Tekion rolls out CRM and digital retail capabilities

Dealership management system startup Tekion has expanded its product lineup, launching a new customer relationship management system and digital retailing platform.

The Pleasanton, Calif., company will power General Motors' new CarBravo online used-vehicle sales platform, along with a digital retailing platform for its electric vehicles. GM was an early investor in Tekion.

GM's EV sales platform is live, though the automaker and Tekion CEO Jay Vijayan said its rollout was delayed after GM recalled Chevrolet Bolt EVs and EUVs over risk of battery fires.

A GM spokesman told Automotive News that dealers will have dedicated pages within its EV digital retailing platform that connect to their store websites, so customers viewing inventory on the brand site will drive leads to dealerships.

Vijayan said Tekion is working with other automakers on its new enterprise-level digital retail platform, Automotive Enterprise Cloud, though the company declined to disclose Tekion's other automaker clients or how many there are. Tekion also offers a separate digital retailing platform for dealerships that use its Automotive Retail Cloud DMS.

Vijayan, 49, spoke with Staff Reporter Lindsay VanHulle last month at the NADA Show in Las Vegas. Below are edited excerpts.

On Tekion's digital retailing capabilities:

It's fully ready for the mainstream now. It has built-in features for dealers to deliver the best digital experience for their consumers. There are a few things with Tekion that [are] going to be different — truly taking the consumer end-to-end as part of their journey, and everything from shopping experience to upselling experience as part of the shopping itself and then doing all of the documentation uploads, making it really simple from their phone.

As a consumer, I want to be in control. I want choice. I should be in a position to decide whether I buy online, or whether I buy in store, or whether I do a hybrid. I think that experience is what dealers need to provide, and they know that's what they want to provide and that's what they can enable.

So using our platform, it doesn't matter where the consumer starts the process, where they end the process. It is a seamless process because it's one platform. There's no reentry of data. As you know today, that's a problem.

That all goes away with Tekion because there's only one customer record.

On Automotive Enterprise Cloud:

Tekion itself is one platform. So on top of it we have Automotive Retail Cloud, which is pretty much all focused for our dealers. It's a complete end-to-end platform for dealers to run their business and seamlessly connect to their OEM partners and their vendor partners. What we rolled out to GM is also a platform. It's not a GM-specific system. We call it Automotive Enterprise Cloud.

Automotive Enterprise Cloud is giving a digital presence and digital platform for large OEM partners, and could be a large enterprise partner, a large public company [of] dealerships. They could do the same. So it is a platform and it is not specific to GM. GM has been a phenomenal partner. There may be workflows that are configured specific for them, but if there is a big public company, dealer group, that wants to configure their own workflows slightly different, totally fine.

Dealers have full visibility to the transaction all the way through. The moment the customer chooses an inventory at the dealer, we take it to a dealer-specific part of Automotive Enterprise Cloud.

On integrating with third-party vendors:

Partner Cloud is a very, very important strategic launch for us. Now a partner can go sign up themselves and immediately get access to all of our API specifications. When they want to get access to the API and start using it, then they can initiate a request, which we create an automated workflow, which goes to our dealers and goes to our integration team.

Zero fees, because it's an ecosystem play. This vendor is delivering a service to their customer, the customer is paying for them and the same dealer is our customer and he's paying for me. So why would I charge him [an] additional fee to get access?

We have to invest a little bit in platform cost for that, do the work one time, and after that, it's their data. If the request goes significantly above [the] standard threshold, then we would charge something nominal to cover that fee, but at this point, I don't foresee that we will start charging.

In [the] future there may be a big player who will come and say, "You know what? I want a massive storage of data and I want to extract [a] significant amount of data out of my system." Then we will think about if there is any [fee] just to cover the cost. But outside of that, I don't believe this is something for us to make money or make profits.

Hannah Lutz contributed to this report.