A different approach to dealer website/chat AI? Ever heard of Seezar?

[joe.pistell]

Back in the day , before "Chat as a Service" was a thing, I launched chat on our site and had the reps 'work' the chats. The reps all got excited and dove in. 2 weeks later they all avoided it.

It failed because most all shoppers wanted fast answers to assist their shopping, and most all reps wanted fast ups to make more deals.

Our web sites still suck and car shoppers still want a car dealer concierge UX via chat. From a shoppers POV, Chat pop-ups and "Lead Gen-Dead Ends" is a nuisance and it reminds shopper why they dont like car dealers.

From the business POV, creating a car dealer concierge is a money pit and hard to score ROI. AI will blow this up. LLMs like GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, etc are perfectly built for this use case. Add a technology called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to the chatbot and now you've got a low cost, highly valuable car dealer chat concierge

(AI-RAG-Chatbot example)


I recently used Amazon's product return chatbot and it was 100% genius. (Claude and Amazon are partners)

Automagic Labs is working on RAG projects for merchandising. Demand for information, fast is everywhere in auito. Example, the UCM needs someone smart to build them a AI-RAG-Chat. Ideally. for the website, the AI-RAG-Chatbot will need to connect to the entire store, sales, service & parts.

Big change is coming... fast.

 

[BillKVMotorCo]

If I had to guess, I'd say less than 1% of dealers have in-house dealership staff answering live website chats consistently during business hours.

We still do chat in-house on two of our sites. We are experimenting with AI on the other. It still needs some work, but I believe this will be the way in the end.

 

[Richard_Lloyd]

If I had to guess, I'd say less than 1% of dealers have in-house dealership staff answering live website chats consistently during business hours.

I figured it was around 10%, woof that's low. What instances (if any) on the decision tree would you absolutely want your own staff/SME's to handle?

Seeing dealers try to pre-emptively mitigate the customer's thought of "ahhh you want my info first so you can blast me out of the atmosphere, right?" on their own contact forms. If it's during business hours, I'd think a human element with no expectations (i.e. forced contact grab) could be a breath of fresh air.

 

[BillKVMotorCo]

I figured it was around 10%, woof that's low. What instances (if any) on the decision tree would you absolutely want your own staff/SME's to handle?

Seeing dealers try to pre-emptively mitigate the customer's thought of "ahhh you want my info first so you can blast me out of the atmosphere, right?" on their own contact forms. If it's during business hours, I'd think a human element with no expectations (i.e. forced contact grab) could be a breath of fresh air.

We know that the guest experience is far superior when they deal with the same person online as when they get into the store (and even better the farther they can go with that person once in the dealership), so as you might imagine when they are able to do the same even with the person they are chatting with on the site the experience is even better.

 

[Seezar]

Back in the day , before "Chat as a Service" was a thing, I launched chat on our site and had the reps 'work' the chats. The reps all got excited and dove in. 2 weeks later they all avoided it.

It failed because most all shoppers wanted fast answers to assist their shopping, and most all reps wanted fast ups to make more deals.

Our web sites still suck and car shoppers still want a car dealer concierge UX via chat. From a shoppers POV, Chat pop-ups and "Lead Gen-Dead Ends" is a nuisance and it reminds shopper why they dont like car dealers.

From the business POV, creating a car dealer concierge is a money pit and hard to score ROI. AI will blow this up. LLMs like GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, etc are perfectly built for this use case. Add a technology called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to the chatbot and now you've got a low cost, highly valuable car dealer chat concierge

(AI-RAG-Chatbot example)
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I recently used Amazon's product return chatbot and it was 100% genius. (Claude and Amazon are partners)

Automagic Labs is working on RAG projects for merchandising. Demand for information, fast is everywhere in auito. Example, the UCM needs someone smart to build them a AI-RAG-Chat. Ideally. for the website, the AI-RAG-Chatbot will need to connect to the entire store, sales, service & parts.

Big change is coming... fast.

Completely agree. There is a pretty big disconnect between what the customers want/need and what the sales team wants. Our vision for the chat tool is to provide all of the "concierge" type service without the need for human intervention whatsoever. We're seeing some of that mindset change with more and more online/customer exp. managers coming in from other retail industries but its slow because they are usually just one person fighting the whole sales org.
In terms of how we use RAG, we combine both internal and external resources to enhance the LLM. So internal documents like service hours, return policies, previous chat logs, videos and other resources as well as external sources such as model/trim info, car reviews, design updates are turned into knowledge bases that enhance the LLM to provide robust and comprehensive answers to customers. All within the AI tool itself.

 

[Carsten]

We know that the guest experience is far superior when they deal with the same person online as when they get into the store (and even better the farther they can go with that person once in the dealership), so as you might imagine when they are able to do the same even with the person they are chatting with on the site the experience is even better.

I have always hated telling the same information more than 2 times.
this is great! I would use chat if this were the case.