Dealerflow : Adoption Strategy & Service Design

Dealerflow is an employee relationship management (ERM) software for auto dealers. It allows dealers and managers to engage, lead and unify their single or multi-location internal organization with one seamless web application. Features include: employee photo directories, text messaging, instant messaging, InMail, blog boards, status updates, shared calendars, announcements, and more.

Dealerflow had developed an innovative web-application designed for an audience comfortable with web-driven conventions, protocols, and tools-sets. The application facilitates instant messaging, filtered communication and bulletins, text messaging and communication via a Wiki platform, among other functionality. The application is intuitive for audiences facile in the social web; it brings together tools and outcomes of intense practicality. However, the automotive dealership audience that Dealerflow desired to target was not a user group well versed in using web-based tools to enhance productivity. Although smart, energetic and scrappy, the folks at most auto dealerships are typically not tech savvy. The challenge, therefore, was to develop an adoption strategy that would go beyond standard implementation activity and drive true adoption and integration into the culture of the dealership itself.

As Kristian Andersen + Associates spent time on site at customer locations, the complex connectivity issues dealerships face became apparent. Through follow-up interviews, intensive sessions with leadership, and by paying attention to the organic activity that was naturally occurring within the application, Kristian Andersen + Associates formulated adoption prescriptions for the dealership environment:

1. Identify real problems that can be solved with the new technology
2. Prescribe tasks for management
3. Find the early adopters; and the hardest
4. Convince curious adopters that they can't break anything and that they won't embarrass themselves.

Insight and conviction were catalyzed through iteration and by listening to users who genuinely attempted to leverage the application to solve real problems.

Dealerflow is now a well integrated, functional part of the work flow at the beta customers sites. The ultimate contribution Dealerflow is making goes beyond speeding connections and improving communications – it is a fundamental tool in the dealerships continual effort to strengthen the contributions of individuals and leadership.