BLiNK AI Accelerates Growth in Fixed Operations Revenue

Brian Pasch0:00Hi, this is Brian Pasch, and welcome to another podcast interview today. We're going to be talking about the future of automotive retail, specifically today on Fixed Ops and how AI is changing the game to help dealers fill gaps in their service process, retention, and to generate more opportunities. In Fixed Operations. In order to accomplish this task of helping you, the dealer community, I've asked Dan McAllister. He's the Chief Revenue Officer at BLiNK AI to join me. Dan, welcome to the show.

Dan McAllister0:43Yeah, thanks, Brian. Really looking forward to it.

Brian Pasch0:45So, Dan, let's just start very quickly at the top. You have been in the automotive industry for a while, and you saw an opportunity to join BLiNK AI as a great next step for your career. What did you see in this particular company that excited you to say, okay, this is where I want to plant my stake in the ground and make an impact for dealers?

Dan McAllister1:12Well, that's a great question. I mean, first of all, I've been really interested in AI and what its impact was and is on the automotive industry. I sought out and talked to a bunch of CEOs of some AI companies and some dealers. And what I loved about what BLiNK AI was bringing was that they really reached out and connected with the customer at whatever level they're coming in. They're calling in through the web, they're calling in on the phones, or there's an outreach need because of, you know, declined service or whatever, you know, information that DMS needs to be mined and then, you know, reached out to the customer. And the way they do it is sort of, I like to look at it as, it's like the intelligence that is in between all of the different, you know, tech layers of a dealership.

Dan McAllister2:03Now really harnessing that data to be able to, you know, drive results.

Brian Pasch2:07All right. So let's break it out because one of the things that we're doing in preparation for the Modern Retailing Conference coming up just in a few days in Palm Beach is to help dealers understand the differences, the strengths and weaknesses, almost like a SWOT analysis for the different AI products.

Dan McAllister2:25Right.

Brian Pasch2:27Especially those who are doing voice, email and texting for dealers, both in fixed ops and variable ops. So one of the things that I loved about your product is that it can communicate via voice, email and text. And the first thing that jumped out was the fact that you have the ability to take in telematics data. And dedupe that, clean it, normalize it, and then identify the dealer's customers. And the dealer then can choose automatically which customers, which needs, which alerts they want to use as a campaign outreach. This to me is solving a huge manual process. I know, you know, Toyota has, for example, a pretty big telematic stream.

Brian Pasch3:23Dealers will get these lists and give them to their BDC. And it seemed like kind of like a manual process. Are dealers starting to understand that the stream of data from telematics is a huge revenue opportunity?

Dan McAllister3:39Yeah, I think so. I mean, what you find is when you look at the base level of conversion before and after, it really jumps off the page. So what's really happening when you apply manual process to it is you lose the timing. Everything is about timing with these alerts.

Brian Pasch3:58Right.

Dan McAllister3:59So when the alert comes in, we are generally responding within the hour to send out an email or a text or both. And we do it in a sequence of three different texts and/or emails over three different days or three consecutive days. And what we see is a very high in the 40 to 60% range conversion of those unique vehicles coming into service. And so the revenue generating off that jumps off the page. And we're seeing, especially with Toyota, Lexus and a few other OEMs, we're seeing a huge uptick in our sales for telematics.

Brian Pasch4:38You know, I'm just going to tell a personal story because tomorrow I'm taking my Mercedes for service here in the Peachtree City area. We recently purchased a home here and I don't know where the nearest Mercedes-Benz dealer is, but for months. My service alerts on the Mercedes and it says, "Hey, do you want to speak with somebody?" Now my experience in automotive is like, I'm not sure if I say yes, you want someone to talk to you right now. I don't know what my schedule is. I'm driving. I don't know where the closest dealer is, so I don't know who I'm talking with. And so I've just been, you want to talk to someone, do you want to schedule a appointment? I'm like, no, no, no, no.

Brian Pasch5:27But if I would have received a text, I would have definitely scheduled it because that was just only going on in the car when I was driving when I'm least likely to book any appointment because my schedule is kind of complicated. You send me a text. I'm going to see that text later in the day. I'm going to look at my calendar. I'm going to say, "Okay, let's schedule." And I want to be very specific because there's some AI tools that's job is just to queue up people, get their information, to have someone call them back to book an appointment. If you're sending out a text like, "Hey, they're B-level service. I have to get a B service, B5."

Brian Pasch6:12So if I get a text, "Hey, I see your B5 service light went on. Would you like the schedule?" So is BLiNK AI actually showing available times to the consumer and booking that in the DMS, or is it just taking a wish list and someone's going to call them back?

Dan McAllister6:30No. We are fully integrated with virtually all DMS products as well as even shop maintenance like Xtime and myKaarma. And so we don't require anyone to change the stack that they have. We integrate in with their current processes and actually book that with the actual opcode of the alert so that the dealer all the way down through. So what's really good about it is it's making the service advisors more efficient. They don't have to ask questions. We're not asking strange questions to the customer about what their VIN is and what we should already know that. That's information we should already know. So that just seamlessly gets booked inside of whatever DMS that they have and there's really no human touch from that perspective.

Brian Pasch7:16Okay, Dan, there is some misinformation or just opaqueness. So I'm going to ask a direct question. I didn't prep this question, but there are some people who are saying, Brian, what people aren't telling you that AI scheduled appointments don't show to the degree of a person to person booking. Now that doesn't actually make logical sense to me, But I want to just throw it out there. Of the consumers who are booking through BLiNK AI, Do you track the show rate?

Dan McAllister7:50I do.

Brian Pasch7:52And what would you say that normal range is?

Dan McAllister7:54We're at an over 90% show rate. Our appointments are strong. We measure it and it's something that I think I mentioned something to you earlier as we were as you were discussing this podcast. We're really not. We really want to measure our KPIs are all around performance of actual show showed appointments, What the increased appointment appointments are and what my revenue lift is because of our because of our service. So in order to be able to do that, we have to be able to look at and tie down not only what was what was scheduled, but you know who showed up. So we actually measure ROs tied to our appointments.

Brian Pasch8:40All right, let's flip the script a little bit voice text and email it's your communication stream. Obviously, if you're getting telematics data that could apply also to recall right so recall data that comes in that can be automated depending on what recalls the dealer is equipped to service. What about inbound phone calls? This is an important one, because as we've been talking to dealers, some of the complaints in the early voice, AI or digital voice assistant tools were having problems with Spanish speakers. So they were like decent for English. But when Spanish speakers, you know, come in. So if a dealer wants BLiNK to handle an inbound phone call, are most dealers using it as the first point or as an overflow?

Brian Pasch9:46What would you tell me on what dealers are feeling comfortable with your platform in regards to inbound voice calls?

Dan McAllister9:55So I would tell you, we're we're very passionate about this. We want to be first line. We feel in order to provide the most value to the dealer, we need to be able to efficiently and effectively answer phone calls and handle the task. So we want to take the burden of the dealership, you know, some of the hard things. And listen, dealerships don't do a great job with their phones. They just don't. We know that. We'll show that. So we want to take that burden off and make sure every call is answered. And in fixed ops, 70% of calls coming in are to schedule to check a status or to change an appointment.

Dan McAllister10:36And they also may want to talk to someone. We give them a way to exit out to a live person at any given time, but we're trying to fulfill, you know, as much of those calls as we can automatically. And then give an elegant way for a live person to follow up with those items, because we can't handle everything for those items that can't be handled through an automation or an AI agent.

Brian Pasch11:01So let's go through that. BLiNK AI grabs a call. The majority of the calls BLiNK is going to be able to handle and book and resolve to the customer's satisfaction. And then if BLiNK is feeling like, no, I'm stuck. I don't know the answer. How is that escalated then for what are the dealers doing? Are you forwarding that call to like a hunt group in the service BDC or service advisors? How does that work today?

Dan McAllister11:31So generally in onboarding, we will determine dealer by dealer where they want those I will call troubled calls to go. Now troubled calls come in two different kind of flavors. One is we measure sentiment all the way through the call. So we're measuring sentiment. What's happening? Are we succeeding? Are we failing? What's happening? And we measure that. And based on what our score is, we will send that call to whoever the dealer has told us to send that to.

Brian Pasch12:00Yeah.

Dan McAllister12:01And along the call, sometimes if there's a misunderstanding or we can't get out of it what we want, we will proactively say, would you like to talk to a, you know, a live agent or a service agent? And so that's been working extremely well. And of course, because it's AI, it's getting better and better and better, you know, as it learns and as we, you know, as we get more and more phone calls.

Brian Pasch12:27Great. Now, one of the things I was thinking about telematics, just about my recent booking experience, because I found that Mercedes-Benz of Atlanta South is my closest dealership. When I called, a person eventually answered. And one of the things that was interesting is when I use their online service scheduler and I put in my VIN, it thought my car had 61,000 miles. And this is why I, I'm thinking about telematics and I knew there was something that was very relevant to me. We don't drive much in our family. I'm on the plane a lot. We travel a lot. But. But this 2021 Mercedes-Benz vehicle has 34,000 miles, right?

Brian Pasch13:24So effectively five years later. So you can see, but I bet that most systems are using some average, you know, algorithm to figure it out. So when I put in my VIN, they said, oh, 61,000. I don't know where they got the number from, but I guess it was a projection, which of course was way off. And that's why I think this telematics data is going to be so important. I had a Corvette that recently sold it, but after four years, it had 3,200 miles. And I think dealers are sending out offers, warnings, you miss this, miss this, based on a schedule, but not on real data.

Brian Pasch14:06So I just thought that since you can handle the telematics data, you can really provide relevant offers instead of estimation. Does that align with what you're thinking, Dan?

Dan McAllister14:16A hundred percent. And I think we're in this shift in the industry from being reactive to proactive as well.

Brian Pasch14:23Yeah.

Dan McAllister14:24So this data, and what I love about telematics data is it isn't muddied yet. It's really coming right out of the car. It's reading exactly what's happening as opposed to being ingested into multiple data sets and mismanaged in some cases. I love getting that raw data because it allows us to be very proactive. And I think you'll see over the next few years telematics becoming, instead of that reaction, it's going to be telling you what you should be doing in advance or even certain wear and tear that's happening inside of the vehicle. It's reading that information and being helpful to the consumer and then to the dealer in getting that to be more of a real-time experience as opposed to someone reacting to something happening.

Brian Pasch15:13I agree. I could go on on telematics, but I wish the cars and the tools were using this data more often. Let's talk about one other very hot button when it comes to AI. And I just bring this up because we're talking to dealers right now as we're doing this market research report on all the tools that are helping dealers with their inbound calls or messaging of customers and sales and service. And it seems that some dealers who got in early had a bad taste. And so, you know, when I look back, the early, say, voice assistant platforms, Brooke, Stella, even CarWars, Kerry. And at that time, we really weren't talking about large language models.

Brian Pasch16:02We weren't talking about training the AI. Today, I'm hearing more AI products saying, look, give us your brand promise. Give us your documents for service process. Give us, you know, almost like your service advisor training manual will ingest this to help tweak our communication style or recognize, you know, something that you've branded. Where are you today in answering this question? How can you train BLiNK AI to be more consistent with our brand, our style? You know, we're a luxury dealership. I think of like Ray Catena in New Jersey, everything about their message and market is exceeding, exceeding, exceeding, you know, a customer's expectation. So where are you with enabling dealers to feed individual policy framework communication documents so that BLiNK is more aligned with their process?

Dan McAllister17:11Yeah, so in our onboarding process, I mean, this is a big part of it, especially with our voice customers, really understanding what the tone and the voice of the dealership is in their marketplace. We take a little bit different approach to our AI. We actually announce upfront that we are a virtual agent. We do not hide behind it. We are very obvious about it. And we also find that that brings everyone's sort of level down. People understand who they're dealing with, and we're able to accomplish the task that we're trying to do along the way. Now, of course, we don't try to have dealers reinvent their process to ours.

Dan McAllister17:51We always try to mimic whatever their process is, and our AI is, you know, learning on that as we set them up and get ready for live. But we're able to onboard our voice clients, you know, very, very quickly, within a couple of weeks. You're going live and we're answering partly because of our deep integrations with all their systems.

Brian Pasch18:13Right.

Dan McAllister18:14So we have all the data and we're able to use that more in a utilitarian way than, and for fixed ops, you would think that, right? Maybe the front of the house is slightly different. There's a slightly different tone that we're going to have to learn more to have our AI agent learn more about. But we don't hide behind the fact that we're an AI agent. We think that's the best practice going forward.

Brian Pasch18:35I agree as well. I get a lot of telemarketing calls, you know, and it's like, hey, Brian, I just want to let you know about your loan approval. And, you know, the first time you get that call, you're like, boy, this is a pretty aggressive salesperson. Then you realize. It's not real. It's just an AI prompt. Let's talk about one other thing. We've talked about your voice handling and the quality of the bookings. We've talked about the telematics and giving near real time outreach to people who've just been in their car and saw a service light or a warning light. Let's talk about campaigning because I believe dealers who are spending a lot of money on direct mail are wasting a great amount because that data could be based off of DMS data that's outdated.

Brian Pasch19:33It could be based on mileage that is just projected, not actual. In my case, the stores always get it wrong. But there's amazing benefits of having a single platform that can send text, send emails or handle voice calls. So when a dealer says, how can you help me with my ongoing lifecycle kind of service marketing? Do you offer campaigning that a dealer can set up like a lapsed service, a decline service, recalls? Is this part of a life cycle campaign that can be set up and run? Let's talk a little bit about campaigning.

Dan McAllister20:17Yeah. It's part of our core set of products that we generally talk with a dealer about. And you hit the nail on the head. There's gold in the data that is in their systems. And so if you take declined service as an example, some DMSs like CDK have an actual opcode that's declined service. That's a bit easier to drive because you know it's already there. Most don't, quite honestly. And so we train fixed ops to actually, in the notes field, just write what the declined service was. And our AI agents train to be looking at those notes.

Brian Pasch20:59Looking at those notes.

Dan McAllister21:00Right? So that we can, on a timely basis, send out a communication to the customer based around that declined service. And then we work on onboarding with our dealers on what does that timing look like by RO. So brakes might be two months later. Tires, you know, maybe they just barely passed the inspection. If you're in a state that requires inspection, that's another one that we'll time up with them. So our customer success representatives, they'll spend a lot of time on setting those parameters up as we go out for declined service. Then there's as vehicles are coming off of warranty. How what is your outreach look for for you know that that three to seven year old vehicle that you want to that defects usually to third party.

Dan McAllister21:50How do you keep them engaged in your in your service. So we have campaigns that'll that'll go out any kind of recall data that were that we're given we can we can send outbound campaigns. And again, it's the same thing it's sent text or email, and you can schedule appointments right out of those, right out of those those text or emails. And more importantly, if you even started that, and then you decided something happened, you couldn't finish the session, and you call back in. We would know that you tried and we would actually say, I see that you tried to book something on.

Brian Pasch22:25Right.

Dan McAllister22:26Are you calling in about that just making it again more personal and more understanding of what the situation is. And, you know, the airlines do that, you know, when I call say Delta, United, and I would say, Oh, we see that you were, you know, attempting to book or change your flight. And I was like, wow, that's, that's cool. That yes, that's what I was trying to do.

Brian Pasch22:50Dan, I want to thank you for leaning in and being very specific and precise with your answers, because dealers are looking for ways to fill gaps in their service process. And the fact that you have a multi-channel communication platform running off the same playbook, ingesting data from their DMS, or as some dealers move to CDPs, right, wherever that data can be found with the op codes and the other things. This is really an important conversation that dealers have to have with their fixed ops director. You know, how many opportunities are we missing because in peak hours we're not answering the phone, or we just don't have enough resources for declined services and recalls and telematics.

Brian Pasch23:42So, Dan, if a dealer wanted to get a demo, talk to you a little bit more, what's the best website for them to go to?

Dan McAllister23:49It is blinkai.com.

Brian Pasch23:52Well, that's, that's really, really easy. And Dan, I also just want to remind dealers that the BLiNK AI team will be at the Modern Retailing Conference. That's November 16th, 17th, 18th in Palm Beach. We've expanded the number of hotels to accommodate all the dealers who are attending. This is the who's who in automotive AI, automotive data management, data hygiene, and retail tech. The Modern Retailing Conference's theme is to help dealers build the right tech stack to meet the needs of their business, be more efficient, generate more revenue opportunities. And BLiNK AI fits right in, checks all those boxes. So, Dan, I want to thank you and your management team for supporting dealer education, being a sponsor.

Brian Pasch24:42I'm sure you're going to be awful busy at the show. Dan, if a dealer wanted to email you directly because they fell in love with you on this podcast. What's the best email address for you?

Dan McAllister24:54Again, pretty simple, dmcallister@blinkai.com.

Brian Pasch24:58Couldn't be any, any easier. Well, I want to thank everyone for listening in. I want to encourage you get your tickets for MRC, come on out and, and actually see live dealer accounts. Look at the KPIs, look at the management reports, listen to how calls are being handled. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. And then more importantly, I think it will show you how much revenue you're leaving on the table. If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you listen to all the podcast interviews rolling up to the Modern Retailing Conference. And don't forget to sign up for my LinkedIn newsletter where every week I'm helping dealers move forward with introductions to new concepts, new technology, new vendor partners to help them sell more cars and service in a digital age.

Brian Pasch25:49You can get that newsletter from my LinkedIn profile. Thanks, Dan. Thanks everyone for listening in and I'll see you next time on another podcast interview.