Artificial intelligence helps schedule service appointments

"Mandy Monroe" works relentlessly to reach out to customers of Lee Kia of Greenville in North Carolina to schedule service appointments.

A consistent revenue generator, Mandy doesn't complain, gossip, make personal phone calls on company time or pop chewing gum. Mandy doesn't even take bathroom breaks.

That's because Mandy is a cyberstaffer driven by artificial intelligence. The virtual assistant, created by the software provider Conversica, conducts email conversations with dealership service customers.

In a typical exchange, a Lee Kia customer gets an email that greets him or her by name and continues: "My name is Mandy Monroe and I wanted to make sure you got in touch with the Service Department about the first service on your Sportage. Would you like to schedule a service appointment?"

If the response is positive, the program forwards the lead to a service adviser or directs the customer to a scheduling tool on the dealership's website.

Lee Kia began using Conversica's software in mid-2016, says Chad Miller, the dealership's Internet director. The program sent email solicitations to 4,235 service customers last year, he says, and 18 percent responded favorably.

"Before Conversica, we had no way of determining actual engagement with a customer unless each representative kept a sheet of how many calls they made, if they talked to someone, if they left a message," Miller told Fixed Ops Journal.

The average Lee Kia service customer spends $130 per visit, Miller says. "For every 100 customers, if 18 of them are from Conversica, you could see about $2,340 in service from customer pay," he says.

The virtual assistant also enables Lee Kia's service appointment coordinator to handle tasks that require human contact and judgment, such as helping customers get rides home or to work on the dealership's shuttle, Miller says.

About 45 dealerships have bought the virtual service product since its introduction last year, says Conversica CEO Alex Terry. For dealerships that also use the company's sales platform, the service assistant software costs $499 a month. Dealerships that buy the service software by itself pay $1,500 a month.

Mercedes-Benz of Plano, a Dallas area dealership, uses the Conversica sales platform and plans to add its virtual service assistant by midyear.

Joseph Davis, the dealership's Internet director and an adviser to Conversica, says he's eager to get started.

Davis says the sales tool helps keep the dealership's sales representatives and lead-generation vendors accountable. The dealership calls its virtual sales assistant "Tiffany Ava."

"The [tool] will send me an alert as to how the lead was handled," he says. "Within minutes of the client saying, "No, I haven't gotten what I need,' I am automatically alerted and so are all the team members."

Davis says he expects similar benefits from the service tool.

Other vendors that provide or are developing service, sales, and finance and insurance technology driven by artificial intelligence include CarLabs, ELEAD1ONE, Edmunds.com and Facebook.

Artificial-intelligence assistants and service managers make great teams, Conversica's Terry says.

"Who's the busiest person in the dealership? It's usually the manager of the service department," he says. "Service managers would like to provide a great, engaging experience to the customer, but in real life they don't always respond right away or at all. And it's even more work to do it in a polite and consistent way."

The service assistant software uses algorithms that interpret customers' messages and can improve over time as the dealership collects more information, Terry says. 

"Over a dozen dealerships told us, "Where I make all my money is the service side of the business,'" Terry says. "We worked collaboratively with the customers and found out what specific challenges they would like the assistant to tackle." 

Dealers configure the software, which can work with more than 40 customer relationship management systems, during a setup process that typically takes three or four days. 

Terry concedes that artificial intelligence "is not perfect. It also knows when it's not confident in analyzing the message and gets a human involved." 

He says that Conversica has refined the service assistant software to "train the artificial intelligence to know what to say on the outbound message and to understand what people say on their return back." 

An industry analyst cautions dealers to tread carefully when they bring artificial intelligence into their service operations. 

"The key difference from sales is that the vehicle is driving the action," says Ian Mason, senior director of marketing solutions for the information and analytics provider IHS Markit. "The owner doesn't have to go to the selling dealership." 

Mason says an artificial intelligence tool can boost a dealership's service business but warns that service department capacity doesn't necessarily scale well. That can mean longer lines in the service drive, he adds. 

"Long waits aren't a good thing for the dealership," he says. When dissatisfied customers use social media, he notes, "Word of mouth is a lot faster and gets out very quickly. It's almost uncontrollable." 

Even as dealerships' use of artificial intelligence software grows, some responses remain best left to humans. 

Davis says that Tiffany, his dealership's virtual sales assistant, is evidently so gifted at email conversation that at least two would-be suitors have shown up at the store with candy and flowers, hoping to meet her and ask her for a date. 

"We just tell them she's an outside assistant on the Internet team," he says.