Earlier this month, Affinitiv announced a series of significant upgrades to its DealerLens offering, the company’s all-in-one data management console. Our team caught up with Matt Rodeghero, Affinitiv’s new Chief Strategy Officer, to learn more about how these new enhancements will help dealers better leverage results to drive success.

How DealerLens Ramps Up Sales ROI for Dealerships: Q&A with Matt Rodeghero,
Chief Strategy Officer

What is DealerLens?

DealerLens is an interactive, heads-up display of how a dealership is working, performing, and functioning. It reports on all aspects of the dealership, covering everything from fixed ops to variable ops to outbound marketing and digital engagement in one customizable platform.

How have clients embraced this solution since it was introduced last year?

Feedback has been fantastic. Dealer groups really love the ability to have a concise view of all their store operations in one place, from sales to service to marketing retention. The combination of our equity data mining capabilities, along with our advertising, marketing and CRM technologies, is the perfect solution for building customer loyalty.

Why is this platform so important for dealerships and dealer groups?

Dealer groups benefit by learning how the full group is performing, as well as individual stores locally and nationwide. There are not many tools on the market today that can focus on scores of KPIs and business metrics simultaneously for a dealer group. Previously, it was annoying and a challenge, having to log into dozens of tools, websites and applications. With DealerLens, we can take a dealer group’s business structure, categorize it by district, state or region, or any locale for that matter, and compare metrics against local and national benchmarks, while providing feedback on how to improve results, whether its sales, service or marketing.

Can you walk us through some of the enhancement benefits, such as new sales and service dashboards as well as 50+ additional KPIs?

We currently have more than 50 KPIs that range from measuring marketing to driving service revenue, so dealers can learn what types of initiatives create the most value. Users will be able to see the impact of their reach and where the customers are coming from to reach them more effectively. For service appointment conversions, dealers are able to track the appointment show rate, and appointment sources, to see which appointments are resulting in the best show rates. You can look at things like average response time by marketing type, so users can identify what specifically evokes the fastest customer responses. And that’s just in the marketing dashboard. We have variable and fixed ops dashboards as well. We cover everything from total gross profit by day to the percentage of deals that have trade-ins, used car sales volume, new car sales volume, customer sales by segment, among numerous other metrics. There are so many different aspects of the sales components that we’re breaking down all key areas for dealerships, while our interactive platform lets users make changes in real time with a simple click of a button.

Can too much data be counterproductive?

Absolutely. That’s why we developed DealerLens to focus on the most important performance indicators. In doing so, we tie those KPIs back to recommendations that we provide to the dealers. So not only do we have KPIs that dealers can track, but we also give tips on how they can adapt, change or alter efforts to help move the needle. If you have too much data, too many reports and too many systems, it just becomes noise and will not result in meaningful, actionable change.

What does it mean by providing a 360° view of operations?

Just that. DealerLens is not only looking at fixed ops, variable or marketing, it is tracking all three at the same time, giving dealers a birds eye view of their entire operations so they can implement programs that generate sales and build long-term customer loyalty, from first-time buyers to repurchases.

Can DealerLens improve sales?

The definitive answer is yes. Fixed ops, variable and marketing are the three main tenants to any dealership. Mastering each enables dealers to drive better results that are ultimately going to drive success. For instance, sales metrics will provide insights on where a dealer could probably be driving more sales or the types of customers who are buying. Marketing will provide feedback on what promotions are more successful. In the end, a dealer can redirect efforts based on that intelligence. So, to that degree, it can be used to help improve sales. It’s not in and of itself going to sell more cars, but it’s going to be a tool that can give dealers insight into where they could improve revenue.

Are there current trends now that dealers should be capitalizing on?

Customer repurchases will be a key focus among dealers post-pandemic. Time to repurchase is one of our KPIs, including a five-year repurchase rate and average time to repurchase. That’s important because as interest rates continue to remain high, consumers who got into their cars a few years back with historically low rates may be taking longer to get into equity positions. Dealerships need to focus on service retention and service loyalty to maintain customer relationships and help motivate buyers to get them to a point where they’re going to want to repurchase in the current economic environment.

How can dealers better deploy this platform in their daily operations?

It’s really not a question of how dealers can better deploy DealerLens, it’s about actually using the application to get its full value. Affinitiv is exclusively focused on the automotive customer lifecycle. We don’t service other industries. Moreover, we are proven leader in automotive dealer sales, and DealerLens provides all the tools to help drive success. And while we provide extensive training and customer support, the interface is easy to use and highly intuitive, providing maximum value to our dealer customers.

What’s next?

We are always innovating and improving, focusing on high-value data, analytics, marketing, and software solutions. We will be adding about a dozen more KPIs into the DealerLens application, based on customer feedback and new focus areas for dealer expansion. Our team is constantly publishing new updates to the platform to improve the customer experience and to help improve results. We are also continuing to work with outside vendors to pull in more external third party data. The end result is a platform that will continue to get richer and richer and have more and more data that will help drive sales and long-term customer loyalty.

Schedule a demo to learn more about how DealerLens can provide a seamless, centralized view of data that will lead to better sales ROI.