Quick Answer
There's no single tool that does everything a dealership needs. The stores that run well pair a Dealer Management System (DMS) (CDK, Reynolds & Reynolds, Dealertrack, Tekion, or PBS) with specialists for each department: a real CRM for sales (VinSolutions, DealerSocket), a Dealership Engagement System (DES) like Kimoby for everything that touches the customer in service, a marketing platform (Dealer Inspire, Cox) for the website and ads, and a reputation tool (Podium, Birdeye, or Kimoby) for reviews.
The DMS is the system of record. A DES is what turns that record into conversations, approvals, and revenue.
Key takeaways
Think about the last time something just worked. Ordering from Amazon. Booking an Uber. The whole thing felt effortless. You knew what was happening, when, and what came next.
Now picture a customer dropping their car off for a 10am service appointment. They go back to work. No update at 11. Nothing at 1. They call at 3 and get voicemail. By the time someone reaches them at 4:30 with an $800 estimate, they're annoyed, suspicious, and rushing out of a meeting to say yes or no.
Every dealership has a version of that story, and most of them trace back to the same root cause: the software stack isn't pulling its weight. This guide walks through what each tool in a modern dealership actually does, where the gaps are, and which specialist tools fill them.
A dealership is really four businesses under one roof: sales, service, parts, and finance. Every one of them has different software needs. The right tools are what keep those four businesses from stepping on each other.
Dealership software used to live in the back office. Accounting, payroll, maybe some inventory. That's not where it lives anymore. Today it touches every moment of the customer relationship, from the first click on your VDP to the fifth oil change six years in. If it's clunky in between, customers notice.
At the center of everything is the DMS, the Dealer Management System. Its job is to make sure sales, service, parts, and accounting are all reading from the same book. Every other tool you buy has to plug into it cleanly, or you're back to the old problem: data in three places, advisors copying VINs from one screen to another, reports that don't reconcile.
Imagine dropping your car off and hearing nothing for six hours. That's not a service problem, it's a trust problem. Customers don't need constant updates. They need to feel like someone's in charge of their car. That's what a Dealership Engagement System (DES) handles: automated reminders before the appointment, real-time updates while the car's in, two-way texting when the customer has questions.
Most of that happens over text now, because that's how customers want to talk. DriveSure found 60% of customers prefer text messages during a service visit over phone calls (DriveSure, 2020).[1] Customers don't want to sit through your on-hold music. They want a quick update and the ability to reply when they can.
"Any news is better than no news." One dealer principal, to us.
Service revenue lives and dies on two numbers: how many customers approve the additional work you recommend, and how many come back. Software moves both.
When an advisor sends a 30-second video showing the worn brake pad, not telling but showing, approvals go up. Kimoby customers see 40% more approvals on recommended work when it's backed by a video (Kimoby, 2024).[2] That's not a "nice to have." That's margin in every single RO.
For repeat business, the win is automated campaigns: pulling from DMS data to text customers about repairs they declined last visit, warranties about to expire, tires that need swapping. One dealership ran a single Kimoby text campaign and booked 45 appointments worth $35,000 in upsell revenue (Kimoby, 2024).[2] A separate recall campaign, same dealership, different audience, brought in $47,000 from customers who hadn't been in for months (Kimoby Fixed Ops Campaigns).[3]
Every advisor spends part of their day doing work a piece of software should be doing. Sending reminder texts. Calling people back with status updates. Re-typing info between systems. Automating those tasks doesn't replace your people. It lets them do the parts of the job that actually need a human.
Every dealership is sitting on years of customer history. Service visits, declined repairs, communication logs, video views. The question is whether your software lets you see any of it. If you can look at which video topics drive the most approvals, which campaigns book the most appointments, which advisors convert the highest, you can actually coach to it. If your tools just store data and never surface it, you're flying blind.
The end-of-day cashier line is a legacy problem that most dealerships still haven't solved. Mobile payment tools (Kimoby Pay is one) let the customer pay by text the moment the work is approved, so by the time they show up to grab the keys, the transaction is done. Less waiting, fewer cashier staffing problems, money in the bank faster.
Customers Google "oil change near me" and "best Toyota dealer in [city]." If your website is slow, your inventory isn't indexed cleanly, or your reviews are weak, they go to the dealer down the road. Marketing and reputation tools cover this layer, and it matters more now, because AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity increasingly recommend dealerships based on the same signals.
The real trap: buying too many disconnected tools and ending up worse off than before. The dealerships that run well either pick a strong central DMS with good integrations, or they pick the best specialist tool for each job and make sure everything talks cleanly to the DMS.
Your DMS runs the dealership from the day a car lands on your lot through every service visit it ever comes back for. It tracks inventory, structures deals, manages ROs, processes payroll, reconciles books, and stores customer data. In theory it's the "one source of truth" that keeps data flowing between departments and gives management a complete view of the business.
The major players: CDK Global, Reynolds and Reynolds, Dealertrack, Tekion, DealerSocket, Dominion, and Autosoft for franchise stores. Independent dealers often run DealerCenter, Frazer, Wayne Reaves, or AutoManager.
A DMS is powerful at what it was built for, but nobody buys a DMS because of its CRM or its texting. Here's where it stops being enough:
| Gap | Why it matters | What fills it |
|---|---|---|
| Shallow CRM | DMS CRMs are built around cars, not customers. Sales teams want pipeline management, nurture flows, and real lead scoring | A dedicated dealership CRM |
| Basic marketing tools | Websites, SEM, social, and retention campaigns all need specialists. DMS-native marketing is limited | Dealer Inspire, Cox Automotive, Kimoby (for text campaigns) |
| Service communication | DMS texting is usually tied to an open RO, with no two-way conversation, no campaigns, no video | A Dealership Engagement System (DES) like Kimoby |
| Video MPI & photo estimates | Not available natively in any major DMS | Kimoby, Xtime, MyKaarma |
| Loaner fleet management | Basic or missing in most DMS platforms | Kimoby Go |
| Reputation management | Managing online reviews sits outside the DMS entirely | Podium, Birdeye, Kimoby |
| Custom reporting | DMS reports give you the basics. Deeper analysis usually needs a BI tool on top | Dedicated BI tools |
Once you accept that no DMS does everything well, the question becomes which specialists to layer on top, and how to keep them all talking to each other.
The tradeoff: managing more vendors, more logins, more integrations. The payoff: tools that are actually good at the specific thing your team needs them to do. It's the difference between having one general practitioner and having a cardiologist, an orthopedist, and a physical therapist. The specialists win on every measurable outcome (better workflows, deeper features, faster updates) as long as you pick ones that integrate cleanly with your DMS.
A real CRM centralizes customer data (purchases, communications, preferences, test drives) and gives your sales team the pipeline management, automated nurturing, and tracking that a DMS CRM just can't do. It's the difference between advisors remembering to follow up and the system remembering for them.
Leading options:
The service department is where long-term loyalty gets made or broken, and where most of a dealership's lifetime profit lives. It's also where the DMS falls shortest, because the DMS was designed to track transactions, not run conversations.
Tools built specifically for service:
| Feature | Kimoby | Xtime | MyKaarma | DMS native |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Two-way texting (any customer) | ✓ | RO-only | ✓ | ✗ |
| Video MPI | ✓ | ✓ | Limited | ✗ |
| Loaner fleet management | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | Basic |
| Targeted campaign texting | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Text-to-pay | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Native DMS integration (CDK, R&R, DT, PBS) | All major | CDK/DT | Partial | ✓ |
| Declined repair follow-up automation | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
Comparison based on publicly available product documentation from each vendor as of April 2026. [SOURCE NEEDED: verify each ✓/✗ with current vendor docs before publishing]
Digital marketing tools run your website, SEO, paid ads, and inbound leads. It's the layer the DMS doesn't touch and where your top-of-funnel spend goes.
Online reviews on Google, DealerRater, and Facebook are still the single biggest factor in whether a new customer picks your store over the one across town. And as more customers turn to AI assistants to recommend dealerships, those same reviews feed into the answers ChatGPT and Perplexity give.
Think about the communication gaps that cost your store money every single day. An advisor playing phone tag with a customer about a $1,200 timing belt. A customer walking out the door with no review request sent. A declined repair from six weeks ago that no one followed up on. An inactive customer who didn't get the recall notice.
You can't control the recall schedule or what the market does to margins. You can control how your store communicates, and that's the whole job of a Dealership Engagement System.
This is the question service managers ask most often when they first hear the term DES:
| DMS | DES (Kimoby) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it does | Manages operations and data | Manages customer relationships and engagement |
| Who uses it | Every department | Service, fixed ops, marketing |
| Customer communication | Basic, RO-limited | Two-way texting, campaigns, video, payment |
| Role in revenue | Records it | Drives it (upsells, campaigns, approvals) |
| Replaces the other? | No. Runs alongside it |
The short version: you need both. A DMS without a DES is a system that tracks every dollar but doesn't help you earn the next one.
The best software for a dealership service department in 2026 combines a Dealer Management System (DMS) for core operations with a Dealership Engagement System (DES) like Kimoby for customer communication, video MPI, mobile payments, loaner management, and service campaigns. The DMS records what happened. The DES drives what happens next.
A Dealership Engagement System (DES) is a software platform built specifically for dealership service departments to manage customer communication and engagement: appointment reminders, real-time repair updates, video MPI, text-to-pay, declined repair follow-ups, and loaner management. Kimoby is the DES purpose-built for franchised dealerships in North America.
Yes. Kimoby integrates with major DMS platforms including CDK Global, Reynolds & Reynolds, Dealertrack, Tekion, PBS, and others, pulling live customer and repair order data to power automated communication, campaigns, and reporting.
Dealership texting software increases service revenue by improving approval rates (customers are more likely to approve work when they see a video explanation of what's needed), enabling automated campaigns to re-engage customers who declined repairs or are due for service, and reducing no-shows with reminders. Kimoby reports customers authorize additional work 40% more often when shown video proof (Kimoby, 2024),[2] and a single Kimoby text campaign booked 45 appointments and generated $35,000 in upsell revenue for one dealership (Kimoby, 2024).[2]
Xtime (Cox Automotive) is primarily a service scheduling and lane workflow tool. Kimoby is a Dealership Engagement System covering the full service journey: appointment reminders, real-time status updates, video MPI, text-to-pay, loaner management, declined repair follow-up, and service campaigns. Many dealerships run Xtime for scheduling and Kimoby for everything that touches the customer after they book.
Kimoby pricing is customized based on dealership size and the modules selected (core Service Lane OS, Kimoby Pay, Kimoby Go, Marketing & Retention, Voice AI). Contact Kimoby for a quote tailored to your store's volume and DMS.
Book a personalized demo with the Kimoby team, or learn more about the Dealership Engagement System.