The move affects all departments at Earnhardt's nine automotive dealerships, including its Ford, Dodge, Chrysler, Jeep, Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, Lincoln, Mercury, Mazda and BMW operations, said Donald Speen, vice president of IT operations at Earnhardt Auto. The dealerships, which together realized just over US$1 billion in revenues last year, are located throughout Arizona and Texas.

Earnhardt selected DealerSocket as its CRM platform in January after trying out other products that fell short of the company's goals, Speen said.

The Earnhardt organization needed a CRM system to operate as a complete interdepartmental system among its customer service, marketing, floor sales, Internet sales, and automotive parts and service units, Speen said.

DealerSocket was the only CRM partner that could effectively offer global management tools to report, compare and identify growth opportunities among dealerships, not just departments. Today, more than 500 employees work on the deployed system, he said.

"We're a high-volume dealer, and we sell a lot of vehicles. We were doing really well with our presence on the Internet and our Internet sales with a product that we were using. ... It was just geared toward Internet sales and follow-up, but that's all it did," Speen said. "We ... realized that we weren't really getting the benefit from all the information we were getting and transferring that [information] to our sales floor, our normal sales staff, and [the] service and parts department."