Louis-Yves Cloutier, President
Louis-Yves Cloutier, President
—
Things were so busy in the 360 Agency booth, that Canadian auto dealer had to circle back and find a moment the company wasn’t doing demos of their new Desking 360 tool.
Company president Louis-Yves Cloutier was excited to talk about the company’s five years of work to bring physical and digital desking of car deals to the same platform.
He said in 2016, the company launched an online retailing platform for used cars, in 2018 launched Showroom V2 which is a digital retailing platform for new cars. Desking 360, he said, now completes the strategy. “It’s made off the same backbone as our digital retailing product. So now if you do a transaction online, you start your quoting and your credit application, you show up at the dealership, everything is integrated,” said Cloutier.
He said if a customer starts in a dealership with a salesperson, they can go back home and everything is saved in their account. “Now you can go seamlessly in between the virtual world on the website of a dealership and the physical world in-store,” said Cloutier.
He said, for example, a customer might complete 60 or 80 percent of a deal, but they aren’t ready to buy yet. The dealership can create an account for them from desking and send them a link to review online at home. “So instead of writing the numbers on the back of a business card, you now have a real transactional platform. And the same thing that you would see in other retail industries where you can place an order online and you transact into the POS of the retailer in store. And it’s connected with the inventory. So now everything that you see online is in the store,” said Cloutier.
The company is offering the Desking 360 tool as a standalone system, and doesn’t need to be bundled in with its other offerings like website platforms.
“We feel it’s very consumer-centric. Instead of looking like I have a big calculator, it looks like a system that I can show to a customer and work the deal with the customer and improve trust,” he said. “It’s a real merchandising tool in-store and it’s fully integrated with our CRM platform. Our CRM has been in the market for over five years.”
Cloutier said the Desking 360 tool helps unlock the full potential of working a deal from A to Z, and linking to the website’s digital retailing tools, dealerships can have a fully-integrated “consumer engagement platform.”
Return to NADA Show 2020
