Getting employees on board is the hardest part

Electronic contracting generally isn't a hard process for dealership employees to learn, but getting them on board with the idea can be a sizable hurdle.

Most dealerships need only an hour of formal training. The learning process is ongoing as new employees are hired and more lenders and F&I providers begin accepting contracts digitally. Experts say employees learn best by putting e-contracting into practice.

RouteOne's and Dealertrack's field teams spend anywhere from a few hours to a few days with clients in most cases. Nissan's captive finance company, which has supported e-contracting since 2007, has its field team work with dealers on an ongoing basis.

"It's like any other process. Some people adopt it better than others," said Brian Massey, director of credit operations at Nissan Motor Acceptance Corp.

Many of the concerns F&I managers have are based on misconceptions that go away once they start using an e-contracting system, said Jennifer Carroll, general sales manager at Trophy Nissan in Mesquite, Texas, near Dallas.

"People have in their head that it takes so much longer to e-contract a customer, when in reality, if you e-contract correctly, it takes five minutes to contract every retail installment contract," Carroll said.

RouteOne CEO Justin Oesterle said dealerships are most successful when they solicit e-contracting help from his company in real time, instead of simply trying to follow a set of directions. "The challenge with training is if you don't get to apply it in real-world situations, you miss some of the nuance about how the tool works," Oesterle said. "Once you do it, it is intuitive enough to be able to do again. But if you've only trained, there's a little bit of fear of the unknown of how it's going to do with your first live customer."

About six months ago, Carroll hired an F&I manager who wasn't e-contracting. When Carroll asked why, he said he wasn't sure how to do it. She walked him through it in less than an hour, and he was completely proficient, she said.

Since e-contracting became widely available several years ago, training has shifted, said Jon Strawsburg, vice president of product planning at Reynolds and Reynolds Co. Dealership personnel have to be flexible and transparent with customers, he said.

"A lot of the training now focuses on how to talk to the consumer properly, how to disclose things, how you explain the different pieces of a deal," Strawsburg said. DocuPad, a Reynolds tool that many dealerships use for e-contracting and for capturing digital signatures, "helps them do that," he said.

E-contracting and DocuPad keep customers engaged, said Ryan Esler, sales and marketing director at George Matick Chevrolet in Redford, Mich. "It caps a halo around the brand of the business, because now we're able to provide these electronic functions for something that used to be so rudimentary and archaic."