The Future of Retention is Data-Driven (and Your Tires Know It) with Shane Wilson

Paul J Daly  0:00  
Michael, do you miss Canadian summers now that you live in Texas?

Unknown Speaker  0:09  
This is Auto Collabs,

Paul J Daly  0:12  
so that sounds like it should be a love song.

Kyle Mountsier  0:20  
That's the snowman. I don't from frozen in summer.

Paul J Daly  0:26  
Oh, I thought you said Canadian summer.

Michael Cirillo  0:28  
Tell me you have young children without telling me

Kyle Mountsier  0:30  
that's exactly. Look. Everything starts and ends with the Disney song. In my world, it's just how the world works. It's just, do you

Michael Cirillo  0:38  
find it? Do you and your wife just sing things to each other, like, just normal, like, do you want Chick fil A or it's so bad. He's, it's

Kyle Mountsier  0:47  
absolutely terrible. We do it all the time. Yes, yeah, our life in song by the mount sear family. I mean, I would, I would tune in for that. Oh, that'd be a good YouTube channel. You know what? I mean, Kyle, you actually, we've been thinking about this. You guys let me know. Okay, this has nothing to do with our podcast guests, but we've been thinking about this. You know, we were thinking about like, just, we sip tea every single night after the kids go to bed. And the thought was, like, we should spill the tea on our day with these children. And that would be just, it would be a magical little Instagram, Youtube channel. Yeah, it'd be messed up. It'd be wild, but

Paul J Daly  1:25  
it would be a real, real moment of empathy, I think, with all the other parents, like, Oh, your kids are that terrible, too. Oh,

Kyle Mountsier  1:30  
ours, too, great. Got it

Paul J Daly  1:33  
on that note, today's Shane Wilson with connected dealer services, has a pretty extensive background in tech, and really leans in to the retention, the connected experience and giving dealers. Like, I can't remember what the number is, probably say it on the show, but it's like billions of data points. Like, there's a lot of data moving back and forth. So let's see how this conversation goes with Shane, and we're gonna ask him about Canadian summers. You know, I started with that question, because the little form that we fill out is like, he stays in northern Michigan or something like that, yeah, during the summertime, which is a thing people do, because no one wants to stay there in the winter, I guess, kind of like Canada and Syracuse.

Unknown Speaker  2:14  
So should we bring them in? I mean,

Paul J Daly  2:17  
I don't know. I'm having fun talking about this.

Kyle Mountsier  2:21  
Enjoy this conversation. Y'all with Shane Wilson.

Paul J Daly  2:28  
All right, today we're here with Shane. Shane, thank you so much for joining us on auto club. It's great to have a conversation for the first time all of us together.

Shane Wilson  2:35  
Yeah, I think I'm so excited, guys, thanks for having me. This is gonna be great.

Paul J Daly  2:38  
All right, so tell us, we were just talking about this slightly before we hit the record button, but you are one of the few people that has the really unique experience of enjoying summertime in northern Michigan.

Shane Wilson  2:52  
Yes, that short lived, that short lived season we have. Yeah, it's, it's actually amazing here. It's beautiful. And you got to take advantage of the, you know, the few months that we have it

Paul J Daly  3:01  
here, so, so, but you're, you're, you live in Michigan all year round. Yeah,

Shane Wilson  3:05  
I'm about an hour north of Detroit, typically, and then occasionally, come up here when I can do

Kyle Mountsier  3:11  
you just hang out with the Northwood people. Then, yeah, on, on the regular, because that's what I would do if I live north of

Unknown Speaker  3:18  
the woods on the water. Yeah, exactly.

Kyle Mountsier  3:20  
That's amazing.

Michael Cirillo  3:21  
That's amazing. Before you guys jumped on the call he and I were talking about how he runs through the forest barefoot and and hunts animals with his bare teeth on

Kyle Mountsier  3:34  
all forms. This is going to turn into a different podcast right now.

Paul J Daly  3:40  
Labs, yeah, no, no. One of the things we usually like to talk about is just get a little purview of how you found your way to the auto industry, and especially how you got into the lane that you're in right now. Yeah,

Shane Wilson  3:51  
it's been a really fun path of my career. So I started right out of college, just getting into the 12 volt automotive aftermarket whole world starting from remote start, keyless entry. I'm going to age myself when you actually needed an aftermarket keyless entry system. No,

Paul J Daly  4:09  
I think you still need those. It's not, I mean, I still see advertising,

Shane Wilson  4:12  
yeah, yeah, right. So, so started there, and then, for all of you who don't

Paul J Daly  4:15  
live in a really cold climate, it's kind of a necessity. Well,

Shane Wilson  4:18  
remote start, for sure. Yeah, right. And that was my world was remote start. And making that, you know, scalable in an actual consumer product, and that brought us into, you know, the car dealer world, and what products we could bring to the dealership. I did a lot of pre load alarm systems back in the day. So just an analog alarm system, you know, Southern California, big market, Texas, big market. But that was really my first intro into trying to figure out F and I type products for that world in the aftermarket space. And got really good at that, and then kind of morphed that into connected car, you know, being able to remote start from your phone, GPS track. Hacking things like that. So that's been really my whole career path. Is that I really don't know anything else, quite frankly. And so 2018 I was brought in here to from pro con analytics. Pro con is the parent company of CVS, who I would I run today, and was really the product guy for them, for all of their verticals. And then 2019 they we spun out CBS, its own entity, and then I started running the group. So, so from 2019 on, I've been running CBS, and it's been really interesting. You know, all the all the different headwinds you don't necessarily prepare for, right? There's no guide on that's

Kyle Mountsier  5:36  
a wild timeline to run a new thing like I kudos to anybody that, like 2019, to early 2020, was like, I'm just gonna start something new. Yeah, it's gonna be

Shane Wilson  5:47  
very interesting. So we're learned immediately on nada, how to live, navigate through that, through the car dealer space, and, you know, all of the chip shortages, and what we do here on our side with with all the manufacturing, we have a widget, if you will, a device that goes into the car. And so we had to really be part of that as well, and making sure we didn't run out of inventory, making sure our warehouse was still scalable, all that. So it was, it was fun. I used to have hair,

Unknown Speaker  6:16  
yeah, yeah.

Kyle Mountsier  6:17  
It's like, it's a magical thing. So you keep saying, CDs, it's connected dealer services, like, just give us a little bit of background since, like, that's obviously so much of what you're thinking about doing on a day to day basis. Where was, where did the advent of that come from? Like, what was the problem that you

Shane Wilson  6:35  
were looking Yeah, we originally, we saw a problem on, on, really, just being able to protect, you know, originally started with just being able to protect inventory at a dealership lot. You know, how to manage their assets, if you will, that are on the lot, how to make them more efficient with sales showing where the vehicles were. They were losing cars, like people are losing car. Dealers were losing cars. They're losing keys, things like that. So we wanted to originally solved for that. And so we created a program that had a really we call it preload. So a preload program put a device on every single vehicle on the dealership lot. That's our model, and so you have our product loaded in, and we help them manage all of their inventory. They know where all the vehicles are, if they're off a lot, if they're on the lot, if they're in a satellite location, obviously we're protecting them, you know, from stolen vehicle. We've all heard those eight Hellcats stolen out of, out of, you know, out of a rooftop somewhere. And so yeah, so we started with that, but then we kept trying to solve additional problems. So, you know, one as an example, we're real leaning forward on data and data collection and what we can pull from the vehicle. One problem we wanted to solve was the traditional GPS product is just just that. It just location, just what you can do with location. There's a manual process for install. So now we created technology which ties into the vehicles data bus, so we can pull the VIN number of the vehicle with that. You can pull the real odometer. So think about getting the real odometer data, just that data point for all of our dealers, the vehicle health. And that's completely pivoted our company into more driven around service retention. How do

Kyle Mountsier  8:17  
we That's it right there. That's the golden like that, right there, we're you and I, we're just going to talk for a minute. Yeah, just forget that Paul and Michael are here because I am obsessed, obsessed with changing. Who owns retention, yep, and I think that we have believed for a long time that we own whether or not we're retaining a customer based on what we do, but really, the ownership of retention has been all on the customer's plate, right? Their ability to respond, their ability to remember, I'm literally I need to get my sprinklers turned on, and it is like I can't

Paul J Daly  8:59  
do that. Actually mean, I don't understand what that means. I

Kyle Mountsier  9:03  
like, the, sorry, this is not a car. I'm going to an aside, the sprinklers. I don't

Paul J Daly  9:07  
even understand what you mean by get them turned on. Yeah. Oh, you have to,

Kyle Mountsier  9:11  
like, because you in the winter, you have to, like, compress compressed air, push all the water out, okay, winterization. Okay, okay, there's winterization then. But I can't even remember between nine and three when that company has a has someone on to, like, call them and do that, because that's outside of my realm of, like, remembering to manage my retention with that company, right? And in auto, it's, I think it's the same exact way where we've been conditioned to think that our mailers are good enough to manage our own retention, but it's been completely on the customer. And I think one of the one of the big gaps, which it sounds like you're solving, is knowing the exact mileage and condition of that car, so that we can manage 100% of the. Retention lifestyle,

Shane Wilson  10:00  
yeah, very precise and accurate, right? I mean, we've, we've all gotten that little postcard in the mail for, you know, your your oil change or something, and it's like, you know, your 10,000 miles are up, but you have 100,000

Paul J Daly  10:10  
miles not even close, yeah?

Shane Wilson  10:14  
So, so we're just, we're trying to be another channel for that dealer to be able to connect to their consumers, right? So, you know, they sell our product in F and I very profitable. They're making a lot, a lot of profit in our with our program, but then we become the loyalty program for that dealer too, right? And so then they have the mobile app has customization for the dealer. There's logo, their logo, and such as there. But then they can campaign to them. All the data from the vehicle side of things is shared so that they can communicate back and forth. Consumer can book a service appointment. It's pretty exciting. And that's just been really resonating with our with our dealer base and our customers.

Michael Cirillo  10:51  
Something I think is interesting here that as I'm taking notes, this idea of retention, I love that, that narrative about how you're giving that control back to where it should sit all along, I think, because often in our industry, so much of the onus is placed on, or emphasis is placed on the sales department to do everything. That's where we start. We talk, you know, it's, it's, I don't know, more fun to talk about selling the car, not so much about servicing the car. And so we get kind of this, this closeted, you know, discussion about the power that actually sits in in the fixed operations of a dealership. I know, obviously there's probably fixed ops professionals that are like, that's what you think Cirillo, but we already know it. You know, you know, there's that absolutely but you know, in speaking of retention, I think it's it's important to also pick up on what you're saying here, which is that so much of it always goes back to marketing and there, what you're doing that I'm picking up on is, well, wait a minute, before we even get to the marketing conversation, there is a tactical output that my people can do by having accurate vehicle health information that, of itself, will bring people back to the business and bring dollars back to the business. I don't need to do the mailer yet. I don't need to do the ad campaign yet. I don't need to do any of these things. I need to pick up the phone, right? That's absolutely now I have the information to that what? What's your stance on and I don't know if we want to go here or not, but what's your stance on privacy? I mean, you're collecting a tremendous amount of data, movements, positions, locations, all those sorts of things. What are your thoughts on privacy? How do you make sure that things are safeguarded in a way, and that that maybe the skeptic out there that's like, Well, great. Now Shane knows exactly right the grocery store, I, you know my my fish sticks, I'll

Shane Wilson  12:39  
say that. So first off, you know, it's been a long time since I'm a fish stick. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's an interesting one.

Michael Cirillo  12:45  
I try to go for the obscure guys. We are a California based

Shane Wilson  12:49  
company, and you know, you always got to give credit to California, but they are very hard on privacy and what they do and what their requirements are. So I mean, first off, we follow all the standard the industry standard privacy policies. We have opt out conditions, all of that, but the consumer is agreeing when they register. But we don't share any location data, right? So like all all location data is private. That is their you know, customers own data. We don't go there at all. It's really purely what the car is telling us from a health perspective, and and the odometer and all of that, right? So it's safe, it's really secure, and it's it's been working. It's a great program.

Paul J Daly  13:29  
So cool, yeah, now saying something, hold on, Michael, saying something, but we're not hearing him.

Kyle Mountsier  13:36  
Oh, no, Michael, no. Oh, there you are.

Michael Cirillo  13:39  
It's like the cane. You know, in the old cartoons, the cane, oh

Paul J Daly  13:43  
yeah, I saw him like, looking very thoughtful.

Michael Cirillo  13:49  
Well, I'll ask the next best question that that one was used on deaf ears. So what's, what's, what is something that surprises your client partners, when you're like, Hey, did you did you notice that the vehicle health summary picked this up? Like, what's something that's obscure, that that maybe isn't even on our radar? I know we get a check engine light. I know we get but what are some other health monitoring issues that I thought

Shane Wilson  14:14  
was most interesting in the kind of the light bulb went off on for a lot of people, is, we do? We call them wearables, right? But it's not a data point we can collect. But we we do based on odometer mileage. We know tire wear. If our app, I was doing a demo for you right now, we actually have the old school Lincoln penny where you can do the tread test on the app. Think about tires. And specifically I'm going to tires, and that going there is dealers don't do a really good job there at all. So from a from a service ability standpoint, some of the wearables, tires, the battery performance, you know, there's, the percentage is high, like 30, 40% of all service calls are related to your battery. It's pretty interesting. So, you know, and I, I can say for myself, I think you guys too, probably, but you. My battery goes bad, I don't my first thing is, thought is auto niche, Auto Zone, wherever I'm gonna go. I'm not calling my dealer for that, right? You're exactly right. We're trying to change that narrative. Those were some of the points where it was just like, wow. Those were big eye openers that we really well.

Kyle Mountsier  15:14  
But this is where, like, like, oh, battery man, how cool would it be? Maybe, I don't know, maybe you're doing this. Maybe I'm already preaching the choir. But it's like, oh, this is wrong. Hey, we can come to you this afternoon or tomorrow. You want us to fix it then? Or do you want a rush appointment for right now? Add $20 that's right, like, exactly. That's owning retention. It's like, oh, we knew about your car's health before you did. We're coming to you, yes, and I think that that's, that's like, that's everything that right there would make if, if there's ever any talk about OEMs coming in and stealing business because of going to direct to consumer that right there would tell cus would customers would just punch out the my dealer takes care of me. I know about problems before I know about, yeah, right, no doubt.

Paul J Daly  16:10  
That's a great point. Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, and

Shane Wilson  16:13  
you So you talk about the profit, profitability we do in F and I just from upselling and giving stony vehicle recovery. A lot of our dealers reinsure our program with a theft benefit or a limited warranty, and then you bring in the service aspect. It's just that, you know, we kind of touch every point of the dealer. And so when I'm talking, when I'm pitching or talking to my employees, you know, we're no longer just a GPS program, you know, we're more of an enterprise tool for the dealer, and we just bring so much more to the table, right? You're

Paul J Daly  16:43  
also aside from, you know, this, this F and I side of the business, or and these products and these retention and you're also a pretty big student of leadership within the stores and in general, how did the two things marry together? Like, how do you infuse some of those beliefs through your products, through you're servicing your clients.

Shane Wilson  17:01  
It's, you know, we, we built the company specifically for this market, you know. So we've scaled the team. We're not, I would say that the support is critical, right? They're turnover at a dealer is very high. You're constantly losing stakeholders or employees. So you're working

Paul J Daly  17:18  
on changing that, by the way. What was that, right? So we're working on changing that.

Shane Wilson  17:21  
Yeah, good. Well, I will help you guys. So, anything, right? So, but you have to have boots on the ground to be able to support that, right? You have to be able to touch the dealer, continuing to, you know, train them, get them to go and get them to understand. It typically takes, you know, 60 days, 90 days, to get them full. I call it muscle, muscle memory of the program. But, yeah, it's just that we're not just a set and forget it type group. You know, we're constantly there. We're constantly in the stores, again, very leaning forward on data. So our team constantly is giving them reporting all kinds of performance, KPIs, etc. So it's a, it's a true partnership ongoing, right?

Kyle Mountsier  18:00  
All right. Now you you dropped a little easter egg in a little form that we had you fill out about you making sure that cars don't hit cyclists that are self driving. Yes, and it's a fun side. Tell us about how we ask this question

Shane Wilson  18:20  
to every guest, what are you talking about? Yeah, that's probably you guys saw. That's probably stranger, right? So everyone,

Kyle Mountsier  18:25  
I think Paul and Michael are, are super excited about this one, because they're both cyclists. Well, maybe not bikes, but like, you know, larger bikes, I still don't want to get run over by a vehicle, right? Nobody wants to get run over by a self driving vehicle. Why did, why did you get in into that?

Shane Wilson  18:39  
Man? It was fun. So, you know, I spent 25 years with a consumer electronic company, and, you know, kind of hit the ceiling in my career. There great company, great mentors, got gave me everything I have today, right? So very grateful. But at that point I was like, you know, I need to go, you know, somewhere else. And so I kind of thought, in a way, it was getting out of the industry, but it sucked me right back in. So I was working with a company in Detroit, small, little startup. And you know, we were more of an app development company, but our true goal, our passion project, was exactly what you just said, Kyle. We know all of us were cyclists. I was a mountain biker over in over time, a lot of my guys are my buddies were all road guys, but we didn't want to have autonomous cars running over us and the street, right? Fair enough. Yeah. And so great. We had all these relationships with the OEMs, the big three, right, Ford, GM, Chrysler, all here in our backyard. And still, lots of, I should say. And so we worked with them, and we were prototyping all kinds of fun stuff, you know, with Bluetooth, so using a Garmin, Garmin tracker to be able to ping the car and be able to create an alert. And so it was really, really fun. So we were doing, I was doing that for about a year and a half before I we got, I got sucked back in from pro con and started that. But it was really, really fun. Yep, that's super

Kyle Mountsier  19:59  
fun. One, I think, I mean, that's like, really early, right? That was back when, at nada, everybody was saying that autonomous cars were going to take over the road. You know, 2017 2018 right? And we finally have that kind of coming as a reality. And then the differences between, like, what Tesla is doing and what way most doing taking

Paul J Daly  20:18  
over the road? No, no, definitely not. That's what it was back then it was,

Shane Wilson  20:23  
we were already be doing it, right? Yeah, it's like that, right? Exactly It was. It was really fun. That's

Unknown Speaker  20:28  
so cool. Yeah, so cool.

Michael Cirillo  20:31  
I I'm intrigued by how slow and yet somehow, how fast technology is moving. I was trying to find the way to phrase that. But you're like, I work for a big consumer electronics company for 25 years. And I'm like, you know, I used to work for back in the day, way back in the day. I used to work for Best Buy, but at the time it was called Future Shop, oh yeah. And I thought it was the end of the world when they finally got around to upgrading their point of sale system, because they had been talking about it for what felt like 25 years, and they rolled it out, and it was still a DOS prompt type system, and I'm like,

Unknown Speaker  21:15  
as 400 or something like that, yeah. And

Michael Cirillo  21:16  
now all of a sudden, you know you're talking about, hey, just in, just in a period of five years, we went from pontificating about autonomous to, oh, now, like, I need to really develop a solution so that people don't die on the side of the road from autonomous. And it just, I don't know, it blows my mind. What is something that you're thinking about that in this concept of how fast things are evolving, and how you have created a con connected solution. What's the next five years look like in your mind? Like? Is it even worthwhile looking down that far because we've got 100 years of innovation seemingly every 18 months?

Shane Wilson  21:56  
Yeah, right. Exactly It is. It is interesting. It's tough to think that far ahead to your point, because it's changing, you know, I, I'm, uh, you know, we constantly are looking and it's, it's a little cliche, because it's, everyone's talking about it, but it's, it's the data, right? And what we can do with the data, and how do we look at that, you know, is the AI is being, you know, everybody's got aI now, right? And large language models and such. So you know that, you know when I'm when I'm thinking about, what, what do we do with what we collect? You know we're processing right now. It's just, it's awesome stat, but we're processing of, processing over 2 billion events a month in just collection of some of this health data and odometers and stuff. So it's like, how do we just continue to give that to the dealer, to to empower them, right? And to get them to be able to own their customers, like we talked about earlier. How do we, you know? How do we continue to make that better for them? You know, that's what we're looking for. And then obviously, you know, in parallel with that, you know, we still need to think about, you know, Ev, what's, what is EV really going to be? You know, we still, I don't think any of us know yet, total different, yeah. But so what does that do for us? How does that you know, what products can can, you know, what's, how are cars gonna be serviced then at that point? And how do we help dealers still be able to draw that in? So that's obvious.

Kyle Mountsier  23:10  
If you did tires, you got half of that solved already, right? Exactly.

Shane Wilson  23:16  
It's just a big battery, so we got that too. So yeah, that's all it is.

Michael Cirillo  23:20  
Man, this is, this is super cool stuff. Thank you for helping us, facilitating our dive down the rabbit hole. We like when that happens. Shane Wilson, thanks so much for joining us on Auto Collabs. Yeah, thanks guys. This was great.

Well, so to answer your question, Paul, I don't miss Canadian summers. That's

Kyle Mountsier  23:43  
full facts. That's full facts. He's like, Texas is warm enough. I love it.

Michael Cirillo  23:48  
In fact, when I moved to Texas, people are like, you're gonna miss Dude, you're gonna pray for snow. And I'm like, No, and I haven't, and I haven't. So

Kyle Mountsier  24:00  
there you go. Hey, I'm sorry I went off on a tangent and got so excited. I just get so thrilled with the fact that people can potentially actually care for their customers before their customers have to feel like they're obligated to reach out. Yeah, and I don't

Michael Cirillo  24:14  
know about Paul, but I love when that happens, because I can sit back, take notes, and I feel like it's as close as we will get to the passion level of like a diner's drive in and dives episode. You know, there

Kyle Mountsier  24:25  
will be a time where someone calls me, I hope, and goes, Kyle, I'm paying for your flight out to the dealership. I want to show you how we manage all of the retention, and I bet their service profitability will be higher than anybody's, their their technician satisfaction, their customer satisfaction and their retention percentages in their DMA will outpace everybody, because it's like if there's one of me, there's 100 of me in this neighborhood, just waiting for. Someone to tell me they're they're coming to come take care of my oil change or change my tires out or whatever it is, and I'll happily walk my credit card right down to them when they're done.

Michael Cirillo  25:10  
What I love is it too. They're probably around the same time that everyone was pontificating about autonomous vehicles and resurfacing photos from the 50s of like people sitting in the back of their self driving car and whatever. Around that same time, in 2017 2018 there was also this idea that the dealership showroom would get smaller and the service department would get bigger. That that is something I was thinking about as Shane was talking and as you brought up these points, I'm like, I think we might be fast approaching an era where where to your point, like, service becomes the actual center of, not just the way we want to perceive it from a fixed perspective, but like, actually the center of

Kyle Mountsier  25:55  
because if retention is right, then you don't need a big old sales showroom, because those people are going to come in knowing what they want. They're going to do. Going to do business. It's going to be real fast. It's going to be simple, yep,

Paul J Daly  26:06  
I think, I think our work here is done today, on behalf of Kyle Mountsier, Michael Cirillo and myself, thank you for joining us today on Auto Collabs. Sign

Speaker 3  26:15  
up for our free and fun to read daily email for a free shot of relevant news and automotive retail media and pop culture, you can get it now@asotu.com that's asotu.com if you love this podcast, please leave us a review and share it with a friend. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time you

Unknown Speaker  26:46  
welcome to Annika last.

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