For used car salesmen, one of the keys to closing a sale is to sign the customer while they are still in the initial stages of excitement about a vehicle. Traditionally, that has involved bringing them into a sales office at the dealership and pitching the sale. With the help of LMI, one national used-car dealership has developed a much more effective way to close deals quickly. Salesmen can authorize and complete the sale with the purchaser in the parking lot, right next to their new vehicle.
A Cost-Saving, Tech-Forward Solution Emerges
For the solution, the dealer needed Wi-Fi throughout each large lot so that sales personnel could transmit and receive data to authorize and close the sale. With no Wi-Fi available at the time, the customary solution would have been to run an underground cable from a network location and install a pole-mounted access point to broadcast the signal.
With the parking lots existing and in use, such an approach would have required disruptive, expensive trenching of the asphalt. To support end-to-end, persistent data transfer and authorization processing for the dealership without laying cabling, LMI recommended implementing a Fluidmesh Networks mesh network.
With this network design, multiple, low-power network nodes interconnect with one another, cooperating to distribute data over the network. Each can send and receive data, which enables data packets to take the shortest route from point to point.
Should a node go down, the remainder of the nodes can “heal” the network and maintain the connection. A single, central router in dealership building sends and receives data to and from the mesh network, which can distribute it to laptops, tablets, IP security cameras, scan guns and other devices, as well as transmit it back to the dealership’s corporate network.
