OEMs · Dealer groups · Service networks
From test drive to trade-in, on a number your group owns
One agentic AI operating system across the dealer network: enquiries answered and qualified in seconds, service bays kept full, and every conversation retained by the group instead of walking out on a salesperson’s phone.
- The group owns the number
- Pincode routing to the nearest dealer
- Response SLA per consultant
- DMS and CRM integration
- Chat and voice in regional languages
- Full conversation audit trail
Enquiry to test drive
Answered while they are still comparing you to three others
A car buyer sends the same message to several dealerships on the same evening. The one that answers with a real price, a real EMI and a real slot gets the test drive — and the test drive is what decides the sale.
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The questions that decide the shortlist
Variant and trim differences, on-road price for the buyer’s own city, current waiting period, colour availability and what is actually in stock at which branch — answered in the thread instead of “our executive will call you”.
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A test drive booked into a real slot
The agent offers slots the branch can actually honour, confirms whether the car comes to the customer or the customer comes in, and writes it to the consultant’s calendar with the full enquiry attached.
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Finance pre-qualified before the visit
Down payment, tenure and an indicative EMI worked out conversationally, with the financier options the group actually has on the desk. Buyers arrive knowing what they can afford instead of discovering it at the counter.
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Exchange valued from photographs
Registration year, kilometres and a few photographs give an indicative exchange band in minutes, subject to physical inspection. The trade-in conversation starts at home, where most buyers decide whether to bother at all.
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Routed by pincode, never by luck
Enquiries land with the nearest branch that has capacity, in the language the customer wrote in. If the assigned consultant does not respond inside the SLA, it escalates rather than ageing quietly in someone’s chat list.
Waiting period on that variant is 6–8 weeks right now. Shall I check the EMI for you?09:14 pm
Do you have a car to exchange? A few photos and I can give you a range.09:15 pm
I have test drive slots at our Baner branch this weekend — we can also bring the car to you.09:18 pm
- Interest7-seater · top petrol trim
- Test driveSat 4:30 pm · at home
- Exchange2019 hatchback · est. ₹4.1–4.55L
- ConsultantRahul Kulkarni
- First response41 seconds
Booking to delivery
The waiting period stops generating phone calls
Between booking and handover sit six to eight anxious weeks, and every week of silence produces the same call: “any update on my car?” Push the update before the question, and the whole queue disappears — along with a good share of the cancellations.
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Status pushed, not chased
Booking confirmed, allotment done, production complete, in transit, pre-delivery inspection passed. Each milestone goes out the day it happens, pulled from the DMS rather than typed by whoever remembered.
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Paperwork collected in the thread
Identity and address proof, the exchange car’s registration certificate, loan documents and insurance nomination requested one at a time, with unreadable uploads re-asked automatically.
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Finance and insurance kept moving
Loan sanction, disbursal and insurance issuance each have a status the customer can see and a nudge when something is pending on their side — the two things that most often push a delivery date.
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Accessories, and a delivery the family plans around
Accessory and extended-warranty options offered while the customer is still excited rather than at the handover desk, and a delivery slot chosen in the thread — including the date somebody has been waiting for.
Booking NM-24817 7-seater · top petrol · Baner
On track- Booking confirmed12 Jul
Receipt and booking summary delivered on WhatsApp.
- Documents received15 Jul
Five of five collected in-thread. One re-asked for a cropped scan.
- Loan sanctioned22 Jul
Sanction letter shared; disbursal scheduled against delivery.
- Allotted & produced14 Aug
Chassis allotted against the booking and confirmed to the customer.
- In transit to branchToday
Update sent automatically. Expected at Baner in four days.
- Pre-delivery inspection—
Checklist shared with the customer once complete.
- Delivery slot—
Customer picks the date and time in the thread.
Service & the ownership annuity
The bay is idle because somebody will not pick up the phone
A car is sold once and serviced twenty times. Most of that annuity is lost to two failures: the due reminder nobody read, and the estimate that sat waiting for approval while the advisor rang an unanswered number four times. Both are conversation problems.
- Due, by kilometres and by calendar
Reminders keyed to actual running and elapsed months, not one bulk send a quarter. Customers who have drifted past the free-service period get a different message from those still inside it.
- Booked, with pickup and drop
Slot, branch, pickup address and driver confirmation, all in the thread. The workshop gets a load it can plan around instead of a morning of walk-ins.
- Estimate approved in the thread
The itemised estimate goes to the customer as a message they can act on — approve everything, or decline a line and approve the rest. The job card moves in minutes, with a timestamped record of exactly what was authorised.
- Ready, and asked how it went
Job-card status while the car is in, a ready-for-collection message with the final invoice, and a feedback ask that reaches the service manager the same day rather than in next month’s satisfaction survey.
Every approval, decline and revision is retained against the job card — so a dispute about what the customer agreed to is settled by opening the thread rather than by whose memory is better.
Estimate · JC-40128 Northline Service, Baner · 2021 hatchback
Approved- Periodic service · 40,000 km₹8,450
- Front brake pads — replace₹4,200
- Wheel alignment & balancing₹1,800
- Cabin filter — replace₹1,150Declined by customer
- Estimates sent64
- Approved without a call51 of 64
- Median time to approval7 minutes
- Bays held on approval2
Retention & repurchase
The renewals, and the next car, on the same thread
Everything after delivery is a dated event you already know about: an insurance renewal, a warranty expiry, a monsoon, an ownership anniversary. The dealership that reaches the customer first on each of those keeps the relationship — and usually keeps the aggregator out of it.
Insurance renewal, before the aggregator
The renewal conversation starts weeks ahead with the quote already in it, not on the last day against four price-comparison tabs. Own-damage lapse is where dealerships quietly lose the service relationship too.
AMC and extended warranty
Offered at the moment they are worth buying — before the standard warranty runs out, not after a customer has already paid for an out-of-warranty repair somewhere cheaper.
Seasonal and pre-monsoon campaigns
Check-up drives, tyre and battery offers and camp invitations broadcast to the exact cohort — by model, by age, by branch catchment — with AI voice picking up the numbers that never open a message.
Exchange offers timed to ownership age
At four or five years the same customer is a new-car lead again, and the group already knows the model, the running and the service history. That is a far better lead than anything bought from a portal.
Recalls and service campaigns, with proof of delivery per vehicle
A safety campaign is not finished when the messages are sent. It is finished when you can show, per registration and per chassis, that the owner was reached, on which date, through which channel, and whether they responded — with the numbers that went unreached escalated to voice and then to a call list. That evidence is what an OEM audit asks for, and it is the same record that protects the dealership if the question is ever asked later.
Lead integrity, governance & network visibility
Leads do not leak when the group owns the number
In most dealerships the enquiry lands on a salesperson’s personal handset. Nobody can prove it was followed up, nobody sees it if it was not, and when that person resigns the pipeline resigns with them — often to the dealership down the road. Everything in this section exists to end that.
The group owns the number and the history
Customers message the dealership, not an individual. Threads, photographs, quotations and commitments live in the platform, so a resignation costs you a consultant rather than a quarter of your pipeline.
Response time becomes a measured number
First-response and follow-up SLAs are tracked per enquiry, per consultant and per branch. Breaches escalate automatically, so a lead that nobody touched is visible the same hour instead of at month end.
OEM visibility across the network
Manufacturers see enquiry volume, response discipline and conversion by dealership as live data rather than as a monthly return compiled by the people being measured.
Conduct scored on every conversation
Unauthorised discounting, misstated finance terms, and free accessories promised to close a deal are flagged the day they are said — with the line quoted — instead of surfacing as a delivery-day argument the dealership has to absorb.
Commitments on the record
What was quoted, what was promised and what the customer agreed to are all retained and searchable. Disputes at delivery or at the service counter are resolved by opening the thread.
Defect themes before they become campaigns
Conversational analytics clusters what owners are actually reporting across the network. A rattle, a software complaint or a part failing early shows up as a trend while it is still cheap to act on.
Where the leads actually went
One view across the group, refreshed live. The branch that is quietly sitting on enquiries stops being an anecdote and becomes a row you can act on this week.
Network response All new-car enquiries, last 7 days
LiveWhat changes
Where the operating leverage shows up
- 30–45 smedian first response to a new enquiry, at any hour and on any day of the week
- 2–3×more test drives booked per hundred enquiries received
- 15–25%lift in service retention past the free-service period
- Zeroenquiries lost when a consultant leaves — the thread stays with the group
Illustrative ranges modelled on common dealer-network deployment patterns for this class of workflow. They are not measured results from a named customer, and your own numbers will depend on brand, network size, existing DMS discipline and how much of your enquiry volume already reaches a consultant today.
Questions from OEMs and dealer principals
The objections we get asked first
Short answers here; your IT and process teams get the full documentation pack during evaluation.
Does this integrate with our DMS?
Integration is by API and webhook in both directions, so enquiry, booking, allotment, job-card and invoice events flow between the DMS and the conversation without anyone re-keying them. Where a DMS exposes no usable API — still common with older dealer-management systems — scheduled file exchange covers the same events with a lag rather than in real time. Which of the two applies to your system is the first thing we establish in scoping, and we will say so plainly if the answer is the slower one.
Do we roll this out OEM-led or dealership by dealership?
Both work, and they produce different things. An OEM-led rollout gives one number, one agent definition and network-wide reporting, with per-dealership routing underneath — that is the only way to get comparable response data across the network. A dealer-group rollout covers that group’s branches and integrates with whatever it already runs. Most networks start with a pilot of three to five dealerships, prove the response numbers, then extend.
How are leads attributed between the OEM, the dealership and the consultant?
Every enquiry carries its source, the pincode it was routed on, the dealership it landed with, the consultant it was assigned to and the timestamps of every touch. Reassignments are recorded rather than overwritten, so a lead that moves between consultants keeps its full history. This is usually the point of the exercise: attribution arguments between an OEM and its dealers are normally arguments about missing data, not about interpretation.
Our consultants already use WhatsApp on their own phones. What actually changes for them?
They stop typing prices and EMIs from memory, and they stop losing threads in a personal chat list. Consultants work the Unified Inbox — on desktop or mobile — where each customer arrives already qualified, with AI Copilot drafting replies, summarising the history and flagging chats still waiting on them. The trade they feel is that the conversation is now visible to their manager. That is the point, and it is worth saying out loud during rollout rather than discovering it in week three.
Which languages do the chat and voice agents handle?
Chat and voice operate across major Indian languages, and a single agent definition serves all of them — you write the product knowledge and pricing policy once instead of maintaining a script per language per region. Conduct scoring runs on the transcript in-language, so a discount promise made in Marathi is flagged the same way one made in English is.
Will WhatsApp approve templates for automotive content?
Outbound templates go through Meta’s approval process, and the platform handles submission, versioning and rejection reasons in one place. Service reminders, delivery-status updates and recall notices are all utility-style messages that sit well within the rules; promotional offers have tighter constraints and clear opt-out requirements. Approval runs before submission, which in practice means fewer rejections and a documented chain showing who signed off on what went to customers.
What about customers who only ever call?
They keep calling, and the call is answered. AI voice agents take enquiry, service-booking and reminder calls in the caller’s language and absorb after-hours and overflow volume; the IVR can offer to continue on WhatsApp before the caller waits in a queue. Either way the conversation ends up in the same thread and the same record, so a customer who calls on Monday and messages on Thursday is one history rather than two.