4 Ways to Utilize AI and Unlock Your Full Potential

When we talk about artificial intelligence, it’s easy to think of tools like ChatGPT, but it’s often overlooked how many other purposes this technology has in our lives. Search engines offer auto-filled suggestions when we start to type. Social media algorithms prioritize showing us content we’ll enjoy and interact with. Even streaming services provide us with recommendations on what to watch next based on our watch history.

Artificial intelligence improves our lives in so many ways and accessibility and convenience should extend beyond personal time. Imagine how helpful those features would be in your dealership. Your productivity would increase, your staff would have more time to focus on other priorities, and complex tasks could be made simple.

Let’s break down some ways you can use AI in your dealership:

Engaging Your Internet Leads

Timing is crucial when a customer drops into your CRM as a new internet lead, so your sales team has to jump on every response right away. But it’s frustrating and feels like a waste of time when a meaningful percentage of those leads don’t respond to calls or texts about next steps.

Artificial intelligence tools can engage internet leads with conversational texts while you focus on the customer in front of you. Large language models can help drive the customer to action through great dialogue and ultimately set an appointment.

Once a lead has committed to an in-person or phone meeting to discuss their interest, your sales team can step in, increasing sales opportunities at the time when the customer is most likely to buy.

Optimizing Your Phone Call Follow Up

When a customer makes the effort to pick up the phone and call your store, the topic of that call is extremely important to them.  Part of your job is making sure each call is handled appropriately.  But reviewing calls each morning is extremely time consuming.

AI can optimize your phone call follow-up by serving you hot cases for follow up each morning and providing quick summaries of calls to help you determine which need reviewed.

Artificial intelligence is able to transcribe every call, create a brief two or three sentence summary, and then tag each call with a category based on the conversation – think upset customer or ready to buy.  You can then filter on those tags for a prioritized list to review and follow up on. You can also leverage these items for identifying coaching opportunities.

Enhancing Your Online Inventory

Merchandising your used vehicle inventory effectively is a never-ending art form. Even if you have all the vehicle’s features and information, manually creating a description, or copy and pasting one, takes time and you have no way to test if it converts well. If you have more than one person writing descriptions, you might have some in all caps presenting only a list of features. Others might be in sentence case telling a story. Inconsistency across vehicle descriptions can cause consumers frustration during the process, and they may give up on your site entirely.

And if your photos have a busy background they can look unprofessional or distracting, but it takes software, skill, and most importantly, time, to update them.

You can leverage AI to enhance your online inventory with smart tools and data that limit the manual effort required for listing your vehicles. Uniquely generated and impactful vehicle descriptions can help your team build online listings quickly, and key vehicle features can be automatically pulled from the VIN based on what’s most likely to interest customers.

AI can also help with photo enhancements like background removal and replacement for more professional photos, as well as automatically incorporating graphic overlays for consistency. There is a lot of time sunk into vehicle merchandising that you can eliminate with AI.

Pursuing Your Best Opportunities

Just pulling a list of your customers who are in a positive equity situation can result in a long prospect list to try to work through.  It’s also no longer enough information to create a compelling offer to get the customer to act. You need to know who has a high propensity to buy, regardless of equity.  You need to know what they are likely to buy.  And you need to know how they are likely to buy it – finance, lease, or cash.

Artificial Intelligence that uses a unified AI data layer is able to find prospects who are ready to buy using all three types of data – demographic, behavioral, and transactional – even the ones that may not be obvious. With the help of AI, you don’t have to waste time working through a long list of prospects that are nowhere near purchasing another vehicle, you can focus on pursuing your best opportunities.

There are several ways you can use artificial intelligence to save you and your team time and energy. Engaging your internet leads via conversational text messages, having call transcripts, summaries, and tags to enhance customer follow-up, minimizing your efforts while merchandising your used vehicle inventory, and easily identifying high-quality lead opportunities is just the start to unlocking your dealership’s full potential.

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