The Cobalt Group Adds Desking and F&I Capabilities with Acquisition of Auto Town
SEATTLE--June 21, 2004--| Auto Town F&I 3.0 will strengthen and extend Cobalt's Prospector CRM solution and offer automotive dealers unparalleled control of the entire sales and financing process |
The Cobalt Group, the leading provider of customer relationship management (CRM) and e-business software and services to the automotive retail market, today announced it has acquired certain assets of automotive software provider Auto Town(R).
With the acquisition, Cobalt will integrate the Auto Town F&I 3.0 product into Cobalt Prospector, the automotive industry's most comprehensive CRM solution, to provide new desking and F&I (finance and insurance) capabilities. As a result, dealers will have unprecedented control over all aspects of the vehicle sales and financing process.
"This is an important acquisition because Cobalt now offers the most complete suite of dealership front office capabilities including desking, credit bureau reports, trade appraisal, menu selling, and F&I forms capabilities as part of a fully integrated, best of breed vehicle retailing solution," said John Holt, president and CEO of The Cobalt Group. "By adding the capabilities of Auto Town to those of Cobalt Prospector, Cobalt will help dealers efficiently manage the sales process to better interact with consumers during every phase of the vehicle purchase and ownership lifecycle."
The Auto Town F&I 3.0 integration with Cobalt Prospector will enable a dealership to efficiently capture all customer and prospect information from nearly any channel of communication (walk-in, phone calls, or over the Internet), move the prospect through the sales and financing process according to the dealership's business rules, conduct the negotiation, perform the trade appraisal, finance the purchase, and record the sale in the dealership's accounting system, as well as automatically schedule all follow-up activities, all through a single, highly integrated enterprise software system. The solution is entirely Web-based, saving dealers thousands of dollars in hardware, software, and infrastructure required by client/server or other legacy technology. Coordinating with the dealership accounting system, the Cobalt solution will automatically capture valuable financial data, efficiently hand the deal off electronically from the salesperson, to the sales manager, and then to the F&I manager, present financing options to the customer, and with one click record the entire deal.
"Auto Town was the first company to fully automate the sales, finance and customer relations process for the automotive retail industry," said Tom Price, Auto Town's Chairman and dealer principal of Tom Price Automotive, Inc. "We're excited to join the Auto Town assets with Cobalt to create the most powerful CRM and F&I product suite in the industry."
The combination of Auto Town F&I 3.0 with Prospector makes it possible for dealers to seamlessly flow customer data directly into the F&I process without tedious and costly re-keying of data. This greatly reduces the number of bad or duplicate records caused by double entry and manual input errors, allowing dealers to serve customers far more quickly with fewer mistakes during the deal process. This time savings translates into substantial increases in sales, gross profits, and net profit per dealership. Auto Town dealers report that the time needed to finance and complete a purchase is cut from over an hour to less than 20 minutes, reducing the time the customer spends in the F&I office and greatly increasing customer satisfaction.
"Customers don't want to spend hours in the dealership waiting for F&I numbers," said Jerry Daniels, executive vice president of the Coggin Automotive Group. "Auto Town F&I 3.0 for Prospector will help sales and F&I managers handle the sales process more quickly, accurately, and efficiently to help improve the customer experience and increase the likelihood of closing the sale."
Cobalt Prospector, the most powerful CRM solution in the automotive industry, helps dealers enhance their prospect handling skills, boost sales closing rates, and better market to their customers and prospects. Prospector enables dealers to automate their sales force and manage their showroom floor with convenient sales desk management tools and accurate enterprise reports to analyze and improve performance.
To sign up or get more information about Cobalt Prospector, contact Cobalt at 866-439-2258 or e-mail sales@cobaltgroup.com.
About The Cobalt Group
The Cobalt Group (www.cobaltgroup.com) works exclusively in the automotive retail market developing integrated technologies that help manufacturers and dealers increase their profits and operational efficiencies. Cobalt offers a broad range of products and services, including enterprise software; customer relationship management (CRM) applications; online retailing applications; the industry's largest OEM parts locating and marketing service; and dealership best practices training and consultation. Cobalt's network includes 12,000 franchised dealers and more than 70 of the 100 largest dealer groups. Cobalt is the only software technology provider ever endorsed by 27 manufacturers and the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA).
About Auto Town
Founded in 1996 in the San Francisco Bay Area, Auto Town is a venture capital-backed Silicon Valley-based software and Internet solution provider dedicated to improving the revenues and profits of automotive dealerships while increasing their customer responsiveness. Its easy-to-use applications integrate fully with a dealer's existing software systems. DealerTrak, Auto Town's core product, is a comprehensive sales management, finance and insurance (F&I), data mining and Internet marketing software suite. Targeted to the top 10,000 franchised dealers in the United States, Auto Town's software solutions help automobile dealers compete in the face of growing consolidation and new distribution channels in the automotive industry. More information regarding Auto Town is available by calling Auto Town at (510) 723-4815.