BLOG: 2023 will be the year of AI in car sales

Despite the claims of many industry commentators, we are some way off seeing artificial intelligence (AI) power 95% of customer interactions in retail by 2025. All that said, I believe there is a specific role for AI to play in our industry; it’s one I’ve seen first hand at carwow as it’s when humans and machines work together, combining and complementing our skill sets – that’s where the magic happens.

Natural language processing (NLP), is a branch of AI that helps computers understand, interpret and skillfully manage human language. This is where the opportunity lies. The reason is simple; it’s a mammoth operational challenge for many car dealers to sort through mountains of customer leads, all of varying quality. Sales teams try valiantly to decide, which customers have higher or lower ‘purchase intent’ to see where they should spend their precious time and who is most likely to give them the sale they need. But this manual, lead-filtering process is labour intensive and time consuming.

This is where NLP can help. We’ve started using tools from our partner Re:Infer, to evaluate customer-dealer interactions and share insights that can improve a customer’s experience and make the sales process more efficient. AI monitoring allows us to find areas of improvement when it comes to how retailers handle enquiries, particularly where dealers can positively impact a customer’s decision to purchase.

We discovered 100 standalone ‘intents’ that can precede a conversion by analysing four million messages in 800,000 chats. We can now aggregate and profile different groups and identify behaviours that lead to different sales outcomes. For example, personalised follow-ups are 2.3 times more likely to result in a purchase, while replying to a message within an hour increases your chance of conversion by 30%. And, when it comes to adding visual assets, providing a photograph alongside a proactive follow-up increases the chance of a sale by over 20%.

According to RTInsights, more than 90% of consumers consider a rapid response as an essential part of their overall experience. So, for the consumer, NLP means businesses are better able to respond quickly, and in a meaningful way. A win for everyone.

Our partnership with Re:Infer means we’re now expanding and enriching our core dataset for our AI operation, with a target of processing more than five million messages from over one million customer prospects by the end of this year. This will allow us to increase the breadth and depth of insight that can be offered to individual dealers on how best to handle online enquiries.

But, what role will sales staff play in this new era of data automation and NLP? I believe they’ll be more crucial than ever. As consumers, we want digital interactions with brands to feel like personal conversations. We all expect to connect with brands in the same way that we connect in our personal lives; in the communications channels we use every day. AI in the form of NLP can empower sales teams to focus on the leads that matter, while helping to strengthen their very real connections with their customers.

Written by John Veichmanis, Chief Operating Officer at carwow