins under pressure, you need to look to new ways of generating revenue. An excellent opportunity may be right under your nose – your Dealer Management System.

A good system can bring significant benefits, reducing costs, boosting sales and increasing aftersales revenues. However, you could be missing out on profit opportunities and incurring unnecessary costs if you are not fully engaged with your software.

New DMS features are constantly emerging to optimise both productivity and the retail experience for customers. Many dealers still lag behind their more technologically savvy competitors, by failing to use an array of important tools which may already be in their systems.

1. Integrated credit card payments is a great example. Many dealers have adopted this in the last few years, eliminating the time spent and errors associated with manual reconciliation. This enables accountants to refocus their efforts into more valuable areas, while saving sales staff the hassle of dealing with a separate EPOS system. Wireless card machines reduce costs further due to their portability, as you need fewer of them compared to wired machines at fixed locations.
2. Our second tip is Business Intelligence. Being able to manipulate and analyse your data however you please can yield a treasure trove of insights. This allows you to make strategic decisions based on a far deeper understanding of your business than ever before, using fast and flexible reports, without needing a report written by your DMS supplier.
3. Giving technicians access to the DMS on mobile devices has been another significant advancement. You can provide a better customer experience (and one which builds trust), by carrying out Vehicle Health Checks and sending videos of repair work directly from your mobile device. The same goes for salespeople responding to customer enquiries with personalised videos prepared on their devices.
4. To reduce inbound phone enquiries when a vehicle is in the workshop, you should check whether your DMS includes a vehicle progress tracker – allowing customers to follow the status of their vehicle online and even authorise recommended work.

We hope the above tips prompt you to take a closer look at your existing system’s capability to get more mileage out of what you already have. Things have moved on since the days of double-keying, costly system updates and using a multitude of costly third-party software tools.

In many cases, a comprehensive, modern DMS can reduce or eradicate the need for additional software, simultaneously cutting costs, boosting efficiency and increasing profitability.

Neville Briggs is managing director of Pinewood Technologies