“With Kahu, dealers can move from a transactional, low-margin sales model to a high-value, customer experience–driven model that increases profitability and loyalty. For the first time, dealers can take advantage of connected vehicle data to optimize every facet of their operation: from lot management to service retention, from test drives to audits, from sales to CSI scores,” said Sunil Marolia, vice president of product management at Spireon. “The new Kahu features we’re introducing at NADA deliver critical insights to inform and improve dealer operations, sales effectiveness, customer service and much more.”

Kahu connects any vehicle to Spireon’s cloud-based management platform, arming dealers with nationwide vehicle visibility and actionable data to improve inventory management, enhance customer service and drive sales. The Kahu dealer app locates vehicles on any lot — or out for test drive — and makes it easy to put buyers into the right vehicle at the right time. Standard features like geofencing, speed alerts, battery management and stolen vehicle recovery mitigate risk for dealers, and make Kahu a profitable add-on when sold through to consumers. Dealers can also utilize actual mileage data from customer vehicles post-sale to target them for service, lease renewals, trade-ins, etc.

In the new release of Kahu, Spireon adds the following features to the solution:

• Dealer Analytics — Dealers have access to unprecedented insight into test-drive activity, inventory mix and aging inventory compared to industry benchmarks. Analytics data enables dealers to align vehicle inventory and test drives with customer demand and promotions to optimize lot placement and sales.
• Enterprise Management — Large dealer groups can access multi-dealer views to see inventory and performance metrics across multiple locations, both individually and in aggregate. This feature provides vehicle search across dealerships to optimize sales opportunities and view comparative performance analytics against industry benchmarks.
• Enhanced Consumer App — Kahu now includes trip history along with detailed records of geofence, speed and battery alerts.
• Streamlined Stolen Vehicle Recovery — New Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) integration simplifies and accelerates filing a police report for stolen vehicles, increasing priority in law enforcement queues, and connecting the dealer or consumer to law enforcement nearest the vehicle for rapid recovery.
• Kahu K10000 Theft Warranty — Standard coverage of $10,000 per vehicle is offered if a car is stolen and not recovered within 30 days, reducing risk for both dealers and consumers.

As a risk mitigation solution, Kahu protects dealer inventory with geofencing, alerts for after- hours movement and the ability to pinpoint car location within 4 feet. Since launch at NADA 2017, Kahu has already helped dealers nationwide recover more than $1.2 million in stolen vehicles, with an average recovery time of 26 minutes.

Kahu is also proven to help dealers increase sales by immediately locating the right vehicle for customers, using a variety of factors including trim, aging, affordability and availability. Kahu dealers report finding cars within five minutes using the Kahu app, when previously it took 30 minutes or more to find a car, often driving buyers away. As a result, Kahu reduces wait time for customers by 40 minutes on average, streamlining the buying experience and improving CSI scores.

“We sell anywhere between 400 and 500 cars per month, and need to be as efficient as possible,” said Matt Asanovich, sales director at Precision Toyota in Tucson, Arizona. “With three additional offsite lots, it was previously very challenging to find specific vehicles to show to customers, and this made us look unprofessional and disorganized. When we introduced Kahu to the sales staff, there was an actual sigh of relief. Time is everything; the quicker you can get the customer in a car, the better, and Kahu saves us at least 35–40 minutes with each customer interaction.”