Two companies operating in the automotive finance sector have signed up to receive services from online automotive solutions provider Quotevine.

Toomey Leasing Group and broker Bowater Price are both using Quotevine’s bespoke Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to more efficiently manage their existing clients – and to increase pipeline conversions.

The two companies are also using Quotevine’s quotation and order-management tools, giving them the ability to configure vehicles and create attractive quotations (optionally including wholelife costs) straight from their respective customer databases.

“The 2012 merger of our five different leasing division companies meant we had five locations with five different ways of gathering and storing data,” said Martin Wroe, managing director at Toomey Leasing Group.

“Our previous CRM system was slow, with limited functionality and couldn’t be used by all the team – the focus was based around retail dealers. It wasn’t in tune with the fleet industry so some fields were missing or not relevant to our industry. “

“We were looking for a new CRM system that was more fleet focused and not just a data centre and diary system. It needed to include functionality like vehicle quotations, mileage logging and whole life cost calculation.”

“Now that they’re using Quotevine, our administration staff – regardless of their location – have a much broader picture of new business opportunities and sales activity by viewing relevant diaries, email correspondence and customer records.

“The system also offers management visibility of the sales team to help us keep on top of things.

“It also offers a bespoke reporting suite so leads can be added into the system and tracked from point of call to conversion.”

Simon Williams, director at Bowater Price, said: “Before Quotevine, we were storing our data on-premise, in a system which had been built for us several years ago.

“This gave us two pain points. Firstly, our data was vulnerable to hardware failures, fires or other disaster events and secondly our business had moved on, but the system hadn't.

“Quotevine was able to give us richer functionality than our old system, as well as removing the worry of us losing our data.

“We've already seen significant functional enhancements come in to the platform, which gives us the confidence that as we continue to grow, the platform will keep up."

Quotevine founder Daniel Layne concluded: “The auto industry has come along way since Henry Ford famously offered his Model T in any colour ‘as long as it's black’.

“The fact that Toomey and Bowater Price operate in completely different areas emphasises the pressure all stakeholders are under to take a different – and more efficient – approach to customer satisfaction.”

“The potential payoffs for the industry are enormous – the White Clarke Group recently estimated the auto finance industry was worth £6bn a year, but up until now there’s been no CRM software package tailored to specifically meet its needs.

“Companies of all sizes are looking for easier-to-deploy CRM systems capable of replacing legacy systems; quickly implement net-new applications and providing complementary CRM system functionality. This is where cloud-based solutions come into their own.”