Video Now a Part of CRM update from August 2008

Video messages are becoming a part of dealership customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

Marketing firm DME Automotive uses a studio for dealerships to provide videos to customers via e-mail attachments and other forms of Web-communication.

The videos range from product information to messages from dealers thanking customers for their purchases.

“The media is important to recipients but the relevance of the message is more important,” says Michael Walther, president of DME, a firm associated with JMsolutions.

DME's customer-contact channels include live calls, interactive voice messages, e-mails, traditional mail and personalized URLs to maintain interactive service-related communications between dealerships and their customers.

There are 57 different segment points that occur in various life cycles for sales and service customers, Walther says.

Those include timely marketing messages centered on factory warranty expirations, lease expirations, and service reminders, birthday greetings and thank-you messages.

JMsolutions' union with DME is intended to integrate with JM's other products that range from AAX, an inventory-management system, to ProCal Desking, an analyzer that structures deal options for customers using data such as down payments, interest rates and trade values.

“We're very new to the CRM space,” says JMsolutions President Scott Barrett.

The challenge is to “tie up to 15 products together and make them work together,” he says.

CRM itself is not a solution, but rather a systematic means to the solution of how a dealership effectively maintains an ongoing relationship with customers, says JM Group Vice President Scot Eisenfelder.

Part of the CRM training of dealership personnel emphasizes the importance of sticking with the system, he says. “It's more than key-stroke training. Great ideas require execution.”