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New platform creates a shared customer data foundation across dealership locations and systems, supporting more consistent engagement, reporting, and future AI capabilities
DriveCentric has announced a new Customer Data Platform (CDP) designed to help automotive dealership groups unify customer information across locations, business systems, and interactions. The platform aims to provide a more complete view of customer relationships across sales, service, and other dealership activities.
As dealership groups expand, customer information often remains fragmented across customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, dealer management systems (DMS), and third-party applications. A customer may purchase a vehicle at one location, receive service at another, and interact with multiple teams, leaving their history distributed across separate records.
DriveCentric’s CDP is designed to address this challenge by bringing together customer identities, vehicle information, transaction records, service history, communications, and interaction data into a shared data foundation. The company said the platform builds on its existing integrations, with the goal of maintaining data quality, compliance, and visibility into individual dealership locations.
Creating a Unified Customer Profile
The first major component is an Enterprise Customer Profile that consolidates customer identity, deal history, service activity, communications, and engagement across dealership locations.
The platform is designed to maintain the permissions and store-level attribution needed by dealership groups while providing a broader view of the customer relationship.
Matt Leone, CEO of DriveCentric, said dealership groups increasingly operate as connected businesses, but their customer data often remains divided by location and system. He said the company aims to help dealerships understand customers across their entire relationship rather than relying on the most recent lead or the location where a record was created.
Dennis Gingrich, sales and finance director at The Niello Company, said customers may purchase and service vehicles at different locations within a group and expect a consistent experience. He described unified customer visibility as an important challenge for dealership operations and cited DriveCentric’s CDP as a step toward addressing it.
Building a Foundation for AI and Automation
DriveCentric plans to expand the platform over time so unified customer information can support engagement, reporting, and AI capabilities across its product portfolio.
The company said fragmented customer histories can limit the effectiveness of AI and automation because systems may lack the context needed to understand the full relationship. By consolidating information across locations and interactions, the CDP is intended to provide a more consistent data foundation for future intelligence-driven applications.
Michael Affronti, chief product and business officer at DriveCentric, said the quality of underlying data is as important as the AI capabilities built on top of it. He noted that systems relying on information from a single interaction or dealership location may have only a partial understanding of the customer.
Identity Resolution and Early Access
Identity resolution is another key part of the platform’s development. DriveCentric is developing technology intended to identify when records across different systems or dealership locations belong to the same person, helping reconcile duplicate or fragmented information into a more consistent profile.
Through its Early Access program, DriveCentric will work with dealership groups to evaluate how unified customer data affects visibility across locations, data quality, customer engagement, and future AI-driven experiences.
The launch also reflects a broader shift in dealership technology, with engagement platforms increasingly expected to support more than lead management and follow-up. DriveCentric sees its CDP as an underlying data layer that can help dealerships understand customer relationships across stores, departments, and interactions without introducing another standalone place to manage data.
Dealership groups interested in the Early Access program can learn more or request a conversation at DriveCentric. The company said it will share broader availability details as development progresses.
