Shift Magazine - February 2020 - 19

Chatbots give
dealerships a way
to stay connected
with customers
BY SEBASTIAN BLANCO

oday's car shoppers might find
it perfectly normal to ask Siri for
driving directions to their local
dealership. Some of them are
just as comfortable using an AI assistant
for more complicated car-buying questions, perhaps without even knowing
that the email, chat or voice conversation
they're having is not with a real person.
Artificial intelligence has become a staple
at U.S. dealerships. Often, it takes the form
of chatbots, software programs that conduct instant-messaging conversations with
Web visitors. Some dealerships even give
their AI personas names and "assistant"
titles, which has led to people coming in
and asking to speak to these virtual beings.
David Kain, president of Kain Automotive,
a dealership training company, says these
virtual assistants work best when they
communicate with customers via text
messages or email, since customers are
still wary of voice assistants. The virtual
assistants that help the most are those
used to handle tasks that salespeople don't
have the time or the energy to do, such as
following up on leads.
"One thing that we love about AI is
that it won't give up," he said. "In the
real world, a human sends you an email
or two, and then they get emotionally disconnected. AI could care less about your
emotions and they're not going to judge
your interest level. They're just going to
keep tapping you on the shoulder."
Virtual assistants can do more than pick
up some slack. They can also be more

effective than human salespeople, Kain
said. His research shows that the open
rate for dealership-to-consumer emails
is only about 25 percent. A well-constructed virtual assistant, one that uses
features such as rolling IP addresses, will
have open rates closer to 40 percent.
"That gives you a nice uptick, just in
open rates," he said. "When you have
higher open rates, you have higher
response rates if the wording was good."
One of the foremost dealership AI
companies is Conversica. Its Emma AI
assistant is enabled at 1,300 dealerships
in the U.S.
Don Crawford, senior director of major
accounts, said the Conversica software is
better than its competitors at understanding intent and "convoluted double-negative paragraphs."
By using more than
seven years of data, which
includes thousands of customer email responses,
Conversica is able to determine whether it can answer
a question or if it needs to
prompt an employee for further action.
"If Conversica recognizes that the person
has an issue, she will escalate it to a service manager," he said.
The software speaks English and
Spanish, and each dealership is able to
assign its own name. Conversica is so
good, Crawford said, most customers
never recognize that they're talking to a bot.
"They thank her, they apologize, they

appreciate," he said. "What makes her
real is her ability to use her own words
and feelings to get the action we want or
try to elicit out of clients."
Despite the authentic feeling that software such as Conversica's can offer, successful dealerships know when to blend
AI and the human touch to get results,
Kain said.
"AI without HI [human intelligence] is
not very effective," he said. n

february 2020 * shift

Shift Magazine - February 2020

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