Auto Dealer Software Data Integration Experts Blog

This is a question that has been debated in the retail automotive sales industry for decades. It is not my intention to resolve this debate or presume that I could. It is just such an interesting industry question; I thought I would share some thoughts.

Customer information is the "golden egg" critical for successful marketing of vehicle incentives, service programs, campaign notifications, lease renewals, etc. Those who have a claim on the customer information are auto manufacturers and auto dealers.

Since both have the ability to access some, if not all, of the customer information for a single dealership, the answer to who owns the customer dictates how the customer information can be utilized. Let's look at each company individually:

Auto manufacturers receive the customer information upon vehicle sales, warranty and customer pay repair orders and parts invoices. They may not have access to all of the customers that come into a dealership, but they have enough. The issue for the auto manufacturer is what are they allowed to utilize the information for. With privacy laws and franchise agreements, auto manufacturer may be permitted to use the data internally but not share the information outside their walls.

Auto Dealers have access to all of the customer information in their dealer management system. Like the auto manufacturer, dealers also have an issue with sharing the data. Not really a legal issue, more an ability and/or ease of sharing the customer information with third parties. Sure dealers can run reports or manually enter data into a third parties web portal to share the customer information, but that can be labor intensive depending on the project.

Auto manufacturers and dealerships both "own" all or a subset of the customer information and what they do with it is important. What integrations do you think they need to develop to improve the retail automotive sales industry?

Rich has over 19 years automotive solutions experience with auto dealer management software. Over his 15 years with Reynolds & Reynolds (then UCS), his responsibilities included dealer management software support, auto dealer software installation, auto manufacturer account management and dealership consulting.

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