Firestock Press Release

FireSocket, a growing software company serving automotive dealers, today announced significant enhancements to its enterprise-wide customer relationship management (CRM) platform, DealerSocket. The upgrade focuses on the automotive service department and includes dynamic appointment scheduling, service management and follow up support tools that promise to optimize a critical but often neglected part of a dealer’s business operations.

With as much as 60 percent of the average automotive dealership’s profits coming from automotive service and repair departments, these new features stand to be welcomed by dealers. Most CRM technologies focus solely on a dealer’s sales and customer service operations, making the DealerSocket upgrade rather unique in the industry.

“This is exactly what the industry needs right now,” said Jim Brown, general manager, Larry H. Miller, LEXUS. “For us, technology has to connect to revenue. And DealerSocket does this for us with every new product that they release to the market.”

Cracking the “Pace of Play” Code

Already one of the industry’s most comprehensive dealer operations management platforms, DealerSocket’s strength lies in supporting the unique way in which an automotive dealership actually runs day to day. After all, the platform was created by two technology consultants who worked for a full year in a dealership prior to writing a single line of code. Today, DealerSocket is one of the fastest growing software companies in the industry, with nearly 500 dealerships deployed on the platform.

Last year, responding to demand, the company focused on cracking an industry-wide challenge: optimizing service scheduling, called “pace of play” in the industry. Managing the schedule of vehicles against specific technician and resource availability is a complicated problem facing nearly all dealerships. “Most don’t fare well,” said Jonathan Ord, CEO of FireSocket.

“Controlling and managing the pace of service is one of those ‘make or break’ issues in creating the ideal customer experience for a service department’s customers,” said Ord. “Unfortunately, it’s often left to chance at most dealerships.”

The new DealerSocket platform addresses the pace of play issue with an interactive “service calendar” feature. Unique in the industry, this extended service functionality manages all service appointments for the dealership to help maintain and organize customer relationships and provide the best service possible to all its customers. It helps the dealership assess and manage capacity and service drive loading. It also manages types of service customers (wait in customers, loaner vehicle customers, etc.) and automatically manages appointment cancellations, confirmations, no shows and reappointments on the fly. DealerSocket has even included a service loaner vehicle tracking and optimization tool.

Upgrades to the DealerSocket platform include:

* Service Calendar – easy to use graphical look at all service drive interactions and schedules, including operation code level views
* Media Mail – availability for DealerSocket customer to send flash video email marketing automatically based on service interactions
* Survey Functionality – online automated surveys for customers to provide feedback at any point in the customer lifecycle
* Roll-up Reporting – new metrics added to reporting functionality for large dealerships and dealership groups
* Loaner and Rental Vehicle – maintains loaner vehicle information including availability, service schedules, forecasts and customer check out tools

For more information on this upgrade, visit www.dealersocket.com.