Tekion Hires a New Leader for Customer Support and Makes Big Investments Showcasing Its Commitment to Dealer Success

March 16, 2023 at 13:28 PM EDT

Hires Mike Runda as its VP of Global Support to ensure dealers receive highest value from Tekion platform and the partnership
Support Center of Excellence in West Chester, Ohio expanded to accommodate additional support staff and enhanced modern dealer training facility
Strategic focus on implementation, hypercare customer support, customer success and continued training for best-in-class dealer experiences

Tekion, innovator of Automotive Retail Cloud^® (ARC), the first and fastest cloud-native automotive retail SaaS platform, today announced their ongoing commitment to dealer success with the hiring of new Vice President of Global Support, Mike Runda, as well as investing more in strategic initiatives to further enhance all levels of customer support and success. Runda brings a strong proven history of leading successful global support organizations at companies such as Avaya, Oracle, Intuit, Symantec and most recently, ServiceNow. With his significant experience in scaling high-performing teams, Runda will infuse new insights to ensure dealers receive the highest value from the ARC platform and their partnership with Tekion.

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Tekion's Support Center of Excellence in West Chester, Ohio, USA (Photo: Business Wire)

“Tekion is an exciting cloud technology company, but what I’ve learned is retail automotive is a people business,” said Runda. “Tekion’s commitment to deliver meaningful long-term value to its partners aligns with my background and I look forward to incorporating my learnings and experience to take Tekion’s support to the next level.”

In addition to adding Runda as a new key leader, Tekion has invested and expanded its Support Center of Excellence in West Chester, OH, adding on to the majority of technical support and dealer training staff that already work out of the facility. The center will also welcome dealers who want to become professionally certified on the Tekion platform, enabling them to facilitate their own department-focused training programs.

“After our last fundraising round in October 2021, we committed to invest in enhancing our Support operations and making it best-in-class for our customers,” said Jay Vijayan, Founder and CEO of Tekion. “We kept up to our commitment, made significant investments, implemented best-in-class systems and processes run by the right people delivering the highest level of customer service as we scale and continue to grow our business.”

Tekion’s support model goes beyond terms of service, it’s based on consistently delivering more value than expected in every way: experience, efficiency, customer satisfaction, product usage and continuous success. Tekion’s dealer partnership involves the following three dealer-facing teams that seamlessly work together to deliver delightful experiences and value to its dealers and their staff:

Implementation – The implementation team establishes dealership engagement right away and prepares diligently for a successful and expedited launch. They work closely with dealership department leaders to establish an immersive training schedule while also ensuring the application is configured to their business.
Technical Support – Available 24/7/365, Tekion Support engineers and analysts engage with dealers who need immediate platform assistance via phone, email and in-application chat. They also proactively monitor the application to resolve issues.
Partner Success – Once a dealer is onboarded to the Tekion platform, they are assigned a dedicated Partner Success Manager (PSM). PSMs are industry experts who have decades of automotive retail experience. They work with dealers as trusted advisors to ensure adoption, usage and success on the Tekion platform.

About Tekion

Positively disrupting an industry that has not seen disruption in over 50 years, Tekion has challenged the paradigm with the first and fastest cloud-native automotive platform that includes the revolutionary Automotive Retail Cloud (ARC) for retailers, Automotive Enterprise Cloud (AEC) for manufacturers and other large automotive enterprises and Automotive Partner Cloud (APC) for technology and industry partners. Tekion connects the entire spectrum of the automotive retail ecosystem through one seamless platform. The transformative platform uses cutting-edge technology, big data, machine learning, and AI to seamlessly bring together OEMs, retailers/dealers and consumers. With its highly configurable integration and greater customer engagement capabilities, Tekion is enabling the best automotive retail experiences ever. Founded in the Silicon Valley, Tekion employs over 2,500 innovators globally. For more information, visit www.tekion.com.