Gulf States Toyota
Trading in for a New Customer Experience
Gulf States Toyota (GST) is one of world’s largest independent distributors of Toyota vehicles and parts. GST serves all of the Toyota dealerships in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
Driving a New Portal
GST’s customer-facing Dealer Daily Portal was operating on a legacy portal and there was a business desire to modernize this important system. In addition to suffering system outages that were difficult to recover from, content had become increasingly outdated because updating it required involving the support team. Also, the lack of a modern search functionality and an older navigation structure made some of the content challenging to find. Finally, without the ability to provide analytics, GST’s ability to monitor portal usage was hampered.
Going Places with a New Portal Solution
GST selected Sitecore as its new portal platform and asked us to build the new Dealer Daily Portal.
The new Dealer Daily Portal provided additional features and capabilities based on user roles, including:
- Security that limits the information displayed
- Access to documents related to the user
- Visibility of links to external applications
Additional features include:
- Enhanced functionality (adding photos, video and multimedia, changing dates, and other easily customizable fields)
- Security attributes (cascading drop downs for granting permissions)
- People search capabilities (simple search feature)
- Favorites management (ability to set up specific sites as favorites)
The Dealer Daily Portal went live on-time and on-budget, even after taking on an expanded scope. Utilized by more than 3,000 unique users daily, the portal is the “new face” of Gulf States Toyota for its more than 150 dealerships.
Results
Introducing a Smoother Ride
The DDP went live on-time and on-budget, even after taking on an expanded scope. This successful implementation:
- Eliminated risk to the business by providing a single point of information sourcing (including navigation ease, updated information on incentives, and favorites setting capabilities)
- Is utilized by more than 3000 unique users daily
- Generated efficiency improvements by offering dealers a more robust and feature-rich system and reducing help calls to GST
- The Dealer Daily Portal is the “new face” of Gulf States Toyota for its more than 150 dealerships
