Cars Chatbot for Auto.co.il, the leading car portal in Israel

Anya – Marketing Manager, https://www.auto.co.il/

Introduce your business and tell us about yourself: What does your business do? What is your role?

I’m Anya, a Marketing Manager at auto.co.il
We’re in the business of supplying quality leads to car dealerships for major brands including Ford, Volkswagen, Chevrolet, Toyota, and Renault, among others. We do this via the car portal websites and landing pages that we operate. Through these, we interact with people looking to buy cars, understand their preferences as regards car brand, car body style, mileage requirement, budget, etc., and we process this information to lead them to dealerships that have suitable cars to sell.
Our scale of operations can be gauged by the fact that we have over 100 landing pages active at any given point in time.

What problems/challenges did you have and why did you decide to create a Chatbot?

Creating a chatbot was a fairly straightforward choice for us, because of the number of people we need to interact with and the breadth of preferences we need to process every day. We had to have a consistent and efficient interface on all our portals and landing pages. But the job wasn’t done yet. Our primary challenge was to figure out – in tangible terms – how car dealerships can drive sales with a chatbot.

One of the most important lessons we have learned from interacting with potential car buyers, is that they don’t like waiting. But at the same time, they don’t want canned responses either. So essentially, we had to be able to offer car buyers tailored and expert advice, without making them wait for it.
To overcome this two-pronged challenge, we first defined the right “chat goals”. And we did this separately for portals and landing pages in order to achieve the best ROI from each of them. We then channeled these goals into our chat scripts, adapting them to deliver the right speech with a well-defined mix of messages.

What was the result of adding your Chatbot to your business/website? And what did you learn from it?

The results have been spectacular! Visitors on our portals are leaving dozens of positive reviews every month.
This process has alerted us to the importance of an optimized chat script which is crafted with due attention to our business’s goals and our clients’ needs. If we had opted for an off-the-shelf lead generation chatbot.

What are your top recommendations for businesses just starting with their own Chatbot?

I’ll say the same thing to every business owner working in or around car sales today – automation is your best friend. I say this from personal experience, because creating and testing our chatbot gave me a new opportunity to love the work we do here at Auto.co.il

I’m passionate about marketing, about delving into factors and strategies that will help us generate more quality leads for car dealerships. This VirtualSpirits chatbot didn’t require coding or complex technical tasks, so I could focus on what I loved doing, and on the results, I wanted the chatbot to achieve for our business. And that, I believe, has contributed just as much to our recent success as the chatbot itself has.

So, my recommendation would be to choose a chatbot platform that lets you focus on what you do best, instead of wasting time on coding or other technicalities that require specialized training.