A new role in Automotive! The Virtual Assistant Manager!

The past few weeks I have been busy with “Alice from Marktplaats”. Alice is a service we launched a few years ago to take over the follow-up of Marktplaats leads for car dealerships, achieving better results.

In the first version of Alice, I did the lead follow-up myself, then Gerben and Hugo took over, and subsequently, a hybrid form emerged where Hugo, with the help of Trengo, further automated the process.

5 Same Questions

That’s possible because in 90% of cases, there are five important questions that keep coming up when following up on Marktplaats leads. Most customers want information about availability, price and trade-in options, test drives, and contact options. These are things that can be easily automated. So, we did that with Alice 3.0, a ‘dumb chatbot’ that asked the customer questions, such as about an offer.

Alice 3.0 did not look at the offer but was simply genuinely happy that someone showed interest and gave the customer two choices: do you want to visit for our price or not? Some leads visited, others did not. Alice 3.0 was successful anyway, making an appointment with more than 30% of the contacts. For a chatbot, that was quite strong at that time.

ChatGPT

Now, with ChatGPT and all other digital services coming up, the possibilities are endless! With our partner Calldrip we already have a follow-up tool at Ligier Store Doesburg – Experience Center that follows up on unreachable customers via SMS. See the example below.

This follow-up can also be done through other channels than SMS, such as Marktplaats Messaging, WhatsApp, or email. More about that later!

Training the Virtual Assistant

I have been busy for a few weeks now creating instructions for a virtual assistant. I have made more than 50 versions and am still not satisfied, as you need to build a whole new expertise. I started with a simple instruction and asked ChatGPT to adjust it to a workable instruction for a virtual assistant, but that gave the wrong results.

Eventually, I went back to the basics: what do I know about lead follow-up and Marktplaats leads in particular, and how can I translate that into a workable instruction for AI? I can tell you, it was short nights with lots of frustration, but I am almost there…with a little help from Maarten Bekkers from AutoChat.

We will tell you very soon what the final result will be for Marktplaats, Autochat, and #DCDW/Calldrip. It will be a breakthrough in lead follow-up, and the follow-up of unreachable leads with the lead follow-up expertise of #DCDW and the AI expertise of Autochat.

Back to the Article

Back to this article. Writing a so-called ‘prompt’ is not a task you give to AI. AI can write an instruction for itself, but the difference between a human and a ‘machine’ is that emotional interaction. A human is still better at incorporating that into an instruction.

Writing a prompt is therefore truly becoming a real profession, just like sales, marketing, or finance. The difference between the result of prompt 1 or prompt 2 can easily mean 3 appointments per week and thus at least 1 sale. Now that we have written the first appointments and orders in Doesburg via the Alice virtual Marktplaats assistant (more later), I also know that the difference between a complaint and a sale is very close.

Want to know more about Alice, and the collaboration between Autochat and #DCDW? We will tell you everything about it soon!