Industry News & Trends

UCS buys Reynolds & Reynolds

I know this is not huge news by now and it’s more of a
merger then a buyout. I was waiting to get an
actual document from Reynolds&Reynolds before posting it. Click here for the document. The combined company will
continue to be named Reynolds & Reynolds, and the UCS brand will be
discontinued.

Today is a great day for Reynolds," said Finbar O’Neill.
"We’re creating the world’s pre-eminent dealer services provider by
leveraging the great product and strong technical capabilities of UCS while
continuing to build on Reynolds’ relentless focus on serving our
customers."

Now if they could only build a CRM system that actually works well.

Founder of DealerRefresh - 20+ Years of dealership Sales, Management, Training, Marketing and Leadership.
J
"...Now if they could only build a CRM system that actually works well."

Music to my ears!
You can tell that the R&R CRM platform was assembled by a team of people that had to cram in every feature imaginable (not a bad thing), then slapped it together without any LEADERSHIP from it's end users (a very bad thing). They need a complete makeover with site navigation optimization gurus and a dealer focus group to beta with.

FOCUS GROUP 101.
Speaking of focus group, if R&R wanted proof of it's platform's usefulness (not that R&R really want's this info), it would be easy to construct a SIMPLE test for the various levels of users and ask them to complete daily tasks... create an email, find a customer that sent an email with specific keywords sent several weeks ago, build a report, ask the sls mngr to pull all the ups on a stock# from the last 20days, create a mail campaign to all past buyers who are NOT did not lease... etc.

They'd discover 3 things.
#1). I'd bet that the avg. Dealer uses <30% of it's potential.
#2). This would present some new training revenues for R&R
#3). Top R&R mngt. should be alarmed and fast track the fix.

I find the entire R&R CRM platform to be a time robbing, head scratching and a puzzlement. It's not me, although I am not from this industry. I am very technically adept. As an example, I've designed and built our web site (breseechevrolet.com: a complete makeover is underway). From a management perspective, I have decades of experience being self-employed with a staff of 30. From my unique perspective, I understand the thoughts & needs of everyone involved in the CRM soup (customers, sales reps, Sls mngrs, GM, etc..).

IMO, Because the layout is not driven by the end users, even though the items I need are in there (somewhere), I can't string together hours of un-interrupted time to see where and how all the parts connect (as R&R sees it).

R&R university is another example of a good idea in need of navagation & content leadership.

HEY! I am not all grumbles, the R&R telephone customer support crew is as fine a group as I have ever found, kudos there (who ever assembled and defined that dept, needs to help his co-managers at R&R!).

If R&R had CSI surveys, they'd fail miserably!
Joe Pistell
Internet Director
BreseeChevrolet.com
[email protected]


J