Meeting buyer expectations starts with the right platform. The tools you choose must support a seamless customer-facing experience. But just as critical is how they impact your internal operations: your team’ s efficiency, focus, and ultimately, your bottom line. With the right system, your team can move faster, stay focused, and guide buyers through a seamless path to purchase. But with the wrong tools— or none at all— frustration builds, productivity drops, and opportunities fall through the cracks. So how do you know which tools are helping and which are holding you back? Let’ s take a look at why the simplest systems often win.
Why simple systems win: the importance of a single customer view I recently came across the term“ The Toggling Tax”— a concept from a Harvard Business Review study that explores how frequently switching between tabs and applications impacts productivity. While at first I browsed through because the unique name caught my attention, the more I dove into it, the more I realized this is costing me, my team, and even more so— dealers— far more than we realize.
As software has become essential to manage workflows and scale dealerships, we’ ve adopted more tools. But with more tools comes more toggling. The more tabs we have open, the more platforms and interfaces we switch between— and the harder it is to be focused and truly efficient.
When a user switches from one application to another, it is not just the mere physical act of pressing keys to switch that costs effort. It takes time to adjust to the application, its semantic context, and purpose after a switch— users need to get their bearings, even if they were just looking at it. This readjustment takes a toll. Psychology and neuroscience have shown that this“ context switching” is cognitively taxing. 1
Thriving as a dealership means equipping your team to deliver at the level your customers expect. Digital expectations are at an all-time high, and as a result, buyers are holding dealers to higher standards of speed, convenience, and personal service. Today, customer expectations go beyond the physical product— putting more pressure on your team and the systems they rely on every day.
Not only is having to switch between multiple platforms annoying, it’ s taxing to your focus, speed, and quality of work. If you want to improve operational efficiency, one major way to achieve this is by providing your team with a solution that doesn’ t just provide tools, but one that is built in a way that actually drives performance, focus, and thereby results. This isn’ t just about saving wasted clicks; it’ s about cognitive fatigue that slows down performance and ultimately your bottom line.
Excessive toggling increases the brain’ s production of cortisol( the primary stress hormone), slows us down, and makes it harder to focus. Users are being asked to constantly refocus, and their attention spans are fragmented, which leads to them being depleted. This state of distraction typically occurs due to poor work design and a plethora of applications. 2
58 NATDA Magazine www. natda. org