MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. – Outsell announced two major updates to its Virtual Customer Engagement platform. The new features are Sales Defector Detection and Dealer Assignment Rules. The new AI-driven Sales Defector Detection content offers another way for dealerships to recapture revenue. This feature targets prior customers who’ve likely defected and bought elsewhere. 

Outsell’s AI brain gives dealerships a way to keep connected to the customer long-term and regain their business in the future.

“Dealers should not give up on trying to engage defectors. They bought from the dealer once and can easily buy there again when the time is right if the connection to the dealer is strengthened,” said Valerie Vallancourt, vice president of marketing at Outsell. “Outsell’s AI brain gives dealerships a way to keep connected to the customer long-term and regain their business in the future.”

Outsell regularly augments the VINs of a dealership’s sales and service customers with change of ownership. When a change of ownership is detected, and there wasn’t a purchase from your dealership around that same time, it’s likely that they purchased a vehicle elsewhere to replace that vehicle. Outsell AI does not delete these customers, rather it changes the message to become more relevant and maintain the dealers’ connection. When Outsell AI determines that these likely defectors are back in market, automated content from Outsell tries to win them back for the dealership. Pilot data suggests that this strategy drives incremental sales.

Dealer Assignment Rules enable groups to coordinate and streamline messages among multiple stores. These rules grow revenues, increase message relevance and save dealers money by removing conflicting and duplicate messages from the customer journey. The feature creates a Global Customer ID for customers that exist in multiple databases to provide a single view across all stores. It also matches and merges customer behavior and activity records that are part of the same household.

“Most store communications don’t coordinate messages when a consumer exists in multiple store databases,” said Gary Marcotte, senior vice president of customer engagement innovation at Outsell. “This new feature allows dealer groups to use their data to its full potential.”

An optional Group Market Hierarchy structure can also be created with the new Dealer Assignment Rules feature. This allows dealer groups to showcase other brands within their group or alternative locations where customers can receive service for their vehicles, particularly pre-owned vehicles that were off-brand at the original group dealership of purchase.

“According to our research, often as few as ten percent of off-brand used car buyers service at the store of purchase and few ever service at the dealer group at all,” Marcotte continued. “With our new Used Brand Service Match program dealer groups can increase their revenue by letting customers know about all of the brands they service and the available locations to get service completed. This can double service retention for off-brand used vehicles.”

Dealer Group Assignment Rules and Sales Defector Detection are the newest ways Outsell works around the clock as a virtual salesforce to help dealerships connect with customers personally, continually and automatically.

To learn more about all offerings from Outsell, visit outsell.com, or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.