Speed Wins. New Technology from iovox is Paving the Way in Auto Sales

automotive, call tracking, marketplaces, webconnect, speech analytics, conversational ai, iovox insights, 

Running a successful business in a highly competitive market is hard work. But when you’re in the auto industry, mastering the speed and execution with which you respond to car buyer leads can be the difference between barely surviving or thriving. In this blog we focus on how progressive auto marketers are using iovox call tracking and Conversational AI to make sure leads are followed up immediately and with the highest level of quality.

While there are plenty of things in the world to keep someone up at night, for car marketers not yet using iovox solutions, it probably includes pondering the plight of leads.

We joke about the restless nights, but lack of visibility on lead activity is a real issue in the auto industry.

In this blog, we tackle two primary questions faced by car sales and marketing teams; 1) did we respond to the lead, and 2) what was said when we responded?

1. Did we respond to the lead?

   It’s hard enough to generate a qualified lead, but what happens next in the sales process makes all the difference. This is also the place in the sales funnel that gets murky and the trail can easily go cold for the marketer when it comes to visibility on what happened to that interested car buyer.

   As you’ll see below, when it comes to selling cars, speed wins.

   According to a recent post by Digital AirStrike, by responding to a lead within an hour of submission, car dealers are 60-times more likely to connect with that potential buyer than a competitor that waits 24 hours. Also, car buyers who get a response within 10-minutes are 3 times more likely to visit the dealership.

   As if those stats weren’t compelling enough, according to a Vendasta blog, conversion rates increase by 391% when companies make a call attempt within a minute of receiving a lead.

   Sales Conversions are 391% Higher in the First Minute

   But how do you know that your leads are being followed up properly with a call back from a sales person?

   Fortunately, with iovox WebConnect, when an interested car buyer fills out an online lead form, a WebConnect link can be inserted into the lead form. The dealer is then immediately notified of the new lead, and when that lead is responded to via outbound call, the circuit is fully connected for the dealership, and they will have the following facts:

   • The referring source URL that brought the buyer to the site in the first place
   • The specific listing the buyer is interested in
   • The time the lead entered the system
   • The time the lead was responded to
   • The person that responded to the lead
   • How long the call lasted
   • And with time, enough data to demonstrate to dealership management who the ‘fast responders’ are on the sales team

   With this data, dealership managers can begin to tune their operations by looking at call arrival patterns and whether staffing levels are well suited to respond quickly to new opportunities.

   As we can see, response time is a massive factor in closing new sales, but what gets said on the call is just as important. This brings us to question number two.

2. What was said to the lead?

   With access to the data from iovox WebConnect, a car dealer now has excellent visibility into how quickly the lead was responded to, and now with the iovox Insights solution, our new Conversational AI based speech service, dealers are also able to evaluate the quality of the follow up conversation.

   In fact, below is a sample checklist of events some iovox partners want to make sure occur on their outbound or returned calls:

   • Did the salesperson offer their name?
   • Was a test drive or visit to the dealership scheduled?
   • Does the deal involve a trade-in?
   • Was price discussed?
   • Does the customer have a budget?
   • Is there a current vehicle under finance?
   • Is new financing or funding required?
   • Did the salesperson say “please” and “thank you”?
   • Did the salesperson close with “thank you for the opportunity”?

   How can a dealership know if these things are being said and at what frequency? And is this possible for *outbound* calls? The answer is with iovox Insights and “yes” to outbound calls.

   The new iovox Insights service is very powerful. As a dealership, you define the keywords or phrases you want to identify, and once the conversation is recorded, the rules you define are run against the conversation and the iovox technology looks for exact or partial matches. Iovox Insights also searches for words that appear in proximity to other words.

   So let’s say a dealership wanted to know if the salesperson used the phrases “Good morning”, “Good afternoon” or “Good evening” and “How can I help you?” in their conversation with the new lead.

   Using iovox Insights and the “proximity” feature, they could define the keyword spotting rule as follows:

   Search Terms: “Morning help ~7”, “Afternoon help ~7”, and “Evening help ~7”
   (this would look for these words to be in proximity with a maximum distance of 7 words).

    

   Transcription: “Good morning, you’re speaking to Jan. How can I help?”

   Results match: Found “morning” and “help” within 7 words.

    

   Not only does iovox Insights provide dealers with visibility on important call criteria, but actions can be assigned to call types that meet certain thresholds as defined by the dealership. If the sales manager wants to receive a email alert anytime one the sales staff are on a call with a prospect where for example the word “test drive” appears more than 4 times in a conversation, they can do that or any variation of that.

   Keyword rules plus actions allows for maximum creativity in defining the terms that matter to your business, but also reinforces the speed objective that we highlighted above. Actions also don’t have to be alerts, they can be as simple as applying a tag to a call type. If a buyer is not interested but wants you to call them in 3 months, you can create a “follow up” tag that is automatically applied to that call and then searchable.

   With iovox Insights, you’ll always be ‘in the know’ about what’s happening with the quality of the response your car buyer leads are getting from your team.

Fortunately, iovox has a lot of experience when it comes to helping innovative, forward-thinking auto marketplaces and car dealers use call tracking technology to sell more vehicles and provide better service. We hope this blog shed light on new technologies from iovox that can help your business better understand what’s happening with inbound and outbound calls.

To learn more about iovox solutions click the green call button below and a team member will be in touch with you shortly.

We look forward to learning more about your business and how we can help.

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