Car Dealership Chatbot for CarClick, a leading car dealership website in Israel

Eliran Aberzel– Digital Marketing Manager https://carclick.co.il/

Introduce your business and tell us about yourself: What does your business do? What is your role?

I am Eliran, and I work as the Digital Marketing Manager for CarClick, which is one of the largest car dealership websites in Israel. CarClick’s car experts collate information and offers from new and second-hand car dealerships, car importers, and leasing companies, to serve as a one-stop-shop for buyers looking for affordably-priced automobiles. Our website is our main point of contact with potential car buyers, and as the company’s Digital Marketing Manager, I look into optimizing it such that it generates and converts more leads from its incoming traffic.

What problems/challenges did you have and why did you decide to create a Chatbot?

A lot of car dealerships are now offering their services online. CarClick’s main challenge is to put up a fight to all of them, by providing new customers with the right car buying offers from all over the internet. To this end, we have built – and continue to update – a huge inventory of new-car deals. We also have mechanisms in place to draw a lot of traffic to our website. But over time, we found that generating traffic is not always enough; we needed to generate more sales leads from that traffic.

Car buyers are ‘explorers’. They’re looking all over the internet for the right car, the lowest price, and the best financing options. So for a first-time visitor, our website is usually just one of many places that they’re going to check out and evaluate. As Digital Marketing Manager, one of my tasks was to explore ways to get the attention of these visitors who would swing by our website. Creating a chatbot appeared to be an effective way to do this without costing us a fortune.

What was the result of adding your Chatbot to your business/website? And what did you learn from it?

Building a chatbot for CarClick has worked out as I had hoped it would. We programmed the chatbot with a lot of frequently asked questions and answers to help visitors find the right car and deal, and it has been doing just that. We know that it is getting our visitors’ attention because we have recorded a dramatic increase in the number of incoming sales leads from the existing traffic on our website.

We have found that our visitors respond very well to the chatbot because it’s easy for them to discuss cars and ask for the best offers using their own words. Before the chatbot, our new-car deals would not get nearly as much interest as they do now.

What are your top recommendations for businesses just starting with their own Chatbot?

In my opinion, marketing is no longer just about the adage “always be closing”. Customers these days would rather not have someone selling them something all the time. They are more interested in seeing whether they can feel safe with a particular business. And that sense of safety comes from knowing that they are getting real, valuable information and not just sales pitches.

So my two cents about chatbot development would be to build a strong chatbot that provides your customers with the tangible facts that they are asking for. This will help your customers trust your business and feel like they are a part of it. Over time, this will help you build a solid foundation from which your business can grow.