Conversational commerce for the automotive industry

How many questions do you need to ask before buying a car? We don’t know the actual answer, but if the questions received by automotive companies and auto traders are any indication, the answer is clearly “a lot”. After all, cars are expensive and the decision to buy one is not taken lightly.

Competition in the market is intense for both new and used cars and happens on many fronts, from price and performance to the image and status that a car can give its driver. To keep up, car dealers and manufacturers invest heavily in marketing and sales and are always on the lookout for new ideas.

An interesting trend

One of the most promising areas for the future is conversational commerce, a form of e-commerce, that leverages messaging apps to connect with consumers. The trend emerged together with the rise of messaging apps and seems destined to remain with us for the foreseeable future.

The first signs of it came from social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter where users started to message companies for all sorts of things, from customer service to product information and problems with the purchase process. The trend later extends to messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat.

Companies started to cope by offering customer service, but over time the line between functions has started to blur, and today we are seeing the emergence of a form of commerce based largely on conversations.

How to exploit conversational commerce

In industries like travel that receive a lot of customer service messages, conversational commerce is relatively easy to exploit since companies are already used to dealing with large volumes of messages and users need little incentive to reach out.

For the automotive industry, the situation is a bit more complex because customers are less used to message this kind of companies and there is a need to create excuses that can start a new interaction. Chatbots can be a key piece of the puzzle, thanks to their ability to engage users and handle large volumes of conversations 24/7.

Smart marketers can build campaigns that require users to interact with chatbots. Once a conversation is started the bot can learn more about the person it is interacting with, and use the data to create market intelligence and follow up with the user at a later stage.

The possibilities are endless and the perfect solution for each company will depend on its unique mix of local conditions, corporate culture, and brand image. To find out how you can get started, reach out to our team using the contact link below.