Dave Bates, Vice President of customer support for the U.S. and Canada
Dave Bates, Vice President of Customer Support for the U.S. and Canada
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At the NADA Show, Reynolds & Reynolds took dealers through the development path of their DMS software, and how they have evolved to support digital retailing and a better in-dealership F&I experience.
“We’ve been working for the last 10 years — rebuilding our platform,” said Dave Bates, Vice President of Customer Support for the U.S. and Canada, Reynolds & Reynolds. “We rebuilt it from the ground up, and had a focus on making it more of a retailing system than just a dealer management system.”
Bates said they have continued that work, with the goal of having a single core platform that drives efficiencies, and that is open and transparent from a consumer perspective. From the dealer perspective, the goal is to drive profitability. “And so we’ve continued down that path,” said Bates.
One of the things the company has focused on recently, is helping dealers maintain profitability with the decline in new car sales, and the search for more revenue streams.
“We’ve got a couple of key products in Canada that can help dealers drive that revenue stream. One is docuPAD. And the other is our Advanced Service platform,” said Bates. “So those are two things that are being used, as well as our payment system that plugs in and makes electronic and online payment more easy to take advantage of. We’re trying to deliver that consumer experience in the way they want to be served, while protecting the dealer’s profitability.”
Consumers using docuPAD to finalize their deal and choose F&I products often experience a “wow” factor, and that has been providing a better user experience.
“You think about people who don’t typically buy cars every year, and they go in thinking about the last time I bought one and signed 39 papers,” said Bates. “There’s more documents when I bought my house, and now you walk in and you sit down at the dealership and you have this expectation of a horrible time, and it’s just like, ‘Oh my gosh.’”
Reynolds and Reynolds is looking to change that reaction, and help improve the experience.
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