VinSolutions issues

[Sharrett]

Actually, Joe, there is value in public shaming.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

users won’t be bombarded by vendors.

Joe,

Now that's just a little funny coming from VIN. Sorry, couldn't resist.

 

[JoeLittle]

Absolutely. We live in a complete digital world now and "word of mouth" moves at the speed of light. I think that open forums are greatly useful for customers of any industry to get answers when other paths seem to not work for them. It is on part of the businesses to keep an eye out in their industry's forums to address those concerns and take action. The reason we extend "No Contracts" is that very reason, if someone is not happy they have opportunity to go else where. We never want that to happen so we challenge ourselves by not having contracts with our dealers and taking care of them. We address comments and concerns through the different forums, Facebook, Twitter, and other media outlets. We welcome it and embrace it because its not changing.
I commend Jeff Kershner and Alex Synder for putting together a great forum for dealers to network.
There are great comments on Dealer Refresh about VinSolutions and not so great ones. We just want to keep the dealers happy, address thier concerns and attract new dealerships that are wanting to consolidate all their vendors into one.

 

[emilymoore]

Emily,
Your issues have been sent to the support department here at VinSolutions.

Joe, Thanks for jumping in and trying to help us. I look forward to being able to write a follow up post saying that our issues have been corrected.

 

[JCollins]

I must say I too experienced some pain if you will when we switched from iMagiclab to VinSolutions. The majority of said pain revolved around support or the lack there of. The issues I had pertained to admin functions and because of there enormous growth I do understand that their support team was playing catch up. In the end, with the help of my advocate Donna Stearns and the involvement of Jim Nelson the team at VinSolutions were able to circle their wagons and I am a "Happy Camper"
My relationship with VS is still evolving and getting stronger daily. Was this a learning curve? Sure. I'm not the most patient person and it took time to understand and learn how to communicate with VS as this is the case with any vendor. Again my issues were with admin functions and have to say that I receive little to no complaints on user interface from my staff. It's the best tool on the market and continues to get better. Well done Vin Team

 

[mattwatson81]

Thanks Jeff. You will be glad to know that I am in the middle of a project to redo a lot of our admin settings to make configuring the system easier to do. Keep an eye out for that in the coming weeks.

 

[emilymoore]

We have been having nothing but issue after issue after issue as well. We are so frustrated! (We have had 2 separate launches which has created its own unique set of problems) It seems that we spend more time trying to make the system work and resolving issues than we do helping customers. I have an entire page of common tasks that any dealer would do on a daily basis that I'm told are "feature requests" - com'on guys. They have completely over-sold their product and under-delivered. It seems like every time we get one thing working, two others break.

Some of our ongoing issues (not to mention the regular down time and lockouts) that are still unresolved :

- cant push deals to ADP
- cant merge sales events within a customer record
- customers marked lost are still getting active prospect followup
- service leads dont show on the dashboard as a new lead nor in the "view all leads"
- we are still missing sold/ service data
- service appts are duplicating in VIN
- a sales manager cant flip buyer/cobuyer when desking a deal without being an admin
- and the list goes on...

Any assistance from VIN to help smooth this out would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Emily Moore
Sharrett Automotive
Hagerstown MD

FOLLOW UP POST:

We still continue to have issue after issue with VIN. The lastest problems include all of the above issues (with the exception that we are now able to push deals to ADP) plus:

-not being able to email out of "Smarter Mail"
-sold prospects showing 6 or 7 DMS sold records for each sale (which triggers multiple processes sending the same things out in duplication)
-no way of giving a service advisor access to all of the service leads without giving them managerial access
-some incoming emails are not attaching themselves to the customer records for no apparent reason (and can't be attached manually)

This seems to be constantly evolving list as things get resolved, others mysteriously break. For example, just last week - one day our leads just stopped showing up for a day. Another few days, the message log was broken. Sometimes, our wholesale vehicles accidently get pushed out instead of being filtered out. Sometimes our feed goes out at strange times which delays our photos an extra day. One day our User List crashed and couldn't be updated. One day our photo upload totally crapped out. All this within one week really makes for some cranky people!

I'm still waiting to be able to write about a positive outcome in all of this...there is one, right?!

 

[GReuscher]

Hi Emily,

..and thanks for keeping us updated. I just wanted to drop by and follow-up on the above instead of lurking for months now I am told that you have Donna and Steve on the case...and a few great feature requests that are being developed to make some processes a bit more user-friendly. Please don't hesitate to reach out if anything has been missed through your work today with the VinCare team.

 

[Mactrekr]

Hi, I thought I'd throw my $.02 in on this thread. I'm the IT Director at our dealership group, and we switched to Vin Solutions a few months ago. Our number one issue is performance, this thing CRAWLS... sometimes it is sooo slow that it literally is unusable. I must get 5 calls a day from our sales guys complaining that they can't use VIN due to speed. Our sales rep told us that our connection was too slow, our internet connection is fiber optic and runs a dedicated 10Mb synchronous, with 7Mbs minimums on speed test. Lots of other problems, mostly having to do with moving data from our DMS to the web, and server error pages. My bosses are just about ready to start shopping for a different CRM.

 

[Sharrett]

Our latest, yet ongoing, issue is we were promised that Service would be able to do follow up much as with our last CRM system. We were told that the functionality we needed would be available with a "Campaigns" tab. Well, the campaigns tab showed up but we don't know how to use it or translate what we were doing previously into the new system. We were told they would set it up for us. Well, phone calls and follow ups later and Service still can't follow up with our customers.

What's it going to take?

I am sure sick of the over sell, under deliver, I gotta tell you.