DMS and CRM integration guide

What to check before you decide

Ask about timing. A nightly batch is fine for equity campaigns.

It is too slow for a service appointment or a deal in progress. Get an answer on how often the sync runs, how long it takes and what the CRM shows when it fails.

Then ask who controls the door. DMS vendors run programs that approve and charge for outside access: CDK's Third Party Access and Fortellis, Reynolds' certified interface, Dealertrack's Opentrack.

Dealers report paying roughly $175 to $700 or more per month in connection fees, plus setup fees per store. Find out whether the fee is yours, the CRM vendor's or shared, and get it in writing.

Check what the connection does about identity. A customer with two records in the DMS may become two people in the CRM. Ask how matches are made and how duplicates are handled.

Test with a sample. Pick twenty customers with a sale, a service visit and an open lead.

Compare their records in both systems after a sync. Look for missing history, wrong vehicles and duplicates.

Keep a record of the connection: who owns it, what it costs, the last time someone confirmed it works, and who to call when it does not.

Keep a plain record of what each side is allowed to overwrite, because the most common long-term damage in this connection is a harmless-looking sync that replaces a correct phone number in one system with an old one from the other, and a rule written down once saves arguments every time it happens again.

Name one person on each side, in the store and at each vendor, who can answer a sync question the same day, and put their contacts in the connection record next to the fee and the last test date.