There are more than 37,000 automotive dealerships currently employing two million people across the United States. Each of these dealers sells an average of 1000 units per year. At the center of such a highly competitive industry lies one crucial factor that is the key to a dealership’s success – speed.
Here’s the story of how a US auto-dealership automated and expedited their quote generation process and increased winnability of sales through RAP’s Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) solution.
Manual Auto-Dealership Quoting Process
The typical process for the majority of U.S. based dealerships still relies on sales agents manually conducting the entire lead to quote generation process. The company RAP worked with was no exception. In today’s multi-channel sales ecosystem, online leads are the majority. And leads often flow in during the weekends and after-hours through an online form fill. So, the company’s sales agents had to manually extract lead data from the CRM and check inventory for a match and selecting the right car and model to quote. This was a laborious, time-consuming and ongoing process for each new lead. Highly specific customer requests such as a model from a particular year, a certain color and so on exacerbated the difficulty of finding a match. In many cases, a match for all these criteria was not available. In such cases, the sales agent had to locate other dealerships nearby and check their inventory for a match before sending out the final quote. With this manual process, it often took over 24 hours to respond – decreasing the likelihood of closing sales.RAP’s Solution: AI-powered Quote Automation
RAP implemented an IPA solution that combined Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to equip the dealership with a smarter, faster automated quote process that tat increased the winnability of sales. One of the unique facets of RAP’s hyperautomation solution is that the AI component RAPFlow is capable of picking up customer preference data (specific model, color, etc.) from the CRM and checking the local inventory for a match then sending out the quote. In case a match is not available in-house, the RPA component RAPBot then locates the nearest dealership with an OEM locator and finds a match, reads the pricing information, feeds it back into the CRM, then generates and sends out the quote. This enables centralized information and a fully automated process with zero manual intervention. In addition, in case the customer changes their mind during the process – first they wanted a red car, now they want a black one, the AI component can handle that too. In a traditional setup the sales agent has to manually update that data. However, thanks to RAP’s intent extraction and ability to process unstructured content, it can update and check such customer preference modifications in the CRM to ensure an exact match. The company could deliver prompt and accurate prices for the right vehicle. Thanks to a centralized intelligent system, the company could automatically distribute leads to different sales agents and be informed of when a lead is ready to convert. With agents free from the manual quoting process they can spend more time doing what they do best – closing sales.Benefits of Implementing IPA
With the implementation of RAP’s IPA solution the auto-dealership increased the winnability of quotes, enabling a more efficient working sales force with many tasks automated. The ability to deliver quick replies increased the success rate of sales. Some of the additional benefits included:- 18% increase in quote engagement rate.
- 15% increase in conversions with this automation.
- Average quote response timings fell to under 30 minutes.
- Increase in ROI by 300% just from time savings.
