The process of purchasing a phone system is not to be taken lightly. Phone calls into dealerships outnumber Internet leads by four to one, and many studies show that dealers are not able to handle both the volume and routing of incoming calls in a way that meets customer expectations.

When you're buying a new phone system your top three goals are:

1) Understand what capabilities your dealership needs

2) Research which phone systems will meet these capabilities

3) Choose a phone system that will scale and support your dealership as needs change in the future

The right system, configured expertly, can assist with answering more calls and getting customers connected with an appropriate agent. That's why many dealerships are opting for IP phone systems, and specifically Unified Communications Platforms (UCPs). UCPs leverage several other tools to turn a phone system into a two-way communications platform that offers dealers the following advantages:

-Allows remote and mobile workers to access features no matter where they are, including voice mail, instant messaging and single-reach numbers

-Supports multimedia communications on a variety of devices

-Better customer experience

-Scalable for future expansion and multiple stores

-Supports call routing for BDCs and call centers

-Increases business productivity

The biggest problem that dealers run into with IP phones is dropped calls and poor call quality. This happens for one of two reasons: the dealer's IT infrastructure is incapable of supporting the phone system, or the phone system vendor relies on the public Internet to send and receive voice calls once they are converted into data packets.

Cloud-Hosted or Self-Hosted?

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Some phone system vendors offer cloud-hosted (aka public-hosted) solutions.  Think of cloud-hosted phone systems as similar to Skype. Would you use Skype as a videoconferencing solution for your business? Most businesses would not. Skype sends video packets over the public Internet and the service is notorious for poor video quality and dropped connections. The same thing happens to your phone calls when they travel over the public Internet.

With a self-hosted VoIP phone system, the box of hardware is on-site at your dealership or data center. The box connects to your phones through a private, digital circuit provided by a telephone carrier.

Although a self-hosted system requires purchasing the equipment up front, it is far more reliable than a hosted solution. Additionally, you own the equipment so the longer-term cost of ownership is the same, if not less, than paying ongoing subscription fees for a public-hosted solution.

When a phone system vendor approaches you, there is one essential question you need to ask: Does any of this system run over the public Internet?

If the answer is yes, run the other way.

IT Infrastructure

Purchasing an IP phone system may require that you upgrade your IT infrastructure so it can support all the additional data flowing through your network. Be sure to have your phone system vendor assess the current state of your Internet connections, routers and switches to see if they will support their systems' requirements.

Experience Counts

Find a vendor with experience servicing auto dealerships. Here's why experience matters. Recently a dealer signed on with a phone system vendor. During installation the vendor used some of the on-site equipment that belonged to the dealer's DMS provider. Unbeknown to the phone vendor, the dealer was in the process of switching DMS providers. Soon the phone equipment was shut off along with the rest of the DMS, and the phone system went completely down.

Auto dealerships are unique business eco-systems. Your partnerships and the way you use phones is different from other businesses. When you are vetting potential vendors, ask if they have other dealership clients. If they don't, keep looking.

Consolidate Carriers

If you are part of an auto group that has more than one location, you have extra negotiating power. I often see situations where individual stores have their own carrier and negotiate their own deals.

Multiple store groups should all use the same telephone carrier. Carriers will give substantial discounts for larger organizations.

Sign 36-Month Contracts: Never Five Years!

Many dealers agree to sign a five-year contract with their phone carrier, believing it will save them money. But locking yourself in gives you less flexibility in negotiating changes. After three years your carrier has recouped its initial costs. Their costs drop dramatically, but your costs suddenly skyrocket.

In my experience it's better to sign a 36-month contract. Don't automatically renew with the same carrier! Bid your business out to competition.

Your phone system is your dealership's primary communications tool. When it's time to buy a new system take the time to become informed, do your research and vet several vendors. Your customers will thank you.

A recent article in Automotive News states the era of online car sales has arrived. Some dealerships already offer customers the ability to transact most, if not all, of the purchase experience online. AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson said that in January 2017, 30 percent of AutoNation's new-vehicle sales were transacted online.

Experts predict this trend is about to be fast tracked, and many dealerships are within a year or two of being able to offer the entire vehicle-purchase experience online.

But there's one aspect of the online car sales experience that many dealers overlook as they begin exploring this option: their IT infrastructure. As your dealership evaluates online shopping portals, new F&I and leasing apps, and other technologies that allow you to move the car-buying experience online, it's important to also evaluate whether or not your IT infrastructure can support the increased data.

In order to offer a fast, seamless and secure online transaction, the majority of dealers will need to make upgrades in the following areas:

Internet

Have your applications been feeling sluggish lately? Are you still using T-1 or DSL based Internet at your dealership? Many popular dealership applications are now web based or otherwise utilizing your Internet connections to operate. Add on customer WiFi and other increasing demands to have it be just as good as at home, and you are likely at full capacity on your current connection. If you also don’t have a backup you can be completely down when a carrier experiences an outage.

Slowness definitely hurts. Your employees are less efficient, your customers can be dissatisfied and you can lose money from lost time to poor CSI scores.

There are plenty of options for upgrades. Fiber optic services are fast and can be easily upgraded as needs further increase. A best case scenario would be redundant fiber connections or a primary fiber and a coax or similar backup connection.

Hardware

Servers, switches, PCs and routers that were manufactured more than five years ago do not have the processing capacity to handle the large amounts of data involved with online vehicle transactions. Additionally, many dealership networks are still using Small-Office/Home-Office (SOHO) hardware that they picked up at a local retailer.

If you're planning to sell cars online, the large amounts of bandwidth and processing capacity involved requires upgrading to enterprise-grade equipment. Benchmark recommendations include:

• If your server is older than three years, purchase a new one. If you don't have a centralized server set-up, you'll need to implement one for security purposes.
• If your PCs are older than five years, purchase new ones.
• Check your network switches; 100 Mbps switches are obsolete and will need to be upgraded to Gigabit switches.  
• WiFi routers. These need to be enterprise-grade; Cisco/Meraki brand routers are best in class. For security purposes routers should also be cloud-managed.

Communication Systems

When you start selling cars online, do you really want your salespeople and F&I people to be texting and calling customers using their personal cell phones? If you're not sure of the answer, let me make it clear: NO YOU DON'T. For multiple reasons, security being high among them, all customer communications should be sent over a secure network and tracked, just as all documentation will need to be tracked.

Online chat tools, texting apps and Unified Communications Platforms (UCPs) are all systems that can be integrated with your CRM and/or DMS platforms to create secure, trackable and seamless communications channels.

Security

When a customer purchases a vehicle online they'll be required to enter their personal and sensitive information into a website form. It's your dealership's responsibility to ensure that all this data is protected. Collecting and storing social security numbers, birth dates, addresses, bank account numbers and credit card numbers online is no small matter. That's the type of information that hackers love to target.

To sell vehicles online, your dealership will need to create a virtual fortress. A benchmark recommendation is to hire a trained IT security consultant to oversee this important task. This is not something you want to mess around with.

Wireless

An important value-add that your dealership can offer that other online shopping sites may not be able to offer is a live, virtual walkaround. If a customer is interested in a particular vehicle, a salesperson can run outside and use a tablet or phone to start a two-way video chat that allows the customer to view the vehicle up close in real-time and ask questions.

This type of service, along with other up and coming location-based technologies, requires a robust wireless network that extends coverage to the edges of your dealership's lot. For the average-size dealership, this will require a minimum of 25 enterprise-grade WiFi routers. Yes, you read that right. No, that's not a typo. Trust me, I know.

More vendors are coming out with very cool front-end apps, portals and other technologies to help make online car sales a reality. As dealers evaluate the risks, costs and benefits involved, it's important to factor in the necessary upgrades to IT infrastructures. These benchmark recommendations should help.

The growing importance of video as a way to engage customers is difficult to deny. According to a think with Google report, video walkthroughs are one of the top three types of content that car shoppers like to watch.

When most auto marketers think of video walkthroughs, they think of a professionally produced video that can be displayed on their website and sent in emails. Those are certainly great to have, but videos don't have to be pre-packaged or professional to be effective.

Some innovative salespeople are using their smartphones to perform live video walkthroughs while they have the prospect on the line!

When a customer calls to ask if a dealership still has a vehicle in stock, salespeople will often respond in the affirmative and then ask the person to come in for an appointment or test drive. When the customer hesitates or insists they just want to know a price, the salesperson is in danger of losing them. One way to build rapport and keep that prospect on the phone is to do a live video walkthrough using your cell phone. If you're close to the vehicle, offer to do it on the spot. If not, offer to call the customer back in a few minutes.

To perform a live walkthrough, you'll need a video chat app on your smartphone. The iPhone's integrated video chat app is FaceTime. If you have an Android or Windows smartphone, the best apps to use are Skype, Google Hangouts, Viber or Tango. It's a good idea to have several apps on your phone and to know how to use them all. That way, odds are good you will have a video chat app that is compatible with your prospect.

While it's possible to do video chat calls using a cellular data plan, it's not very practical. Video eats up data like nobody's business, and data is expensive. To offer this type of service to your customers, your dealership will need an external WiFi network.

Many dealers are now installing outdoor wireless networks to accommodate the growing number of people with their connected devices. For a salesperson out on the lot with customers, it's great to be able to look up pricing information, message their manager or find the answer to any question using a mobile tablet. 

Video is a great way to engage customers and just maybe, get them excited enough about the vehicle to want to come in for a test drive. What do you think?  Have you ever performed a live video walkthrough and what kinds of results did you have?