Sales and finance director at the Niello Company, Dennis Gingrich, switched the group's CRMs in July, right in the middle of summer selling season. One month later, the company has concrete data on whether the transition has paid off so far.
Driving the news: "All of our stores are officially live. Our final two stores, which are two Porsche stores, went live Monday as a matter of fact," Gingrich told Sam D'Arc and Uli de'Martino on a follow up episode of Daily Dealer Live. "We haven't had any casualties reported and we're a full month into this party."
For context: Gingrich made the switch from Vin Solutions to DriveCentric for a few reasons. The main one being that Vin Solutions wasn't cutting it on phone and text integration, and his team was juggling too many separate apps.
"I wanted a more integrated application for our team to use because I just feel—the easier the application is for our team to use, the better customer experience we're going to deliver.... So it was just rip the band aid off and let's go," he said.
Initially, they tried using DriveCentric like Vin Solutions—assigning tasks to salespeople and tracking who completed what.
Then, they discovered the AI tools in DriveCentric platform could handle customer follow-ups just as well, if not better than humans.
Now 70% of Niello's customers engage with the dealership through AI.
The difference is consistency. Humans get busy, forget follow-ups, or decide some customers aren't worth the effort. But AI never does.
"It does a good job of just being consistent and disciplined, which I think is something human beings as a whole just don't do as well," Gingrich said.
How it works: AI handles routine check-ins and spots opportunities, then alerts salespeople when it's time to intervene. For example, Niello's AI tool asked a customer how their BMW was running, learned they were eyeing the new Defender, and flagged that Land Rover had special rates available.
"And then it notifies the salespeople and then it's up to us to engage in the phone and the video and all that stuff and get them in and make the magic happen," he explained.
Worth noting: Customer videos also got a major boost once they became native in the CRM. Before, Niello used a separate video tool. Now, everything happens inside DriveCentric, and video usage reaches nearly 100% across all stores.
But the real discovery was day-of appointment confirmations. When managers send a quick video confirming the appointment, show rates jump to 80%. Skip the video and show rates drop to 60%.
The video itself is dead simple—15 seconds of the manager saying they saw the car getting prepped and introducing the salesperson.
The implementation hiccups were manageable, but it's still a work in progress.
The transition happened remotely. No techs showed up on site, and most of the support came through chat instead of phone calls.
Some AI features still have limits, like customers can't reschedule appointments directly with the AI assistant.
"In the grand scheme of things, those are all fixable," Gingrich said.
The bigger picture became clear through practice. Let AI handle the boring stuff so humans can focus on relationship building. Follow-ups, appointment reminders, and opportunity spotting happen automatically. Salespeople spend their energy on video messages, phone calls, and face-to-face interactions where personality actually matters.
"Let the AI do that and let the people do the video and the phone," Gingrich said.
Bottom line: Highly integrated platforms that simplify workflows free up employees to focus on what actually matters—building genuine relationships with customers.
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