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Artificial intelligence in the automotive industry creates an environment where marketing and sales operations can improve in terms of accuracy. It takes care of predictive tasks such as trendspotting and forecasting and automates resource-intensive activities. With all that, AI also enhances the customer experience by providing personalized after-sales service interactions.
How Conversational AI is Bringing a Change in Today’s Automotive Marketing and Sales
With human-like cognitive abilities, AI is now capable of offering real-world business impact. This breakthrough has been possible due to three factors: growing computing power, tumbling costs of processing and storing data, and increasing abilities of conversational AI.
Conversational AI is being adopted by businesses around the world for its ability to understand human inputs in real-time and in multiple languages. However, there’s an untapped potential lying in the automotive sector. Embracing AI has the scope of lending leadership to automotive dealerships in the market.
Let’s discuss the automotive marketing trends around conversational AI:
1. The market is ready to adopt conversational AI
The path of purchasing a vehicle has changed a lot with digital platforms, search engines, and social media channels. Online is the first place where a customer goes to know about a car.
Google says that 92% of car buyers spend almost 14 hours researching cars online. In fact, 2/3 of them make their final decision online only.
Adding to that, the new normal has increased the demand for seamless and quick digital experiences. Customers are looking for tailored recommendations and assistance for all services. Without a seamless offline and online experience, an automotive dealer can’t gain and retain customers.
In short, you have to think about the whole experience right from the first research to purchase and ownership – not just about the product.
2. New car dealerships are already using conversational AI
Many automotive dealerships are successfully using conversational AI to serve consumers as per their new expectations. From Tesla to Carvana, the market is seeing the rapid emergence of digital native dealerships.
They are taking the help of AI partners to design omnichannel bots to optimize all operations of marketing and selling cars. AI is automating sales forecasting based on market conditions, providing product recommendations, and managing after-sales operations as well.
3. AI will decide future leadership for automotive dealerships
With traditional methods failing to deliver optimal margins and revenues, AI becomes the way forward to gain and retain market leadership for automotive dealerships. New entrants are digital-native, more agile, and stronger in terms of their online marketing and sales approach. Without keeping up with the market, dealers can easily start losing their profitability.
Adding to that, the market is seeing a rise in electric vehicles that require lesser maintenance after-sales. This also calls for more cost-effective ways of attending to customers’ after-sales demands, otherwise, the profitability will be affected.
Automotive dealerships can avoid such situations and gain prospects faster by deploying a conversational AI. Superior customer experience delivered by AI will ensure successful participation in the new-age mobility market of the automobile sector.
Using Conversational AI in Automobile Marketing
Today, consumers live amidst the overflow of options and information, which is making them increasingly impatient and demanding. Their attention span is going down, so marketers need the right message and showcase it at the right time for efficient results.
Vehicle buyers often come across wrong advertisements that don’t align with what they need currently. An ad for sporty cars doesn’t work for a buyer who’s looking for an SUV for his family.
Automotive dealerships can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their marketing approach with conversational AI. Let AI overlook the entire marketing journey of a potential customer and decide the right message, correct channel, and appropriate time. AI can make decisions in split seconds based on its analysis of the entire available data.
AI-programmed advertising can even provide tailored communication based on the interests of every individual. This personalized way of marketing is possible due to the intent identification conducted by an AI with the help of machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). These technologies segment customers on the basis of what they like, where they go to search, how they navigate a website and the kind of content they respond to. This saves marketers from running one-size-fits-all campaigns that drive minimum to no returns.
Using Conversational AI in Automobile Sales
For a customer, car buying presents a number of stressful processes. Apart from the price haggling, buyers mostly feel dissatisfied by the non-existent or slow answers to their questions. The same delays bother them when trying to connect with a salesperson. Customers also feel overwhelmed by the variations of vehicle models that are available today. Every car line mostly comes with dozens of options based on packages, engines, colours, and more specifications.
On the other side, automobile dealerships struggle to manage leads due to time constraints and limited human resources. As a result, all the best practices that can boost sales are rarely executed consistently. This is a huge problem as showroom visits have gone extremely low in the current situation.
Within vehicle sales, dealerships can leverage AI to gain more customers through better lead management. Plus, dealers can increase their revenue from every customer through personalized cross- and up-selling. Conversational AI can be used to automate the process of capturing, qualifying, and nurturing leads with personalized interactions. It learns from each customer interaction and regularly optimizes the sales funnel user experience.
Hence, with the best use of AI, dealerships can expect 5-10% growth in their revenues with improved margins.
Take this opportunity of growing your marketing and sales efforts with ORAI. Chat with us to know more, or get a closer look at the car dealership AI chatbot with a DEMO.
Swapnil Jain
CEO-ORAI Robotics
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