or so the saying goes.
One of my customer's recently asked my advice on an issue he wanted to solve. The problem is common for a most dealers - they receive email leads in from many sources -their web site as well as third parties ranging from Autotrader, ebay, Pistonheads through to their local newspaper listings.
Each of the emails is in a different format, and each changes from time to time.
He uses our email interface to load up leads into our Sales 360 but this means that the sales team have to inteprete the email text on screen and enter the customer contact details and the vehicle of interest, part exchange details manually. This works well, but there are clearly efficiency gains to be had by automating this part of the process.
After a short discussion, I recommended that they use a low-cost third party software called "Zapier" which is a middleware product which can accept emails (or collect files or call web sites etc), and then translate the incoming message into a standard Navigator message.
The Navigator message in question was part of our Engage 360 suite of Application Programmer Interfaces. This is a simple web service call which is supported universally online and Zapier easily uses.
After a short screen sharing session with the Marketing Manager to demonstrate how to create a "Zap" (as Zapier calls them!) which calls our interface, they were able to easily go and build a solution which takes emails from almost any source and "scrapes" the information out of them, calling the Engage 360 Sales Enquiry Creation Web Service to load the enquiry into the Navigator Sales 360 CRM system meaning that the Sales team can immediately start working on the lead without having to interpret it.
The beauty of the solution is that it is relatively simple, can be easily extended for any and all types of emails, plus when eBay (or anybody else) change their email format, they can easily adjust the email scraping template to use the new format.
From a business perspective, it means that all leads are instantly in Navigator, which then means that the Sales team can immediately follow them up. KPIs such as "time to respond to lead" and "success" can be measured accurately by Lead type, by Sales executive and many other ways with ease.
It is also straightforward to use Engage 360 to populate a dealer specific Dashboard screen (eg a big monitor in the Sales Office) which highlights new leads that haven't been picked up quickly enough and other live metrics which help a Sales Manager to keep his finger on the pulse.
A genuine solution where the customer is now fully self-sufficient , both now and in the future. He's learnt how to fish.
Find out whether Navigator is a good fit for your dealership. Spend 30 mins with one of our Consultants in a no pressure environment. Click the button to book a Zoom Call
Book a Discovery Call
.jpg)
