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"We Want Our Website to Drive Sales"
When you sell RV vehicles in Alaska, where customers often live a day's drive away from your sales center, they need to be sure you offer what they want before they set out to purchase. A & M RV Center, the largest RV dealership in the state (and one of the largest in North America) had a problem. Their website displayed pictures of available vehicles, but it had to be updated by hand.
Because their customers often do pre-research online before making the trip into the "big city" in Anchorage, A &M's Web site is a critical part of bringing leads in to their main show room. They wanted to be able to display the latest inventory online, since new inventory comes in several times a day. But they didn't have the personnel to dedicate to this job, and so were searching for technology that would take of this for them, automatically.
When customers went online and looked, they wanted them to see the latest stock, the latest prices, and highly accurate information based on their current inventory, not last week's or last month's. When a customer made the trip from Kodiak Island (a 390-mile trip), they didn't want them to discover that the model they saw on their website was out of stock.
But A & M wanted more. Their sales personnel are quite busy, and they wanted their website to be so attractive to customers and representative of their inventory that it could help cut down on the many phone calls asking already busy personnel to check their inventory, freeing them up to take care of onsite sales.
The system A & M wanted had to be easy to use, streamlined, and not require a major investment in staffing or IT development costs.
The current system A & M used was based on its Windows-based IDS Dealer Management System. They had a strong database for updating inventory; they just didn't have a way to leverage it to create simultaneous website updates without duplicating the data entry process.
Redberri provided the solution they were looking for - without the need to hire a dedicated IT staff member. They contacted Redberri, and discovered to their delight that post-purchase installation was simple, using the Redberri CD.
Redberri remotely configured a lightweight client version, which could work on any standard PC. This was run on the same PC as A & M's IDS dealer management system, and forwards inventory updates to a server edition of Redberri running on a Linux server.
From this server, Redberri uses a rules engine to post updates directly to the A & M website (www.GoRV.com): once an inventory change is entered, Redberri updates the Linux-based site within 60 seconds. As part of the posting, the system picks a stock photo of the vehicle type and displays it with the listing.
The system is streamlined, automated, and was a huge step forward in empowering A & M's online marketing channel.
"Redberri has definitely made an impact on sales. And it's all automatic, which is great. As soon as it sees a new Fleetwood Discovery vehicle enter the system, it posts on our website. It runs by itself." -Michael Horning, A & M RV Center
According to Mike Horning, the Marketing and Sales Director, A & M saw an almost immediate return on their investment with an RV sale that involved a pre-purchase inventory check. During the first 6 months of deployment, over a dozen sales have been attributed to the newly improved website features implemented with Redberri.
Horning states that A & M gets 6 queries a week from their website now, and customer complaints that vehicles they saw online are out of stock have virtually stopped. Customer satisfaction has dramatically increased, as accurate pricing and vehicle information has become easily accessible through the website. Executives at A & M credit the use of Redberri with helping to differentiate their firm from the competition and further widen their market share in regional sales dominance.
Contact Redberri today to learn more about how it can help you leverage your firm's data and break through "online/offline" boundaries.
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