Duplicate Customer Records in the DMS, from Advent Resources.
Your DMS is the heart of your dealership operation. Regardless of what DMS provider you are using, the single biggest problem that every system has is Duplicate Customer Records. Most of the time this problem goes undetected until you attempt to get an accurate customer count or decide to change your DMS or CRM to another service provider.
Recently, we were made aware of a situation where a dealer thought that they had over 50,000 customers in their DMS and after the file was de-duped (duplicates removed) they were shocked to find that they had just over 20,000 customers.
The root cause of this problem lies in the service department when a customer brings the vehicle back for serviceand the original record is not found or used, and a new record is created. The problem becomes acerbated when the name gets modified. For example, the original customer record is James Martin and the new record is entered as Jim Martin or Jimmy Martin or in other cases it is entered as the spouse’s name, leaving one vehicle with multiple files and multiple names.
