A message from our CEO
I would like to take this opportunity to personally address and inform all of you about a few problems we have experienced recently with our fully redundant enterprise network provided by our major nationwide carrier of choice, Century Link. All of our internal redundant systems remained online, but we were hit with carrier-related service issues. We have used Century Link (previously called Qwest) for years and we have had very few issues with their enterprise level service. However, even though Century Link has assured us that their problems have been corrected, we take any sort of outage very seriously so we are adding a redundant carrier (AT&T) for further protection against downtime. We are going to add the same bandwidth with AT&T that we currently have with Century Link so that we end up with fully-capable, redundant-carrier circuits with automated failover in case Century Link experiences any more issues on their backbone. We have had a 99.996% uptime rate that we are extremely proud of and we are taking immediate steps to maintain this very high level of service.
I also want to let all of you know that we have recently added five new programmers, and you can expect a host of new and improved features in the next few months including automatic photo importing from third party websites such as vAuto, HomeNet, Cobalt and others. This feature will benefit hundreds of our dealers in many ways and should be released very soon. Beta testing should start within the next two weeks for select dealerships.
Finally, we will be opening an in house call center that will be integrated completely with ProMax that will initially handle all inbound calls from our trigger lead program, Market Thief. The call center will also be making outbound calls and appointments to all of the leads that have phone numbers attached to them, approximately 25-35%. For those of you not familiar with our Market Thief program, a trigger lead is a customer that was in a dealership the day before that had a credit bureaus pulled for automotive purposes. You choose the radius around your store and the credit bureau score range for these prospects. You can’t ask for a better lead, and somebody that is in the market for a car and looking for a dealer to get them financed. I am looking for 10-12 stores to help us Beta Test this new program, and will give these stores 200 free leads, and I have no doubt some extra sales at no charge! If you have never tried Market Thief or have been using some other Trigger lead programs now would be the time to try Market Thief. Please contact me directly at [email protected] if you would like to be a part of this intial test program.
Thank you again for your business and support. Next month we are celebrating our 18th year in business and look forward to providing you with great and innovative products for many more years to come.
Sincerely,
John Palmer
President/CEO
Version 9.7.21 is scheduled for release on July 19, 2012.
New Features / Updates:
- Added support for manually running an Instant Screen on co-applicants. For the dealers that have an automatic Instant Screen on showroom visits, this automatic pull now also works with co-applicants.
- The Desklog Summary Report, available on the Manager Dashboard, now has a date range filter.
- The Appointment Report, available on the Manager Dashboard, has a new Vehicle Desired column.
- The Sales Ranking Report, available on the Manager Dashboard, now remembers your last selection for "Front End Profit" versus "Total Profit"
- The speed of the BDC Sales Management Report has been greatly enhanced for some dealers.
- The speed of the Prospect Information Analysis Report has been greatly enhanced when selecting "All Prospects"
- ProCreditExpress now has a new user configuration option for "Edit Adverse Action Column in Logs"
- Lender guidelines for Advances now supports Black Book Wholesale value options.
Miscellaneous Fixes:
- Entering a new customer on the Deal Search screen and then immediately calculating new deals would sometimes result in no deals found which has been corrected.
- Fixed an issue for Reynolds integration that generated duplicate vehicles in stock on some occasions.
- The number of 'Late Payments in the last 24 months' was sometimes incorrect on the AutoSummary screen.
- The Compliance Review Report included an extra day when using the date filter.
- The Needed Vehicles Report would sometime freeze when sorting on the Model column.
- Completing a call on the outbound calls screen for tomorrow's appointments will now remove that call from the list of calls to be made.
- Corrected an issue with the Salesperson Inventory Report, and the New/Used Web Reports from including vehicles from the entire dealer group in certain situations.
- When auto-populating the City/State fields by a zipcode lookup, the known counties were not auto-populating the county drop down list on the Customer Workscreen.
- Scheduling an activity for a customer from the Customer Workscreen with a typed-in date would sometimes generate an error.
- When performing a retail scan and printing the filtered list, the term column was incorrect.
- When printing the Used Vehicle Summary Report on the Manager Dashboard, the bolded total row was not visible on all printers.
- The Incident Report and Pending Adverse Action Report, available from the Manager Dashboard, now save the previous report filter settings after drilling down to a Customer Workscreen and then clicking Back to the report view.
- Clicking on the Cash Down link on the Customer Workscreen after creating a customer could lead to a misleading error message stating that there was no customer name.
- Fixed a minor menu navigation issue with the Website main menu.
- On the Notes & History Screen for a customer, the VIN number wasn't fully visible for some purchased vehicles.