The modern dealership is awash with technology as employees navigate multiple systems to fulfil daily, often specific, tasks.
In many cases, systems are unconnected resulting in double keying and extensive manual input with data unable to be readily accessed.
Differing demands of dealer groups, individual dealerships and OEMs mean requirements inevitably vary. However, the overriding need is surely good quality datasets that connect across systems.
Finance systems that speed sales
At Hilton Garage in Derbyshire, iVendi’s Finance Navigator went live earlier this year. The used car supermarket stocks up to 1,700 vehicles at any one time and has since seen finance approval ratings in Q2 leap from around 50% to almost 85% with around three-quarters of accepted customers progressing to payout.
Finance Navigator enables the retailer at the point of sale and the consumer online to input basic details to access preapproved and high eligibility lender products, producing output in a format similar to a price comparison website in less than 10 seconds.
James Tew, iVendi CEO, said: “No one is wasting time hanging around and the car isn’t left on sale for another 24 hours because the retailer isn’t sure if the finance will be approved.”
With 300-400 customers purchasing finance every month, previously, the Hilton team applied to multiple lenders for a single customer.
Head of sales Robert Collins said: “Now, within the space of a few minutes from start to finish, we get a result so we know where to place a customer. By facilitating the soft search up front, it stops those hard searches showing up.”
Hilton’s web calculator uses iVendi’s Connect APIs, enabling customers to complete more of the sales journey online, undertaking the soft search themselves and selecting their own lender. Website engagement has resulted in over 700 unique leads of which 257 applied and 107 subsequently progressed to payout.
Utilising iVendi’s Digital Deal solution enables the team to send the vehicle price, part exchange, settlement figure and value-added products (VAPs) to a Hilton branded account.
Currently, it is used mostly in the showroom but as consumer car-buying behaviour evolves, the business expects fewer physical customer touchpoints and the ability to offer ‘the best of both worlds’ is a focal point of its future sales strategy.
Connecting marketing and CRM
With so many digital channels, retailers face a growing challenge of qualifying and converting an ever-increasing volume of enquiries. TekCor4 analysed over seven million messages sent during the first six months of 2026 on behalf of over 600 UK retailers and identified a net 19% year-on-year increase in resultant enquiries, equivalent to over 720,000 over the first half of the year.
Digital messaging, though, generated high levels of engagement. Enquiry follow-up emails enjoyed a 61% open rate and a 17% click-through rate. Dynamic stock alerts, whereby details of vehicles similar to those that the customer enquired about are shared, saw an average open rate of 47% and a click-through rate of 22%.
Following a visit to a retailer’s website, SocialStock automatically delivers personalised stock catalogue adverts to an individual’s social media platforms with retailers implementing the tool receiving over 2,000 enquiries, leading to over 980 orders.
Jeremy Evans, director, marketing services at TekCor4, said: “Through more effective data and lead management, retailers are logging more leads than ever before. Automated systems can then take on the heavy lifting for nurturing and qualifying those enquiries, generating significant measurable return on investment and leaving sales teams to focus on leads furthest down the sales funnel.”
CitNOW Group’s chief product officer Lisa Arrowsmith identifies dealerships’ key challenge as ensuring the right technology works together to deliver measurable business value.
She said: “While the DMS remains an essential operational platform, the CRM has become the true commercial engine of the business. It is the CRM that enables retailers to manage customer relationships, proactively identify opportunities, automate engagement and drive revenue across the entire customer lifecycle.”
The key enabler is unified data. Often, different information sits across disconnected platforms with the customer experience layer separated from the underlying data, records and systems that power the business. As a result, experiences are not informed by data, data is not shaping outcomes and every disconnect becomes a missed opportunity.
By bringing together data from across the dealership, including CRM, DMS, enquiry sources, aftersales activity and customer interactions, retailers can create a single, trusted view of the customer and the business.
CitNOW Group’s DataHub AI helps connect data across the entire value chain, not just from its own solutions, to deliver ‘actionable intelligence’. Missed opportunities are identified, and the priorities for the day highlighted in just minutes.
Arrowsmith added: “The most successful retailers will be those that combine unified data, CRM, AI and customer engagement technologies into a single ecosystem that supports employees, strengthens customer relationships and delivers measurable commercial outcomes.”
Connected data enables dealers to deliver the right message at the right time, to the right individuals whilst integration of showroom, aftersales and DMS platforms, through solutions such as Marketing360, creates a single view of the customer.
CitNOW Group calculates campaign creation time is reduced by 35% but when combined with AI-powered campaign automation, time saving increases to as much as 75%. Meanwhile, automated, data-driven campaigns have increased sales by 15%, demonstrating how connected technology can drive both efficiency and measurable commercial growth.
Closing the dealership data gaps
The typical group runs seven to ten platforms, DMS, CRM, digital retail, finance, and OEM portals, according to Nexbotix which has developed AI and automation to bridge the gap between disconnected systems. The cost isn’t in technology but headcount as duplicated human effort hold disconnected systems together.
Nexbotix software sits above a group’s DMS, CRM, finance and OEM platforms, to read and validate the data passing between them. It then executes manual work such as sourcing stock, sales admin, keeping vehicle records clean, and processing invoices and finance.
Arnold Clark now processes 200,000 invoices a year across more than 1,000 suppliers and 200 sites, with 8,500 manual hours taken out and over 90% going straight through, without replacing any existing systems. Mon Motors put the same approach through their finance workflows and took out 4,600 hours a year across 90,000 invoices, while removing manual errors entirely.
CEO Chris Porter said: “Most dealers don’t have a technology gap; they have an integration gap. They’ve already bought the tools, what’s missing is the layer that makes them work together and takes the manual glue-work off people’s desks. An eleventh system rarely fixes that. Connecting the ten they’ve got does.”
Keyloop data shows the average dealer uses eight to 10 disconnected systems to close a single deal yet connectivity is needed at every stage of running a dealership, not just at the point of sale or the point of customer contact.
Tim Smith, chief strategy officer, said: “What retailers don’t need is more systems. What they do need is a unified technology stack.
“A customer experiences the outcomes of a dealership’s disconnected technology stack, while staff are left to grapple with the disconnection itself. Every absent link in the stack becomes a task somebody has to do by hand. Staff become the connective tissue holding a disconnected stack together.”
Park’s Motor Group, one of Scotland’s largest dealer groups with 80 sites across 28 franchises, rolled out Keyloop’s Service Hub – a cloud-native platform designed to manage the entire aftersales journey – across all of its workshops in June 2025, replacing three separate aftersales point-solutions with one platform. The group reported a £57 increase in average aftersales invoice value, a 42% rise in upsell rate and a significant reduction in customer no-shows.
Smith added: “As an industry, we talk about connectivity like it’s a customer feature, but it isn’t; it’s what lets a staff member at the front desk answer a customer question with one look at a screen instead of via three phone calls. If dealerships can adopt a unified system, then the positive customer experiences will follow.”
Faster vehicle prep and stock turn
Sometimes, efficiencies gained in a specific area can have far-reaching results. In vehicle prep, staff often physically track down a vehicle and its progress by liaising direct with colleagues or by walking a large site with a clipboard.
The vAutoStock toolkit – vAutoPrep, vAutoTrack and its AI assistant vAutoBots – combines robotics, AI, and vehicle tracking to automate processes. Most dealers implementing the technology see a movement from 20 plus days down to five-seven in prep time. The impact shifts dealers from taking 40 days to turn to 28 days.
Managing director Chris Barrett said: “We often go into a business that has ‘good prep times’. What we find in reality is that the majority of cars flow through well but what gets missed are the vehicles that do not such as a delayed difficult decision to trade or a forgotten vehicle.
“We deliver marginal gains like jobs cards raised as soon as the car lands, authorisation requests and approved, and moving the vehicle between processes quicker. These are easy wins with the right tool.”
Register for AM’s Innovation Week webinar
This issue will be explored further during AM’s free webinar, Identifying the innovations that count, at 2pm on Thursday, 24 September.
Our expert panel will examine how dealership leaders can distinguish technology that produces a meaningful return from tools that merely add another layer to an already crowded technology stack.
Reserve your place for the AM Innovation Week webinar now and follow AM throughout Innovation Week as we examine innovation in marketing, sales, aftersales and dealership culture.