by jazdale » Tue Nov 11, 2008 4:10 pm
This has been an ongoing topic that every dealership needs to address - then adhere to store-wide, go-forward rules.
Somewhere between X476 and TheOne lies the answer for your store.
Ask yourself this - Is your DMS simply a transaction system, or is it also a database for follow-up and marketing campaigns?
Ask those in parts and accounting and the answer will be towards the tranaction side.
Ask sales and service and their answer will be towards the follow-up/campaign side.
CRM and 3rd party data collectors are one way to address this - but regardless of whether you follow-up in-house or out-sourced, there needs to be retained data to work with.
Personally, I like the idea of 'as long as I can" since you never really know what piece of data becomes a marketing campaign home run.
Realistically, you should retain the data for at least as long as the financing note on the sold vehicle. In some cases, that may be 84 or even 96 months.
Using your inhouse system for follow-up just makes good economic sense. To do this, we need to have a store-wide agreement to how we add customers.
Are we adding a new cusotmer number everytime we sell a car to a repeat customer? If so, stop it!!
Otherwise clean-up will be futile.
In ADP, turn on the Dupe rules with function NMS.
As TheOne pointed out, run your name file against the NCOAA (Datafresh) and run the name-consolidation tool (NCT) to merge the dupes. The first time you run NCT will be a huge chore because there are several years of junk to clean up. Thereafter, it should be a very small task to maintain.
Whether your using your system for inquiries, transactions or marketing, you would be amazed at how much easier it is to work with a clean name file. Its definitely worth the effort.