Finding car deals on the Internet is a lot like panning for gold: You sift through a lot of rocks to find a few gold nuggets. The volume of automobile transactions involving the Internet has grown so rapidly, that it could be considered a virtual gold rush. Managing the process of sifting through mountains of information has become an exercise in efficiency. Your Websites, customer database, third-party leads, and advertising all produce streams of information that must be sifted for car deals. The question is: What is the most efficient way to sort through all that information to find the customers who are ready to buy?

Viverrae, LLC, the Seattle firm behind AutoFerret.com, has developed a form of artificial intelligence that has the potential to greatly reduce the labor involved with the process of sifting through your streams of information for car deals. This new technology contacts customers and carries on a conversation over email, scheduling phone appointments, and verifying the customer’s phone number without any human intervention. It also reduces the potential for human error in the process, such as when a salesman working for a dealership near Portland, OR, used the following message as his first contact for his leads, “Are you at least 18?” Needless to say, that salesman experienced a very low response rate.

There are a lot of automatic email response systems available, but for the most part all they do is acknowledge that a potential customer sent an email. The sales staff is still responsible for setting up the phone appointment. AVA, however, through its artificial intelligence, actually communicates with leads to first make sure that they are in the market for a vehicle and willing to work with a dealer, and then sets the phone appointment.

With an auto response email system the customer gets one email message immediately, but if they respond to that email with “would my ’89 explorer qualify for the cash for clunkers program?” Human intervention is required to go any further with that lead, which leaves the customer waiting. Before your staff gets a hold of them, they may have already found their answer from the competition. The ability to interpret customer responses allows AVA to keep the customer engaged in a dialog with ‘you,’ reducing the possibility that the customer will get tired of waiting and go to the competition.

AVA can find out if the customer plans to make their purchase in the next 30 days. When the customer responds the AVA system is able to interpret their response. If the lead responds that they only filled out the form because he or she could win an iPod, the AI interprets this and the lead is dropped. On the other hand if the lead is really in the market then AVA responds with another email asking if he or she is willing to work with a dealer. Here too, AVA is able to understand the lead’s response; if the lead isn’t willing to work with a dealer then it’s dropped. But, if they are interested in working with a dealer, then AVA obtains their contact info and sets up a phone appointment. What’s the best part about all this? The salesperson doesn’t have to do a thing until there is a confirmed phone appointment with a verified lead, who is in the market for a vehicle, and willing to work with a dealer.

The AutoFerret.com Virtual Agent (AVA) was developed using AutoFerret Lead Finder leads as a test bed and has been successfully used in over 100,000 conversations with customers. AVA currently schedules over 4,000 phone appointments per month, using only Lead Finder leads. AVA has been used four message threads deep (four different messages sent, four different replies received) without the customer being aware that he or she is communicating with a machine. What makes this technology groundbreaking is not the ability to send messages, but the ability to receive and interpret responses and then to take some action based on those responses.

Viverrae has recently expanded the capabilities of their AVA technology to be useful for many different purposes that would otherwise require human intervention. Some examples of other uses include scheduling phone or in-person appointments, verifying customers’ information, getting additional information from customers, scheduling service appointments, or following up after the sale. This technology can now be applied to any leads and Viverrae has developed a simple tool for training AVA to carry on dialogs for different purposes and to interpret responses to different questions.

Salespeople often blame their poor sales numbers on bad leads; sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re not. If you could give your salespeople a list of phone appointments with in-market, hot leads and a list of their phone numbers, how many cars do you think they could sell? Thanks to new technology, you can.

Ben Brigham is the president of AutoFerret.com. He can be reached at 888-337-7380 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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