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The pandemic has caused a rapid shift in how automotive consumers buy cars and get their cars serviced. Their concerns have shifted from “what’s the best price” to include “how can I do this safely?” It was already a complex customer journey, but this has drastically changed how car manufacturers, dealerships, and automotive repair service providers communicate with and advertise to their customers. As consumer behavior continues to change, it’s more important than ever to adapt to their needs. Here’s how manufacturers, dealers and automotive service networks can use call tracking and conversational intelligence software to drive more leads, increase revenue, reduce cost-per-sale, and improve customer experiences in a rapidly changing environment.
Invoca’s call tracking and conversational intelligence software allows marketing, sales, and customer experience teams to automatically mine and take action on data from phone conversations with customers. Those in the automotive dealer and service industry are likely familiar with the use of call tracking for sales coaching and monitoring sales call quality. But AI-powered conversational intelligence platforms like Invoca provide true 1:1 attribution, technology integrations, and a high level of process automation that the traditional call tracking tools automotive dealers use cannot. Invoca is also used across a broader swath of the organization, including marketing, data analytics, and customer experience teams, as well as for sales.
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AI-powered conversational intelligence software like Invoca enables you to tie customers’ digital journeys to phone calls using online data collection via unique, trackable phone numbers. Invoca’s call tracking and analytics are made possible with a website tag. The tag is a snippet of JavaScript code placed on your website that automatically replaces standard, static phone numbers with trackable, dynamic phone numbers that are unique to each site visitor. These dynamic numbers act as a unique identifier for an individual’s website session.
Watch this video to see how call tracking with dynamic number insertion works:
The Invoca tag captures data like UTM source, medium, paid search keyword, and Google ClickID—basically everything about your customer’s digital journey that happened before they called one of your dealers. With this data, you can understand exactly what is driving your high-value phone calls and the effectiveness of your shopping experience.
When a person calls an Invoca-supplied phone number, the call is routed through the Invoca platform to the most appropriate dealer location, local agent, or call center. Then Invoca aggregates the digital data and ties the callers’ previous activity to the phone call—which happens nearly instantaneously with no interruption to the caller experience.
Once a customer is on the phone, Invoca conversational intelligence goes to work analyzing the language used by the caller and the salesperson on the call. Invoca Signal AI analyzes the call, detecting keywords and common topics that help you identify the trends that are occurring at the individual caller and dealer level. Signal AI also identifies and automatically classifies events that happen on the calls, like if an appointment was set, whether it was a sales or service call, competitor mentions, and more.
Now that you have a better handle on how conversational intelligence works, here are some of the primary use cases for Invoca in the automotive world.
After experiencing a precipitous drop early this spring, sales are bouncing back as consumers chase lower interest rates and discounts. Of course, the shopping process for automotive customers has completely changed, and they are doing more research online and making more phone calls before stepping into a dealership. Our call volume data shows that calls to our automotive customers are up over 20% in August compared to pre-pandemic levels. This means it’s more important for marketers to use all the first-party data you can gather from your customer conversations to optimize your marketing campaigns.
Do you actually know what your customers are responding to right now? It could be messaging about a safe shopping experience, like sanitized cars for test drives or “touchless” service experiences or it could also be prices, interest rates, or incentives.
By using Invoca Signal AI, you can automatically detect what keywords are resonating with your customers and turning into leads and which ones are falling flat. By integrating Invoca with ad platforms like Google Ads, you can adjust your keyword bidding in real time to make sure you are putting money behind only the most effective keywords in the most effective regions. This helps marketers optimize paid media campaign budgets and reach the most high-value prospective customers. The icing on the cake: Invoca customers have seen up to 150% reductions in CPA just by using it to optimize paid search.
Watch this video to see how Signal AI works.
The pandemic continues to drive changes in consumer behavior, so you must be prepared to rapidly adapt your marketing campaign messaging and strategies. This means you need to listen to what your customers are actually saying when they are calling your dealers. Are they asking about inventory or prices? Are they more concerned with being able to safely shop, get service, or take a test drive?
Of course, it’s impossible to get data at any scale by listening to call recordings. By using Invoca Signal Discovery, you can get insight into changing customer behavior and see what topics are being discussed on phone calls. This can be used to automatically create new call classification signals so you can track trending call outcomes, to create more effective sales scripts, and to adjust your campaign and website messaging to match the concerns of your customers in the moment.
While some dealers are skeptical that customers are ready for a fully-digital car-buying experience, consumers want to take care of more of the process online. According to a recent survey by car search site Cars.com, 48% of consumer respondents said they’re interested in handling price negotiations online, and 42% said they want to handle financing online, too.
Call tracking software like Invoca gives you full visibility into the customer journey so you can see exactly how the online experience leads to a phone conversation, visits to your dealerships, and ultimately, sales.
It may sound counterintuitive, but call tracking software like Invoca can be used to improve the shopping experience on your websites, too. Using integrations with Invoca and online experience analytics platforms like Adobe Experience Cloud, Decibel and Fullstory, you can figure out if frustrating web experiences are causing people to call your dealerships when they would rather be shopping or doing research online. Phone calls are now a very important part of this new hybrid shopping experience, but you want to make sure that customers are calling because they are ready to talk about buying, not to talk about how awful your website is. Learn more about Invoca’s integration with Decibel here.
When your customer is ready to throw down a big chunk of cash on a new car or have a major service performed like getting a new set of tires, you need to make sure that their call is immediately routed to the right location. Invoca’s multi-location call routing technology can be used to connect people to the right dealer the first time. And the platform is designed with multi-location businesses in mind, so whether you have 20 dealers or 2,000, it is easy to update information in the system like hours of operation, phone numbers, or new locations. Bulk update options allow you to make network-wide changes in minutes, too.
Which one of your dealerships are converting the most phone leads? Who’s the salesperson that’s really rockin’ it? Using Invoca conversational intelligence, you can automatically classify every call that comes into your dealers, and identify leads and conversions. Invoca can integrate this data with conventional CRMs like Salesforce Sales Cloud, automotive industry specific CRMs and lead tracking tools like Dealersocket, Dominon Sales Center or even proprietary CRMs.
Invoca also makes it easy for you to segment user access to the platform so you can provide call performance data to each individual dealership, so they can see only the data they need to see to help them track and improve their lead conversion performance. Invoca automotive industry customers have even used the platform to incentivize dealers by tracking call performance and rewarding the leaders with sales-driving perks like increased ad budgets and featured listings on corporate websites.
With more of the buying experience shifting online and more customers calling your dealerships, it is more important than ever to take advantage of conversational intelligence as a new source of first-party data.
Schedule a free demo today to learn more about Invoca call tracking and conversational intelligence for automotive dealers.
