Define the population
Record dealer type, OEM, market, rooftop count, department, product, edition, implementation date and respondent role before comparing results.
Dealer technology benchmark and operator survey program
The dealer technology benchmark and operator survey program is a publication standard for collecting implementation, adoption, support, integration and outcome evidence without inventing benchmarks or allowing vendors to buy conclusions. A benchmark is published only when real responses support it, with the sample size stated.
What this protocol governs
This page publishes the collection and publication rules before any benchmark data exists, so a later result is auditable against a standard fixed in advance, not one written to fit whatever the sample turned out to say. Record dealer type, OEM, market, rooftop count, department, product, edition, implementation date and respondent role before comparing results.
Collect baseline, adoption, operational outcome, quality guardrail, cost and elapsed-time fields with the same definitions for every participant. Confirm dealership and role while protecting nonpublic dealer information.
Record vendor, consultant, incentive and commercial relationships. Do not publish a benchmark until the sample, completeness and comparability thresholds are met.
Small or skewed samples remain labeled observations.
| Protocol steps | 6 |
|---|---|
| Survey modules | 10 |
| Published results | 0: collection has not started |
Use common measures
Collect baseline, adoption, operational outcome, quality guardrail, cost and elapsed-time fields with the same definitions for every participant.
Verify context
Confirm dealership and role while protecting nonpublic dealer information. Record vendor, consultant, incentive and commercial relationships.
Set publication thresholds
Do not publish a benchmark until the sample, completeness and comparability thresholds are met. Small or skewed samples remain labeled observations.
Separate fact and interpretation
Publish the question, denominator, exclusions, time period and method beside every result. Do not imply causation from an uncontrolled association.
Maintain corrections
Preserve dated versions, correction notes and methodological changes so a revised result cannot silently replace the record used by dealers.
What the program is designed to measure
□
Implementation duration and dealer staffing
□
Data migration completeness and reconciliation
□
Integration availability and failure handling
□
Role-level adoption and workarounds
□
Support severity, response and resolution
□
Workflow outcome and quality guardrails
□
Three-year cost and unplanned charges
□
Renewal, export and offboarding experience
□
Dealer context and configuration
□
Relationship and incentive disclosure
Publication boundary
No benchmark result is displayed until sufficient verified data exists. This protocol creates the collection and publication system; it does not manufacture first-party findings.
Why a protocol exists before any data does
Dealership technology is full of figures with no denominator: a percentage improvement with no baseline, an average implementation time with no population, a satisfaction score with no response rate. Those numbers are easy to produce and impossible to check, and once published they get cited back by people who cannot see how they were made. Writing the collection and publication rules first, in public, is what makes a later result auditable, and it commits this directory to the same standard it asks of the providers it lists.
What would disqualify a result from publication
A result is withheld, or published only as a labelled observation, when any of the following applies. These are stated in advance so that a disappointing sample cannot be reinterpreted after the fact.
- The sample is below the threshold set for that question before collection began
- Respondents are concentrated in one dealer group, one OEM or one vendor’s customer base
- The comparison population is not like-for-like on rooftop count, product edition or implementation age
- A material share of responses is incomplete on the fields the result depends on
- The question wording changed during collection
How participants are protected
Operator research fails when respondents believe a candid answer will reach their vendor or their group. Participation is therefore designed so that no individual response is identifiable in anything published: results are reported at population level, free-text is quoted only with explicit permission and with identifying detail removed, and no participant list is shared with any vendor. Nonpublic financial and operational detail is collected only where a specific question requires it, and is not retained afterwards.
What a dealer gets for taking part
The intended exchange is comparison, not compensation. A participant receives the aggregate result for their own segment ahead of publication and can see where their configuration sits against it.
Nothing about participation affects any record in this directory, and no vendor can purchase visibility, question inclusion or influence over how a result is framed. If that ever changed, it would be disclosed here first and dated.
Corrections and versioning
Every published result keeps its question wording, denominator, exclusions and collection window beside it, and every revision is dated. Nothing replaces the earlier figure silently. A dealer who cited a result should be able to establish what it said on the day they cited it, and what changed since.