A warm AAC welcome to three more stores! Anthony Buick / GMC in Gurnee, Ill., is a beautiful store with strong community roots and great customer reviews. Infiniti of Hoffman Estates, Ill., is a progressive dealership that represents the quality and prestige of its vehicle line in all of its departments. And Schaumburg Toyota in Illinois boasts a strong, cohesive team and a sales approach that makes it simple for customers to do business with them.

We are pleased to provide each of them with what we feel is the best available tool to sell accessories, promote the dealership and build long-term service clients. New improvements to AAC now allow sales staff to select different languages, as well as visually present more products on the customer’s soon-to-be vehicle.

If you haven’t yet learned about AAC, browse our Website. Though the C in our name stands for “configurator,” you’ll find that we do a whole lot more!

Tom Waitzman

Automotive News’ Power Training Series is holding an interesting webinar in August. It’s called “Hacking the Millennial: Sales to Service Conversion. I love the word “hacking” because it implies that anything can be decoded, and as a business owner, trying to understand how this generation thinks can be the key to new profit centers.

The good news is, you don’t have to be an app developer or turn your dealership into a Pokemon gym! Despite the attention paid to the online world, human beings—regardless of age—will still respond to a positive customer service experience.

When my team and I sat down to develop AAC, the same three principles that the webinar will cover were at the foundation of our conversation.

• What would it be?
• How would AAC help dealers enhance service to customers?
• Third, of course, was Delivery

The most important thing we talked about was building a recurring revenue model for the dealership. In other words, a customer buys a car, and comes back for service until they are ready to buy their next car from the same dealership.

Our solution needed to be presentable on anything with a screen. (This is the millennial appeal!) Our goal is that all of these together create an environment where this new generation feels welcomed. But they need more than that. Millennials have a very specific world view, and we needed to make sure that they feel like an AAC-equipped dealership fits into their world. That kind of connection will really build business.

AAC creates the ability for all departments to be on the same page, sharing information and mimicking the same service experience for the customer.

We feel like we’ve accomplished our goals, and we’ll continue to evolve AAC to be sure it engages all types of customers at the highest level. If you haven’t considered AAC yet, we hope you’ll give it a try. But at the very least, if you want to attract millennials, make sure you have WiFi in your waiting rooms!

Tom Waitzman

It’s been a busy month since our launch, and we’re happy to welcome our newest dealership to the AAC family, Lexus of Arlington. Lexus of Arlington is part of the Bob Rohrman Auto Group. It’s a great-looking store with a strong, proactive team, and we are excited to get in and train them on how AAC empowers them to build better rapport and increase accessory sales. We look forward to helping Lexus of Arlington post record numbers in the coming year.

And speaking of sales increases, all of our pilot stores (thanks!) including Midtown Toyota and Woodfield Lexus are showing marked accessory sales increases! In addition, service conversions are up across the board, thanks in part to AAC’s presentation modules that promote the store and its customer benefits.

But the work continues: We’re getting set to roll out updates to our system that enhance the way customers can visualize accessories on their new car. Plus, sales staff will have the option to change languages on the presentation to better engage customers. And be on the lookout for an iPad app coming later this year!

Tom Waitzman