The Mission
With over 300 locations, AutoNation is America’s largest and most admired auto retailer. In an average year, they sell over 500,000 new and pre-owned vehicles and service nearly five million customers. Their mission is to deliver the most customer-focused sales and service environment in automotive retail that is built around respecting the customer’s wishes, earning their trust, and surpassing their expectations. Their commitment to service excellence is validated by 78 stores recognized as J.D. Power Dealers of Excellence and the most 4 and 5 star reviews, all-time of any automotive dealer group, public or private according to Reputation.
The Challenge
Since buying or servicing a vehicle is a complex purchase, phone calls are often a key piece of the customer journey. This human-to-human interaction helps to reassure customers, and it gives them the opportunity to ask questions they couldn’t find answers to online. Because of this, AutoNation knew they needed a way to tie phone calls to their digital marketing efforts and the broader digital journey.
Buying a car isn’t like buying toilet paper or socks — you’re making a big investment. It’s the second biggest investment you’ll make besides the purchase of your home, so you want to call a trusted advisor during your journey. That’s why we put an emphasis on connecting the digital and call experience for our customers.
Marc Cannon, Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer, AutoNation
Before using Invoca, AutoNation had a different call tracking solution in place. But their vendor wasn’t giving them enough data and granularity about the customer journey. “Our last call tracking provider didn’t have anywhere close to the technology, the features, or the data resources that Invoca does,” said Matteo Togni, Product Manager of Localization and Digital Product at AutoNation. “Switching to Invoca was a no-brainer.”
From the beginning, AutoNation was impressed with the Invoca team.
The Resolution
Tracking Phone Calls from Digital Marketing Campaigns
With Invoca, AutoNation has full attribution for the web pages, digital marketing campaigns, and search keywords that drive high-quality phone leads. With this data, they can allocate more budget to their top-performing campaigns and eliminate campaigns that are primarily driving support calls and non- sales-related inquiries.
AutoNation passes Invoca’s call attribution data into their martech stack, including Google Ads, Search Ads 360, Google Analytics, and Facebook. This allows them to manage their bids and CPCs based on both online and phone call conversions, ensuring they’re getting the most out of their campaign budgets.
Our biggest problem was that our phone calls were going into a data black hole. We couldn’t tie a sale back to the campaign that drove it and that made it difficult for us to optimize our media spend. Invoca has given us complete visibility into the campaigns driving each call as well as what happens on those calls. It’s enabled us to get a higher return on our ad dollars and prove our full ROI.
Anand Rao, SVP of Digital Business, AutoNation
Increasing Sales Agent Close Rates With Insights from Phone Calls
AutoNation also uses Invoca to train its sales team to close more deals and better serve customers. Invoca automatically records and transcribes each inbound call, and AutoNation uses these insights to identify sales agents’ weaknesses and coach them to improve their performance. They also feed these recordings into their CRM to keep complete and accurate records of every customer interaction. AutoNation has also started using Invoca to automate customer call quality assurance (QA). With Invoca automated call QA, AutoNation can select the criteria that make up a successful phone conversation for both sales and customer care agents and use AI to automatically scan every call for those criteria, at scale. These criteria include if the agent is greeting a caller correctly, if they’re asking them to set an appointment, if they’re mentioning a recent promotion, and more. This eliminates the manual work of scoring calls and removes human error from the process. It also gives agents real-time feedback on their performance so they can adjust on the fly, without having to wait for their next meeting with their manager.
Providing a great customer experience is at the core of our mission, and that’s why our sales managers constantly provide feedback to our agents. Invoca’s call recordings and transcriptions are invaluable coaching tools. Insights from Invoca have helped guide a great deal of our training. They’ve also helped us close the customer feedback loop so we can understand how our customers think, what matters to them, and their sentiments.
Anand Rao, SVP of Digital Business, AutoNation
Improving the End-to-End Call Experience
In addition to improving agent performance, Invoca enables AutoNation to enhance the end-to-end experience for callers. AutoNation uses Invoca to create IVRs callers can use to quickly self-route to the relevant department and get the help they need. When calling to set up an appointment, the IVR gives the caller the option to receive a text with a link to do so online instead of holding the line for a representative. This reduces hold times, frees up agents, and increases customer satisfaction.
Invoca’s data also helped AutoNation identify staffing inefficiencies at their locations, which were causing quality phone leads to go unanswered. Now, they can better staff their locations to reduce abandonment rates and ensure that every caller promptly gets the help they need.
Adjusting to New Vehicle Buying Behavior During COVID-19
When the COVID-19 pandemic began to take hold in the U.S., the vehicle buyer journey changed dramatically. Buyers were shopping online and placing phone calls to dealerships, rather than visiting brick-and-mortar locations. It became more important than ever for AutoNation to understand each customer’s needs and create a unified omnichannel experience for them. To accomplish this, they combined Invoca conversation intelligence data with data from their digital channels to get a 360-degree view of every customer.
The car buyer journey is different for everyone — some people want safety features and others want performance. Invoca has helped us tap into phone conversations so we can understand each buyer’s unique needs. As a result, we can deliver a truly peerless car-buying experience.
Marc Cannon, Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer, AutoNation
With Invoca, AutoNation sends buyers personalized marketing campaigns touting the type of features they mentioned over the phone. AutoNation also gives its sales agents access to those insights, so they can tailor the conversation to win the sale. This creates a seamless omnichannel experience that makes every customer feel acknowledged and valued.
Invoca’s conversation intelligence platform helped AutoNation not only survive the COVID-19 pandemic, but truly thrive. AutoNation had its best quarter in company history in Q2 of 2021, and the company is poised for future growth as it continues to open new locations and increase its used car inventory.
The Results
- Boost return on ad spend by tracking the phone call conversions driven by marketing campaigns
- Increase sales agent close rates with deep insights into phone conversations and automated QA
- Create seamless customer experiences that drove the highest profits in company history during the COVID-19 pandemic
Invoca has been a reliable partner at every phase of the journey. We’ve had great experiences with everyone from the sales to the customer success to the executive team. I’m excited to continue our partnership and take AutoNation’s customer experience to the next level.
Matteo Togni, Product Manager of Localization and Digital Product, AutoNation
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