It’s now easier than ever to customize the purchase process in Roadster Admin. Sales agents can request customer documents at any point without waiting for a submitted order. Agents can also send an open-ended document requesting any other pertinent documentation.

This upgraded sales process targets the needs of agents and customers, creating a flexible purchase experience in line with any changing circumstance.

To use this feature, go to the Documents section of the customer profile, locate and click on the three dots in the upper right corner of the page, then select Request Documents.

We know how frustrating duplicate leads and customer records can be. To help improve efficiency and optimize existing data, CRM Customer Lookup allows you to search your current customer records for an enhanced buying and selling experience.

Search for any customer in Roadster Admin or your Express Storefront and the existing Roadster data will appear alongside matching CRM records. This deeper integration streamlines your customer check-in process, making selling more efficient without duplicating data or efforts.

CRM Customer Lookup is currently available for CDK Elead, VinSolutions, and DealerSocket customers.

We’re enhancing our roles and permissions functionality to give your team more control and flexibility.

Once this is live, you can select your role from a pop-up menu in Roadster Admin. Each role has a recommended set of permissions but select users can adjust those permissions under “Settings” to best customize it for your team. Users can also configure their notification preferences to better fit their workflow.

We’ve replaced the “Recent Orders” feed with “Quick Actions” so Sales Agents can quickly see what customer activities or tasks need their immediate attention in Roadster Admin.

Agents can now see customer messages that require a response, trade submissions that need reviewing or completed documents awaiting approval in one place on the Dashboard. Outstanding actions can be completed directly from the Dashboard without opening the customer profile.

Our enhanced pricing tool functionality gives you even more control over your pricing strategy. Now you can edit the default down payment, adjust rate cards and select which programs show on the vehicles in your inventory — all without calling Dealer Support. Changes will appear on your Express Store in hours. You can also now configure Group Rules to include Used and Build-Your-Own inventory for even more control over pricing installed options.

To adjust your pricing, go to the Pricing tab in Roadster Admin.

Save time (and trees) with every transaction. Our new Documents workflow within Roadster Admin enables you to digitize common sales documents, rather than print them each time, and streamlines the signing process. After you upload the documents once, agents can access them any time within a Documents page and customize them in under a minute to support different deal types. If the customer’s already submitted their information via your Express Store, it will auto-populate in the documents.

Offer your customers the modern convenience of home vehicle delivery, thanks to our new integration with RunBuggy. This end-to-end platform prices and manages vehicle delivery from your dealership to their door. 

With this integration, you can:

• Manage vehicle logistics, pickups and billing 

• Provide customers with exact delivery quotes, based on pricing and mileage information that you provide

• Communicate with customers about vehicle delivery

However, you can still manually customize delivery pricing if you don’t use RunBuggy. To enable this feature in your Express Store, set up a RunBuggy account and then contact your Dealer Success Manager.

In August, we updated our messenger feature to make connecting with your customers easier and more efficient than ever. Now, when a customer sends a message from the My Order page, it’s prominently displayed in real time in the new Messages column, located on the right side of the Roadster Admin dashboard. At a glance, BDC and sales agents can also see any new messages, marked as “unread,” without needing to refresh the page. 

When customers initiate a chat on your dealership website, are they able to get actual answers to their questions?

In an industry where most chat providers rely on bots or agents who are only motivated to secure leads, Roadster saw an opportunity to offer a solution that meets customers’ needs and helps you capitalize on sales opportunities: Express Store Live.

Our new conversational commerce solution leverages our automotive experts’ 10 years of experience and the full functionality of your Express Store. Our live automotive experts respond to customers in seconds, provide detailed answers to their queries and guide them further down the purchase funnel.

On average, each conversation lasts 26 minutes (vs. 11 minutes for the industry) and, afterward, you’ll receive a time-saving summary that automatically pushes into your CRM for easy and efficient follow-up. In fact, 79% of customers respond to dealer outreach and 35.5% of deals close — 2x the industry average.

To learn more, please contact your Dealer Success Manager or request a demo.

*Available for purchase as an Express Storefront add-on.

In September, we began rolling out our biggest update yet to our Express Storefront to help increase engagement and efficiency for both you and your customers. 

In addition to sharing vehicle details with customers, you can now also proactively start online orders for them from the Customers Tab.

At the beginning of every order, customers are asked if they’d like to add a service and protection plan, if they haven’t already. This gives you a greater opportunity to boost your backend profit.

We’ve streamlined and simplified the remote checkout process to make it easier for customers to complete more of it prior to visiting your store. From the My Order page, they’re now able to complete purchase tasks in any order they’d like.

You can view all of their purchase activity on the Customers Tab and push tasks to guide them to finalize their order.

You can see all of this and more in our two-minute overview video. Or for a deeper dive into how to leverage the enhancements we made, you can take the Roadster Academy training course.

Tired of choosing between sending inactionable auto-response emails that internet leads ignore and sending detailed, individualized emails that eat up your time? Enter Express Response.

Roadster’s newest product instantly replies to customer queries with quality, actionable emails containing the price and VIN information from your Express Store. With the information they want right at their fingertips, customers are invited to immediately begin building their deal online. And they do. Express Response emails generate 10x more engagement than generic CRM autoresponders.

To learn more, please contact your Dealer Success Manager or request a demo below.

*Available for purchase as an Express Storefront add-on.

Having a Specials Page within your Express Store is a great way to boost SEO and is a perfect landing page for your marketing campaigns. Pulled directly from the vehicles available in your inventory feed, this new page will automatically display your OEM lease and finance specials. Customers can click on any vehicle to learn more about the incentives offered and begin building their deal online or in store. To enable this on your Express Store, please contact your Dealer Success Manager.

Our newly redesigned Customers tab is replacing the Leads tab in Roadster Dealer Admin. This is the first of many enhancements designed to provide sales agents with a complete view of a customer’s car-buying journey.

All of the customer’s online and in-store activity will be organized in one aggregated view under the “Activity” section: leads, orders, saved deals with terms, trade-ins and add-ons. Sales agents can see who initiated the activity and any next steps they need to take (displayed as links on the page).

Moreover, agents can now be assigned to customers, not leads. Anytime the customer takes action, the assigned agent will see a notification in the Activity list. They can also exchange messages with customers, add notes and even delete customer records.

We recently updated our Agent Utilization Report based on your feedback! The biggest enhancements include:

Fresher data. Stay in the know with info that's refreshed every 2 hours instead of overnight. Roadster Academy Certifications. See who’s completed which Certification(s) in a matter of hours, not days. Better user experience. Easily access agent activity from within the report itself via newly added drill-downs, right-clicks, hover-overs and links. New insights. Track your agents’ SRP and VDP views to see how they’re using your Express Store prior to capturing customers’ information.

Check out the changes for yourself by navigating to the Reports tab within Dealer Admin. Want to learn more? Take our course in Roadster Academy.

Our new “Compare Payments” feature on the VDP targets specific lease, finance, or down payments in seconds, without having to pencil a new deal with each adjustment.

Sales agents and customers can search by monthly payments while adjusting lease mileage options. Input a specific down payment to see what the monthly payments might look like, or view deal options by term length.

We even include lease mileage as well as standard and subvented rates in our calculations, so you can effortlessly roll to whatever monthly payment, down payment or due at signing amount you want.

Let your online customers know about your “contactless car buying” option available during the COVID-19 threat. We can provide you with an Alert Banner and Overlay Message featuring messaging that is personalized to your dealership. Contact your Success Manager or email [email protected] to enable this feature.

Deal View gives sales managers real-time visibility into every deal on the showroom floor. From a new “Showroom” tab in Dealer Admin, managers can monitor each deal in detail, including terms, trade-in and add-on products. They also can approve, adjust or override deals to manage profitability from anywhere there’s an internet connection.

Learn More

This new report enables you to see which new or used VINs (or Stock Numbers) have the most page views and VDP engagement (aka “buy signals”). You can use these insights to optimize your marketing campaigns and pricing strategy.

For example, see which colors get the most engagement and use that data to optimize your next marketing campaign. Or, quickly identify trims and price points that aren’t getting the engagement you’d expect and consider offering a discount. There are lots of ways to slice the data.

Spanish-speaking customers can now shop your Express Store in their primary language. We worked with a professional translation agency to create a thoughtful and immersive Spanish-language Storefront with all of the same features and functionalities of our English version.

When shoppers navigate to your Express Store, it will automatically load in their preferred language. If they’d like to switch from Spanish to English or vice versa, they can toggle a button located at the bottom of your Express Store.

We are making many in-store process enhancements that will provide a quicker and easier experience for your customers. The latest of these is our Customer Check-in feature that enables you to see all of your customer’s previous Express Store activity aggregated on a single page when they come into your showroom. No need to click on individual leads and orders one at a time!

Select “Customer Check-in” from the top-right menu on your Express Store and enter the customer’s name to receive a single search result that details all of their activity. This makes for a much faster and easier way to see where customers are in the purchase process and to help them pick up where they left off without the customer having to log in.

Our reporting tab has undergone a serious upgrade so that our data is more accessible and useful to you. Our reports have a new look and feel (modeled after Google Analytics), and better functionality, too.

We’ve added drill-down capability, a one-click-to-Excel feature and some cool hover-overs to help you understand what the numbers mean. You can also track all of your traffic — across your site and your Express Store — in a single report and spot trends using time-series analysis.

One of the best benefits of Express Trade is the Express part. Now you can appraise trade-ins even faster because information submitted through Express Trade is pushed directly to vAuto Provision.

To see the full vehicle profile, agents need only click a button. Vehicle details like the VIN, odometer reading, year, make, model and customer information are available quickly and easily. Efficiency and convenience? You bet!

At Roadster, we provide you with the tools and the know-how to succeed on our platform — including all-access to our new Learning Library within Roadster Academy. Here, you will find product one-sheets, reporting guides, best practices, industry insights, customer stories and more. You can even download any content that you want to readily reference.

Learn More

You asked, we listened: You can now enable Reservations and Deposits on your Express Storefront! Customers who click “Reserve This Car” from the VDP will be prompted to enter their contact and credit card info to place a deposit on any new or used car they want to stake their claim to.

Your customers will have peace of mind knowing their car will be waiting for them when they’re ready to take the next step in the purchase process. You’ll have a monetary commitment from a high-quality contact who is likely to convert to a sale.

You can customize the messaging within the Reservations and Deposits experience to integrate your unique brand promises and best address your target audience. And, what’s more, you can maintain ultimate control over who can refund a deposit (only agents with “Admin” permissions).

Learn More