|
Personal Experience with BZ Results, Bz Productions
My Experience DO NOT choose BZ Results / BZ Productions for your web host or CRM solution.
Leave your BZ Results story on the BZ Results Blog.
Greetings. First, a little info about me. I'm a business and Internet consultant since 1988 (1994 for the Internet). I consult with many car dealerships in the Chicago area in Internet and BDC. I have an extensive background in website design, development, marketing (SEO, SEM, PPC), sales and e-commerce. I have worked with many Fortune 500 organizations and lots of small and medium sized businesses. Below you will find my personal opinion of the services, and lack thereof, offered by BZ Results / BZ Productions, now owned by Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP). In today's market, standards for an ISP and what BZ Results offers are two totally different concepts. Please keep in mind while reading this, that the dealership is paying $5,000.00 per month (on a 3 year lease) for a website and a web based CRM. Yes... you read correctly, $5,000.00 per month! ** Once again, this is my personal opinion. **
Although the websites may look nice, it is NOT Internet marketing friendly, as it is built in FLASH and this method does not allow for marketing into the website (i.e. hyperlinking into the second level or unique keywording for special pages). They now are offering non-flash websites, but they are still not functional for todays standards. In order for me to help my dealership clients Internet marketing. BZ Results / BZ Productions Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Department ignored the first 4 days worth of phone messages I left, until I finally got the SEO person on the phone by insisting on waiting (holding) on the phone until he was free (20 minutes). I then had to bully him into viewing examples of what I was trying to accomplish in marketing the dealership's website. It took another 5 days for this person to copy, paste and post my simple text change. 5 DAYS!!! To help the major search engines, certain files (i.e. robots.txt, ror.xml) need to be placed in the Root Directory of the website. BZ Results / BZ Productions doesn't let you have access to or place files in your own root directory, AND WOULD NOT DO IT THEMSELVES, further hindering your website marketing capabilities. Now this is BIG... REALLY BIG!!! Let me ask you a question. Do you look in your spam or bulk email box? If you use BuzzTrak CRM, your outgoing email to the free email hosts (i.e. yahoo.com, hotmail.com, gmail.com, msn.com, etc...) is most likely ending up in their BULK EMAIL / SPAM EMAIL BOX, never to be seen by the prospective customer/lead that you just paid $21.00/per lead (avg.) for. How many potential customers waited for a response via email and thought that you weren't interested enough in their request to even answer them with an automatic reply. Additionally, (02/12/2011) the follow-up emails are still a simple click for a flash presentation. Today, many people have their emails going to an ANDROID phone and by the time the flash email downloads to the phone (some android phones do not use flash or flash is an add-on application), the customer just closes the email, never seeing or hearing the 10 year old message. SO 1990's!!! YES... YOUR CRM EMAIL REPLIES ARE GETTING TAGGED AS SPAM EMAIL. Here is one of the reasons. Spam filters will move email automatically (even with some spam filters turned off) to the Spam/Bulk Box when the incoming email address is alphanumeric. {MyChevyDealer12@leadcrm.com} will be assigned as spam mail. Some other spam triggers are; large font sizes, excessive text colors, color or image backgrounds, the text (words like; Sale, Savings, Money etc...). I have personally shopped BZ Results / BZ Productions websites for other dealerships nationwide, again in 2011, (including the Herb Chambers Group who has 31 dealership websites with BZ Results and BZ Results uses their endorsement on their website) and have found this fact to be accurate. BZ Results / BZ Productions is not the only CRM product with this alphanumeric email address problem so be sure to ask about this before signing-up with a vendor. However this issue is so huge that it must be your primary consideration when looking for a CRM solution.
NOTE: Some people believe that many of the free, public email hosts (i.e. yahoo.com, comcast.net, hotmail.com, msn.com) have black-listed, banned, or assign incoming email as spam, when it's received from one of the Automotive CRM applications (i.e. dealershipsname5@leadcrm.com; whereas all email inbound from @leadcrm.com is automatically tagged as spam). NOTHING IS FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH. Ask yourself: Why would, lets say, Yahoo, black-list the auto industries CRM vendors, then sell ad space for vendors to capture sales leads, who then resell the leads to car dealerships ($18.00/each avg) and they even have the leads formatted into "xml" so the lead can be automatically populated into the CRM they are black-listing? Not! Wouldn't Yahoo lose all of their advertisers? Go ahead... shop some other dealer’s websites for yourself (anywhere nationwide) and use a public email service as your contact email. You'll have your proof.
Want to hear more? On April 19, 2006 the Executive Vice President of Consulting Sales from BZ Results / BZ Productions personally stopped in our dealership. What I took away from the meeting was what the Executive Vice President of Consulting Sales said to me: "No one from BZ Results / BZ Productions held a gun to your heads and made you sign the lease." I was told that when BZ Results / BZ Productions signs up a dealership they then sell the lease to a third party, who pays BZ Results / BZ Productions, at a discounted rate, the entire lease term which the third party then collects. In other words... there is no getting out of their lease because, and I quote the Executive Vice President of Consulting Sales, "we already got paid for the lease and we aren't going to buy it back and take a loss." As far as I am concerned, the Executive Vice President of Consulting Sales came to see us to reinforce their lease and dictate the services they provide ("it's on the lease"). He never asked how he could work with us to accomplish our goals. Instead, he belittled me, told me how a judge will rule in their favor, and told me, "well... you're no expert!" How would he know? He didn't listen. You can't learn when you're talking. By the way, I am an expert, and your customer. He proclaimed "you have no proof of this alphanumeric email address issue", but again... I do!!! I shopped BZ Results / BZ Productions websites and received emails back via BuzzTrak from those dealers. And guess what? The emails went in my BULK email box. Only a couple of them made it into my regular box. The meeting ended with me asking the BZ Results / BZ Productions Executive Vice President of Consulting Sales to leave the dealership. If you look at BZ Results / BZ Productions websites, you'll notice that all the secondary pages have menu choice buttons and an image only, no text. BZ Results / BZ Productions wants to charge $250.00 per hour ("No one from BZ Results / BZ Productions held a gun you your head and made you sign the lease.") to add some text (copy, paste and post) to the pages so they don't look unfinished ("per the lease the site IS complete"). As BZ Results / BZ Productions calls the secondary pages, the console pages just add an extra layer to the website forcing the visitor to make another click to get the information they want. Poor performance is standard at www.bzresults.com. Just look at their website and while the flash page loads into the browser, BZ Results / BZ Productions blames "net congestion" as the reason for a slow loading page. Below is another example of BZ Results / BZ Productions lack of product and service testing. Note the simple misspelling of their "BuzzTrak" CRM product logon screen as BUZZRAK.
My personal, experienced, first-hand opinion: Find a better Host and CRM solution. $5,000.00 per month for one website (even with all the bells and whistles) and an out-dated CRM can be found for about $1,200.00 per month or less, from many other quality vendors who care about your business.
Please email me: BZResults@zoomshare.com (You are given permission to print, copy, share, this document for personal or commercial use.) revised Feb 12, 2011
|
