AI – Are You Playing Offense or Defense?

Recently, I was watching the NCAA Tournament selection when the announcers began talking about how different team members helped get their teams to the tournament. At one point during the discussion, each of the announcers agreed that this year’s tournament would be won or lost based on the best all-around success of a team’s offense and defense. While flying out to meetings this week I took the time to reflect on this conversation and it hit me – the way AI is being used in today’s space is entirely a defense play.

As an industry, we have treated dealership AI solutions as a defensive mechanism to improve response time and help check the boxes of OEM-mandated programs. For instance, is the dealership following up on a request within X number of minutes?

While this does help the team continue to get better, it is a limited way of thinking and does not represent all of the different ways our industry can use AI to “score” those shots. It’s time we started thinking of AI as an overall playbook and employ both an offense and defense partnership.

How do we Change from Defense to Offense?

Let’s take a step back and think about this past year. The opportunities were there to sell, but the amount of vehicles needed was not. Here are a few ideas on how AI can help you switch to an offensive strategy:

• Use AI to reach out to current active/lost automotive leads in your system to see if they are still in the market for a vehicle.
  
  
• For vehicles beginning to age out on your preowned lot, use AI to proactively find those units and then create an outbound message to help promote and move them.
  
  
• Use AI to analyze customer data and create targeted marketing campaigns. By understanding customer preferences and behavior, dealerships can deliver personalized offers and messages that are more likely to resonate with potential buyers.
  
  
• AI solutions can be used to answer customer inquiries in real-time, 24/7. This can help dealerships engage with customers and provide assistance even when the dealership is closed. By the way, this helps immensely with scheduled service appointments and follow-up with customers after a sale as well.
  
  
• Use AI to predict future behavior: Examples include when a customer may be in the market for a new vehicle or when their current vehicle may need service.
  
  
• While we’re talking about predicting future behavior, this can help in your service drive as well. AI can be used to analyze data from a customer’s vehicle to predict when maintenance may be required. This can help dealerships proactively reach out to customers to schedule service appointments and offer relevant service packages.

Just to recap the above, it’s time we all collaborate together and look at how AI and automation can work to complement the opportunities we have while ensuring the heavy lifting of redundant tasks like CRM data clean up continue working. By looking at AI as both an offensive and defensive strategy, we will be able to continue to evolve the customer experience and create greater wins for the industry as a whole.

Interested in more AI strategies for your dealership? Schedule time to talk with our expert team here.