Numa handles car dealership service calls when a human can't

The early adopters of Numa, an artificial intelligence-powered phone answering service, included restaurants, medical offices and beauty salons. But when a few franchised dealerships began testing the system to relieve a common pain point — handling incoming service calls — company founders Tasso Roumeliotis and Joel Grossman decided to visit a service department.

"They were amazed at what they saw," says auto industry veteran and Numa automotive division Executive Vice President Derek Simonds. "There were sticky notes all over advisers' desks and computer screens, messages from customers wanting to make an appointment or wanting to know when their car would be ready."

The two left knowing their technology could have a positive impact in a dealership service department. Until then, the only automotive-related customers had been some aftermarket shops. A few dealerships signed on and told their sibling stores about Numa.

"We weren't even marketing to them," Simonds says. "And when we looked at the statistics, they were the most active users of the product. When we investigated, answering the phone call was big business to these BDC teams."

Numa "was able to handle the overflow and handle just the flow, in many cases."

Simonds says their research showed 40 percent of phone calls to the service department go unanswered. Numa will answer a call to the service department or business development center if it isn't picked up after three rings.

It will ask if the caller wants to schedule an appointment. If the answer is yes, Numa will ask the caller if their phone can receive text messages and then send a link to set up an appointment. Numa also can take messages and route them to the appropriate service adviser.

Numa is in about 100 dealerships, and Simonds says, on average, answers about 1,500 service calls a month. One in 4 service appointments, on average, is scheduled without any human interaction.

In addition, Numa will automatically send texts to customers to update the status of their vehicle's repair. Simonds says Numa research shows 41 percent of calls to a service adviser are to check on when their vehicle will be ready.

"What we found is that the quicker that the people at the dealership engage a customer in communication, the happier the customers, the higher the CSI, the higher the repair order value is," Simonds says.

The Oakland, Calif., company has interesting roots. If you ever used your mobile phone's GPS to locate a loved one, Numa CEO Roumeliotis and President Grossman were pioneers of that technology.

Roumeliotis says when developing Numa, he and Grossman were inspired by the Chinese business communication platform WeChat, with its natural language processing and other AI capabilities.

"We said, 'That's going to happen here. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when,' " Roumeliotis says.

"We said, 'There's room for a company to come in and help businesses interact in the new way of communicating with customers, which is going to be initially hybrid voice messaging and then evolve to just get smarter and smarter over time.' "

Another interesting feature: Numa can text in more than 100 languages, Simonds says.

"We actually have service advisers using Numa on the service drive texting with customers," he says. "They text in English, and the customer sees it in their native language."

The monthly cost of Numa is $2,795, and the system can be set up in less than a half-hour. Service adviser training on the system takes less than 10 minutes, the company says.

There does not seem to be much customer resistance in not dealing with a human. Customers who scheduled an appointment through Numa showed up 76 percent of the time, compared with 78 percent when booked by the BDC, the company says.

"We want the dealership to answer the phone; that's ideal," Simonds says. "We want your service adviser, your BDC to answer the phone. But if they can't, we're there. We got you 100 percent."