What is Google Assistant if you didn’t catch the keynote?
On Tuesday, Google unveiled the future of their Artificial Intelligence(AI) powered Assistant. If you didn’t catch the keynote from Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, you can watch it below and learn more about Google Assistant here. With the announcement of “Duplex”, Google Assistant will soon be able to call and schedule appointments with the 60% of small businesses that do not have an automated scheduling system. They aim to make communicating with businesses more seamless and efficient.
Why You Should Be Excited
Dealers should be very excited about how easy it is becoming for their customers to interact and communicate with them. The opportunity for customers to have an AI-powered virtual assistant automatically schedule their next visit, send them automated reminders, and update them of their vehicle’s status while it’s at your service facility will make it easier for you to deliver a great customer experience, build brand loyalty, and increase retention. With the added ease of consumers to schedule appointments with your dealership, what adverse impacts can this have on your dealership’s operations?
What Are The Implications?
First, how will dealers handle this influx of phone traffic? The traditional paradigm is to add more fixed ops receptionists, add more people in the BDC, outsource their scheduling and BDCs, and the forward-thinking dealers will consolidate their group’s BDC and scheduling operations. Essentially, “let’s throw more people at the problem”.
Is this strategy sustainable? Throwing more people at a problem isn’t always a bad thing. If revenues will significantly increase and marginal costs are low, adding to fixed costs will not have a huge impact on profitability. However, this will affect your dealerships operating leverage (essentially, when things are good those benefits will be magnified, and when things are bad, the negative effects will likewise be magnified). Just be sure to understand the implications of operating leverage.
As an example, what happens when you’re inundated with calls and make the expense of hiring more people, but your “no-show” ratio increases? Additionally, having higher fixed costs will adversely affect your dealership’s performance if the economy begins to slow.
Second, as scheduling appointments becomes easier (essentially effortless), will consumer behaviors change? Without the human interaction, will they feel less pressure to show up for an appointment?
What Can Dealers Do?
What if there was a way that you could increase profitability and efficiency, all the while reducing Opex (operating expenses)? This would protect your dealership in economic downturns and maximize earnings in favorable economic conditions. What if your dealership could leverage this same technology to make it just as easy for you to automatically schedule customers, remind them, and give them the opportunity to reschedule before they no-show?
Auto Labs, is pioneering the way dealers communicate with customers to ensure their shop is operating at capacity by leveraging the power of Artificial Intelligence to automatically schedule customers, conversationally remind them, and leverage your dealership’s data to provide a personalized customer experience. What’s more, Auto Labs’ AI Engine Sophí can analyze customer sentiment and book your shops appointments to maximize your capacity. Sophí works across all channels and is deployed according to your customer’s behaviors.
If your consumers are armed with technology, let’s not throw humans at a computer problem.
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