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Reynolds Expands Offerings at NADA

Autosphere » Dealerships » Reynolds Expands Offerings at NADA
Chris Walsh, President of Reynolds. Credit: Reynolds

Annual dealer convention in New Orleans revealed further AI tools and integrated solutions to enhance the automotive retail experience.

Autosphere recently had the opportunity to conduct an exclusive interview with the Reynolds and Reynolds Executive Team about this year’s unveilings at the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) Convention in New Orleans (January 23-26).

A key announcement was the release of Appointment AI, the latest artificial intelligence (AI) tool to leverage Spark AI—Reynolds and Reynolds’ Unified Data Layer that connects tools across its entire system. Appointment AI was created via a partnership between Reynolds and STELLA AI, a leading provider of intelligent conversational AI technology designed specifically for the automotive industry.

Advanced parts delivery robot was a hit at the Reynolds and Reynolds booth during NADA 2025. Credit: Reynolds and Reynolds

Tackling unanswered calls

There’s no question that Dealerships are busy places and most of the time that’s a good thing. One time it isn’t is when the phone rings and no one answers. At dealerships, nearly 1-in-3 phone calls go unanswered today and the vast majority of those missed calls are to the service department, leaving huge gaps in the opportunity for customer retention and revenue generation.

Additionally, industry studies have shown that, dealers also lose opportunities due to putting customers on hold. Nearly 70% of customers placed on hold for less than 30 seconds hang up—of those customers, nearly 60% will never service with that dealership again. “Dealerships simply cannot afford that,” said Rich Sands, CEO of STELLA AI. “Not when they can maximize revenue with the 24/7 intelligent call handling that Appointment AI provides.”

With Appointment AI consistently answering every call, customers are never forced to wait on hold. Using intelligent, conversational AI to elevate the customer experience with personalized responses, this cutting-edge technology is designed to give dealerships a greater opportunity to book more work and increase CSI scores. 

“Because Appointment AI is able to seamlessly access our Spark AI unified data layer, it can recognize when a returning customer is calling into the dealership and will customize the interaction to them,” said Jason Sideris, Vice President of Fixed Operations Product Management for Reynolds and Reynolds. “That level of attentiveness and personalization makes a big difference with customers.”

Difference maker

This new AI tool not only benefits customers, but it is a difference maker for employees as well. Going beyond basic automation, Appointment AI understands shop capacity—the AI will attempt to schedule customers to maximize work throughput. By taking the menial task of booking appointments off the plate of busy staff, it allows them to focus on more lucrative tasks dealing face to face with customers on more complex issues.

“Day or night—before, during, or after hours—it doesn’t matter; when a customer calls, they need to feel like the dealership considers their needs to be the most important thing at the time,” concluded Sideris. “Customers aren’t calling because everything is going well with their vehicle. Something is broken or not working. They’re frustrated and need help. Appointment AI lets you do that for every customer, without slowing down the rest of your operation.”

Appointment AI further enhances Reynolds’ Spark AI, it’s artificial intelligence platform that serves as a unified data layer. First released last summer, Reynolds’ President Chris Walsh explained that as AI becomes more prolific and proficient within the automotive retail sector, there is an opportunity to build upon the unified data that’s available and create more powerful tools and solutions for dealers. Hence the introduction of Spark AI and it’s growing suite of tools.

More efficient and productive

Designed to solve many of the issues that dealers face on a daily basis, Spark AI was conceived to make employees more efficient and productive, a key factor in an era when many automotive retailers are dealing with significant staff shortages.

For Canadian and U.S. dealers, Spark AI offers Conversation AI, which transcribes and summarizes each customer call to the dealership and tags it for a specific category directly within the dealership’s CRM tool. This enables simplified and more targeted follow up by dealership staff.

Engagement AI is another tool that’s designed to help dealers on both sides of the border with one of the most frustrating aspects to retail store operation—chasing down non-responsive leads. Engagement AI is designed to augment that task via conversational messages with prospects as leads come into the dealership. By prioritizing high-value leads, which are identified by the conversations generated, Engagement AI can connect these leads directly to staff via instant notifications, saving a huge amount of legwork and time.

Other tools available through Spark AI (though currently only for U.S. dealer customers) include Prospect AI and Merchandising AI.

Prospect AI identifies customers with a high propensity to buy and matches them with vehicles that best fit their situation in the dealership’s inventory. It also goes a step further to determine how they will buy the vehicle (finance, lease, or cash). The Spark AI data layer leverages phases of life, major events, and a host of other factors and variables to make these determinations. 

Merchandising AI is designed to create compelling vehicle descriptions and professional-looking photos. These are major factors in creating meaningful online conversions for dealers but doing them properly often takes a tremendous amount of time and resources. Merchandising AI is designed to eliminate all that guesswork, manual creation, and copy-and-paste entries by creating high-quality descriptions with key vehicle features pulled directly from the VIN. It also updates image backgrounds to remove distractions and automatically places overlays on images for consistency.

Partnership with Kimoby

Reynolds and Reynolds have also been working on some initiatives, specific to the Canadian market, as Lance Alverson, Vice President, Sales, shared with us. These include a partnership with Kimoby that provides online payment capability for French speaking dealerships and their customers in Canada. Reynolds has also acquired TSD, a major provider of fleet management solutions that allows Reynolds’ dealer customers to have integration for vehicle service and managing fleet customer requirements. A partnership with UVeye, which provides service lane solutions, is also another major development. This automatically generates videos and photos of vehicles as soon as they drive into the service lane and integrates with the Reynolds and Reynolds ERA-IGNITE platform to allow smooth and seamless transitions from that documentation directly into a Repair Order (R/O.)

Reynolds also announced at NADA a new development with KeyTrak, its leading key and asset management systems provider. Thanks to its partnership with TrueSpot, which provides real-time location services, KeyTrak now enables dealership staff to locate vehicles and their keys faster from the palm of their hand. For sales and service associates looking for keys or vehicles, KeyTrak Edge now pinpoints the desired assets with an intuitive map view of the dealership. For personnel on the go, KeyTrak’s mobile app enables a quick search capability with the asset’s location pinned on the map. This makes it easier to find missing items like hidden keys, saving valuable time for dealership staff. To save even more time, the key tracker feature now also responds in real-time, switching seamlessly from Maps Mode to the Enhanced Modar Mode, which is a proprietary feature to deliver an even faster and more efficient key-finding experience. This saves hours of wasted time searching for missing assets and hundreds of dollars per key in rekeying costs. Through the continuing partnership between KeyTrak and TrueSpot, dealers have more opportunities to quickly identify and resolve problems before they escalate.

Another interesting product on display at the Reynolds booth at NADA this year, was an early version of Reynolds’ parts delivery robot, which performed onsite demonstrations at the show and drew a lot of attention from attendees.

In summarizing, Reynolds and Reynolds at NADA and in 2025, Chris Walsh stated “We’re excited about our presence at NADA this year. And one of the reasons we’re so excited, is the business growth that we’ve had over the past five years. We’ve got all these customers that are really interested in coming to Reynolds, and more than ever before. Our pipelines are full, and the whole strategy around structuring our booth this year was to give these customers that are looking to come to Reynolds an opportunity to see all our capabilities across all of our companies, so they understand the full breadth of our capabilities and the different ways we can impact their success.”

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