How AI Voice will become an engine of sales growth

Talking rather than texting will enable lenders, brokers and car dealers to provide a 24/7 ‘human’ response to sales leads

AI Voice will become the first point of contact between customers, car dealers and automotive finance companies within the next five years, according to an industry expert.

These LLMs are not only capable of ‘understanding’ and responding to spoken words, but having been trained on audio are capable of recognising emotion in a caller’s voice.

“If it notices that the customer is frustrated, for example, it will be empathetic,” said Lynch. “This is something that’s going to make this technology incredibly powerful in all sectors.”

He identified car sales, auto finance and healthcare as three of the industries where the technology is likely to flourish.

“Any business that has a staff process, a patient process or a customer process can now identify a cohort of that process, and the AI is able to take customers, staff or patients through that process,” he said.

This means, for example, that a car dealer can keep its call centre open 24/7, responding to customer enquiries with a naturally human-sounding voice, and following up sales leads in volumes and frequencies that would be unaffordable if delivered by staff.

The technology could even enhance the customer experience, compared to human interaction, said Lynch, because it has instant access to far more data than a human could possibly remember. He also suggested the system will be more compliant when selling finance solutions than human agents, because it is trained to follow prescribed rules and will capture a digital audit trail.

V12 Sports and Classics, one of the UK’s largest used car supermarket networks, has introduced CarPass’s AI voice agent, answering and following up thousands of leads per month.

Importantly, from an IT perspective, the solution is a Cloud app that works independently of legacy systems. Dealers can integrate it into their WhatsApp account to create an interactive sales channel capable of voice and text communication, as well as sharing images and videos.

“This is going to become an incredibly powerful channel for you to engage with your customers,” said Lynch. “It’s going to be utility technology that everyone uses.”