Auto Dealer Software Giant Acquires Interactive Service Counter Firm GoMoto

March 2, 2020 by Dave Haynes

One of the challenges any technology company faces in penetrating a vertical market is crossing the divide from selling something that would be nice to have, to offering something that is seen as essential.

In car dealerships, things like big video walls and interactive car configurators are likely still in the nice to have category, whereas digital tools that solve a problem – like wait lines at busy service counters – may well be must-haves.

A Philadelphia company that does customer-driven check-in, upselling and check-out kiosks for auto dealers, called GoMoto, just got acquired by Reynolds and Reynolds, one of the dominant players in the management software used to run most dealerships.

“When I speak with dealers, I consistently hear them note the importance of the Service department in their overall business, but also the need to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of Service operations and improve the way consumers experience the Service department,” says Robert Burnett, a senior VP at Reynolds.  “GoMoto is a proven retailing tool that will enable dealerships to increase efficiencies and better serve customers the way the customer chooses to be served.”

The interesting data from this announcement is with GoMoto’s core benefits:

• Displays service recommendations tailored to the customer’s vehicle and helps improve the upsell rate at the dealership by as much as 20%.
• Displays other upsell opportunities, including trade-in appraisals, which have increased vehicle trade-in appraisal rate by as much as 11%.
• Provides a consumer-friendly reminder for recall alerts.
• Streamlines the Service check-in process – in as little as two minutes or less – and collects the necessary information with 95% accuracy.
• Boosts higher throughput in Service.

Reynolds and Reynolds is headquartered in Dayton, OH, which is also home to STRATACACHE.

The deal is interesting because it shows how a company that has a dominant, fundamental position in many dealerships can add new capabilities to its solution stack – which plays to the whole single provider, single contact, single invoice that many companies are looking for these days.

GoMoto did a deal a few months ago to have Toronto-based VenueVision be its Canadian reseller partner.  VenueVision started out as a digital signage play specifically for auto dealers, but over time has gone well beyond simple screens to very dealer-centric customer-facing applications.

This video (below) shows what GoMoto does, using interactive displays. Some hotel operators could learn from this – having tried self-service checkin a few times and had wildly different experiences (some slick, others hopeless).