TOPICS: Chatbot for Cars    Chatbot Optimization   

Car Dealer Chatbot – Are Chatbots the Future of Car Sales?

With car dealerships scaling up and streamlining their services for a new target audience of tech savvy millennials, the demand for car dealer chatbot development has been on the rise. Building chatbots allows car dealerships to automate the bulk of their customer service interactions, and cast a broader net by attending to large volumes of potential customers.

But where do online chatbots feature in the context of car sales? Do they have the potential to change the way automobile sales are made and managed? This article will attempt to answer these questions by examining some key areas of auto sales that require an upgrade from conventional marketing mechanisms.

Visitor engagement with car dealer chatbot:

Conventional online marketing tools including search engine optimization, social media promotions, and targeted pay-per-click advertisements, are all geared towards bringing traffic to a website. For car dealerships, they may translate into significant visitor volumes every day, but inadequate visitor engagement mechanisms can turn them into negative-ROI tools. Recent studies reiterate this trend; they are indicative of a decline in the effectiveness of traditional marketing methods.



Car dealer chatbots offer a viable solution. By building chatbots, automobile dealerships equip themselves with the means to retain the attention of potential customers, round the clock and throughout the year. By striking up conversations with the visitors, and automatically answering common questions about the dealership’s inventory and policies, a car dealer chatbot can significantly lower the percentage of visitors who pass through the dealership without turning into leads and eventually buying cars.

The automobile selection process:

Buying a car constitutes a major decision for most people, in terms of both finances and lifestyle. Car buyers evaluate every option using a myriad of criteria, and invest considerable time and effort into studying auto brands, reading reviews and opinion pieces about specific car models, and exploring multiple dealerships in search of the right price. At the end of this process, a potential car buyer wants to arrive at a carefully calculated decision that is perfectly tailored to their needs and desires.

Car dealer chatbots are able to offer this brand of unobtrusive assistance. Their ability to answer customer questions about car brands, pricing, service center details, safety provisions, and financing options, finds a perfect match in their quiet, non-interfering presence on the corner of the dealership’s website. As such, car dealerships that create a chatbot, are able to offer their visitors the freedom to conduct their research at their own pace, while knowing that they have the option of getting their questions answered by the car dealer chatbot.

Follow-up with potential customers:

Visitors who arrive at a car dealership’s website, are unlikely to make a purchase on the spot. Car sales typically involve multiple steps, with potential buyers expressing interest in a particular car, requiring additional information, taking a test drive, understanding their financing options, and making sure they are getting the best price. As such, it is important for modern car dealerships to ensure that their website’s visitors do not leave without commencing the next step in their purchase process.

Dealerships that create a chatbot for their websites are able to collect contact information and custom queries from their visitors, and pass these on to their human sales staff. These visitors thus turn into leads that can be contacted by the sales team. Thanks to recorded chat histories, the sales representative making the call already has key information about the lead’s requirements, and is thus able to follow up with relevant information that can move the lead closer to a purchase.

Evaluation and improvement of sales strategies:

The fast-faced world of automobile sales requires regular evaluation of existing sales and marketing strategies, with a view to staying up to speed with customer preferences. Experience with chatbot development has shown that online chatbots serve as effective collectors of customer feedback. The best chatbots for car dealer websites are able to provide the dealership with a mix of direct and indirect customer feedback, in the form of targeted surveys and recorded chat histories. The dealership’s sales team is then able to analyze this feedback to better understand the questions, needs, and desires of their potential customers.

The above discussion shows that car dealer chatbots play a vital role in several key areas of car sales. Making them a default feature on dealership websites, appears to be a logical step for the near future. For more information and insights on chatbot development for car sales and other industries, stay tuned to our latest blog posts.