Louis-Yves Cloutier talks about 360.Agency’s newest product DRX 360
Louis-Yves Cloutier’s 360.Agency has been a familiar DMS presence in Canada for a decade now, and counts over 1,000 dealerships in Canada as customers. But now the company is announcing the next step in the evolution of their product, DRX 360. What is it? Why now?
With all the technology available for marketing cars and running a dealership available today, auto dealers have often been on the leading edge of business software adoption. DMS, CRM, digital marketing, F&I programs and many others can help the day-to-day operations of a dealership, but they may not integrate for the customers on the other side of the equation. This can lead to breaks in communication, added effort on the part of the potential buyer, inputting information numerous times, and overall frustration. Smoothing out the customer’s buying journey is the new Holy Grail.
We sat down with Cloutier at the 360.Agency booth at the NADA 2023 Show in Dallas in January and had a great conversation about the direction of the company, as well as a rundown of their newest product, DRX 360.
So, why are they releasing this product here and now? “360.Agency has been coming to NADA for the last six years,” said Cloutier. “So even though we’re a Canadian company, and we were not that big six years ago, we always felt that NADA is the biggest platform in North America, probably in the world, to showcase technology to car dealers. And I think for us it’s just an exciting opportunity to be in the market that is boiling. It’s just a strategic decision that we’ve made many years ago that NADA would be part of our marketing strategy.”
360.Agency dropped the big news on the first day of the NADA Show on Facebook Live about DRX 360 being the next evolution in the company’s technology. “DRX stands for Dealer Retailing Experience,” said Cloutier. “So it is an omnichannel retailing platform that will help dealers that want to modernize their activity and absorb the digital transformation that is underway”.
DRX 360 is a tool for creating an experience, not only for consumers, but for staff members, to streamline all the processes that are included in a transaction, from online to offline, offline to online, and vice versa. “It’s a very unique platform that takes all the big components that a retailer uses today: a website, digital retailing, for CRM and another vendor for your desking tool, and we put it together.”
Integration is the key to DRX 360 . “That is actually the platform of choice for omnichannel selling,” he said. “Consumers today, especially through the pandemic, are more online than ever, but there are still customers showing up in dealerships. The problem with today’s ecosystem for a retailer is that there’s no link between what’s happening online and what’s happening offline.”
The problem that DRX 360 is solving is quite simple. Customers can start their journey online, start a quoting process, go into the digital retailing module, and at some point, may need to talk to some people, and go into the store. DRX 360 goes wherever the customer wants to interact, seamlessly.
“So DRX 360 is the answer for modern dealers that are looking to get into omnichannel, and they want to make sure that the customer experience is seamless, and that their staff is also equipped with the proper tools to interact with the customers without breaking the experience altogether,” said Cloutier.
DRX 360 is the evolution of the 360.Agency concept that has been in the works for over 13 years, Said Cloutier. “The DRX 360 is a unique user experience and a unique platform that will integrate everything and basically take all the friction that is in between all the products out of the way.”
The future is bright for 360.Agency. “We’ve been working on this for so long. It’s the beginning of something, because we are the leader of the industry in omnichannel selling.” NADA was a success for Cloutier and 360.Agency, with a lot of interest from dealers from Canada, as well as the U.S. “We did many demos at NADA for American dealers, and dealers actually said to us, ‘This does not even exist here in the United States’”. Cloutier is rightly proud of being a Quebec-based company, a Canadian vendor, with about 1000 dealerships doing business in Canada. But the company has greater ambitions as well. ”I would be lying if I said 360.Agency doesn’t have the power to be exported. I think we have a solution that is leading edge even in the United States, and that’s something we’re looking for for the next months and years to come. We’d like to go south of the border, but at the same time, we are never going to forget where we come from”.
