How Conversational AI Saves After-Hours Leads

We all live in a busy world, and a lot of car shoppers can’t make calls or go visit dealerships during 8 to 5 working hours. Unfortunately for your sales team, that has always meant lots of lost leads and missed opportunities when there’s no one available to respond to questions and engage with those potential customers.

Let’s take a look at how conversational AI can help fill those gaps and help keep with lead generation for automotive sales.

Losing Leads After Business Hours

If customers are coming to your dealership’s website after business hours or on weekends or holidays, that’s to be expected. But when calls go to voicemail or customers get canned responses from a chatbot on your website, they’re likely to move on to another dealership’s site if they’re not getting the help they need.

If your customer says “is that 2022 Camry still available?” and the automated response is “Thanks for contacting us! Someone will reach out to you during business hours”...that’s technically an instantaneous response, but it’s not very satisfying for the customer. Conversational AI can help by getting the customer the info they need right then, in the moment, rather than leaving them hanging on a response.

How To Leverage Conversational AI to Develop Leads After Business Hours

Let’s take a look at the resources that Matador’s AI suite has to help handle inquiries and get the lead conversion process started:

• AI Engage: this is the first point of contact, taking up the conversation and letting the customer know that his questions can be answered right then. It’s different from chatbots, since it’s able to formulate responses that are specific to the customer’s interests instead of a canned, pro-forma reply.
• AI Reply: that customer asking about the 2022 Camry can find out what he needs to know with AI Reply. With that kind of info on hand, AI Reply can gauge customer intent and keep them interested.
• Call AI: for inquiries that are handled via phone rather than online, Call AI is there to pick up those after-hours conversations. Call AI is designed to take it as far as capturing inquiries and scheduling appointments, since it’s got full access to your sales team’s calendars. For a more personalized touch, Call AI’s agent can be customized with a regional accent (think Texas or New England).
• Chat AI: you can think of this as a next-generation chatbot for your dealership’s website, drawing the customer into a conversation and helping to gauge interest.
• AI Follow-up: once an engagement with a potential customer goes cold, this is the tool that can help get that conversation going again. AI Follow-up is fully customizable for the interval of time you prefer before reaching out to a customer again.

All of these AI resources are designed to recognize signals like questions about trade-ins, financing, pricing, appointment scheduling and inventory to help qualify leads. Conversational AI cannot, however, actually negotiate trade-in value or financing – that will be up to the sales team in a face-to-face setting.

Turning Off-hours Inquiries Into Appointments

Once the AI agent has fielded inquiries from overnight customers, your sales team will have a full briefing on that conversation when they come in. That gives them the groundwork they need for the handoff, including the history of the conversation, context clues that give insight into the customer’s personality and intent, and solid information that they can use when they call or meet with that lead.

Compare that to a salesman returning a call with nothing more than a voicemail to go on – conversational AI gives your sales team a leg up so they can start an informed conversation and hopefully turn that lead into a conversion.

Dealerships everywhere have been using Matador AI and have reported up to a 25% jump in pipeline conversions. Why not give us a shot…book an appointment with Matador and let’s talk about what we can do to help your team and your operations.