HOUSTON and LISLE, Ill. -

Two of the largest publicly traded dealer groups — Group 1 Automotive and Sonic Automotive — made moves this week to improve their retail performances.

First, Group 1 acquired Rountree Ford Lincoln in Shreveport, La., a dealership executives expected to generate $80 million in estimated annual revenues.

“We are delighted to strengthen our relationship with Ford Motor Co. and expand our existing footprint in Louisiana with the addition of Rountree Ford,” said Earl Hesterberg, Group 1’s president and chief executive officer.

Over at Sonic, the group signed a three-year, multimillion dollar agreement with Lextech for mobile app development to help Sonic better engage with customers from the moment they step into a dealership.

Lextech has been tapped to evaluate business workflows and to identify and build apps that improve processes and make the complex simple for Sonic’s mobile business unit

“Sonic Automotive has a mission to reinvent the traditional process of buying a vehicle and align the process around the way customers want to shop and buy vehicles,” said Rachel Richards, Sonic’s vice president of retail strategy and business applications.

“By developing a suite of interconnected apps on an iPad, we will improve the customer experience by shortening the buying time, and making the sales professional the single point of contact for our customer from the moment they walk into our dealerships until they drive off as happy owners with their vehicle purchase,” Richards continued.

“Looking at the pipeline of mobile app work we’ve identified as important to our business, we decided to commit to a three-year partnership with Lextech,” she went on to say.

In addition to working with Sonic to identify additional workflows that will benefit from mobile apps and then building new apps to support them, Lextech will provide professional support for updating existing apps.

“Sonic Automotive is passionate about creating a seamless buying experience for customers, instead of the traditional process where customers are handed off from sales to financing, with other stops along the way,” Lextech CEO Alex Bratton said. “By using mobile apps, Sonic is leading the industry in delivering a better customer buying experience.”

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