Josselyn Boudett, CEO and founder of STELLA Automotive AI, provides insight into why the company entered the Automotive Industry and how STELLA AI was the answer to the dealership's number one paint point - the telephone! 

Josselyn Boudett, CEO and founder of STELLA Automotive AI, provides insight into why the company entered the Automotive Industry and how STELLA AI was the answer to the dealership's number one paint point!

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Q&A- Why did you launch a product in the automotive industry? 

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We have a wide variety of dealerships, from all sizes, who are using STELLA. We consistently hear that within 48 hrs of deployment they experience a huge relief.

Josselyn Boudett, CEO and founder of STELLA Automotive AI, explains that we have a wide variety of dealerships, from all sizes, who are using STELLA. We consistently hear that within 48 hrs of deployment they experience a huge relief. 

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Q&A- What would you say to dealers that are looking to try out STELLA for the first time?

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The immediate first result of deploying #STELLA is a noticeable change in your inbound call volume.

Josselyn Boudett, CEO and founder of STELLA Automotive AI shares dealerships immediate first reactions and results of deploying STELLA.

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Q&A- What is the most common reaction to implementing STELLA?

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Josselyn Boudett, CEO and founder of STELLA Automotive AI, discusses the benefits of unsupervised artificial intelligence for car dealerships. 

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Q&A- With your product, do humans monitor and manage the calls in the back end?

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“The reception in automotive has been better than I could have ever imagined,” says Josselyn Boudett, CEO and Founder of STELLA Automotive. 

In May, STELLA Automotive AI participated in three major industry events. Leaders from car dealers across the country responded with curiosity and commitment. We appreciate the interest, engagement, and enthusiasm for the solution that STELLA offers dealerships. 


**Kain BDC (Business Development Center) Internet Manager Group**

“Who can explain the term ‘artificial intelligence’?” asked Josselyn Boudett as she kicked off her session teaching AI fundamentals to the BDC and Marketing leaders assembled in David Kain’s NSM 20 Group. No one raised their hand. She then asked if anyone was using “artificial intelligence” in their dealership. Every hand shot up. Then the conversation began. What “really” is artificial intelligence? 

David Kain knows that the term “AI” is used very loosely to describe business intelligence tools and invited technology veteran and entrepreneur, Josselyn Boudett, to educate his 20 Group. 

After forty-five minutes of highly engaged conversation regarding the features of ‘true’ artificial intelligence, the group asked to know more about STELLA. Josselyn honored the request and called one of our dealerships currently deploying the STELLA conversational AI tool. They all recognized the value STELLA offered to resolve weaknesses associated with the current phone protocol at their dealerships. The conversation became electric with ideas and questions surrounding how they could adopt artificial intelligence themselves to ease their own staffing problems and customer service experiences. 


**Digital Dealer Tampa**

“Are you STELLA?” was the most frequently asked question at the Innovation Alley booth that STELLA Automotive had at this year’s Tampa Digital Dealer conference. After a few laughs, STELLA team members would introduce dealers and vendors to the real STELLA by calling dealerships using STELLA to manage their service scheduling and reception needs.  

The introduction to the digital community at the Tampa event was successful with demo’s given and follow-up meetings planned. We will return to the Fall conference with hopes that Hunter Swift will be asked to be a speaker. AI is a hot topic these days, and AI-enabled digital voice assistant technology offers dealerships an elegant solution – and a bigger bottom line. 

 
**DMSC (Digital Marketing Strategies Conference)**

Do high quality wines and gourmet food facilitate learning? Absolutely. This year’s DMSC in Napa Valley had all the above in a comfortable setting ideal for networking.  

At this year’s DMSC, hosted by Brian Pasch Enterprises, over 100 dealers gathered to meet each other and some of the industry’s most innovative suppliers. From Digital Retailing tools to multiple AI offerings, the vendor partners offered learning highlights and expertise guaranteed to help dealers advance in the new retail landscape. 

Hunter Swift, VP of Product for STELLA Automotive AI, participated in a panel entitled “Will Artificial Intelligence replace 50% of BDC and Serice Call Center Staff?”. In that panel, vendors and dealers discussed the value of AI for employees and managers – it is not about replacing staff but empowering them to better serve their customers.  

 
For more insight about artificial intelligence, stay tuned for Q&A sessions with STELLA executives on our website and YouTube Channel. www.stellaautomotive.com/news
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In May, STELLA Automotive AI participated in three major industry events. Leaders from car dealers across the country responded with curiosity and commitment. We appreciate the interest, engagement, and enthusiasm for the solution that STELLA offers dealerships. 

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May 2022 Automotive Dealer Engagement 

Kristian Kime, Director of AI Engineering & Analytics, discusses the value of artificial intelligence in car dealerships.  

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Q&A- Why do dealers need AI?

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Rapid Recon: How AI Improves the Entire Customer Experience with Hunter Swift

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Rapid Recon with Hunter Swift

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Kristian Kime, Director of AI Engineering & Analytics shares car dealership feedback about issues they face with hiring and training staff. He explains how STELLA AI can take a huge workload off of car dealership BDCs.  

Josselyn Boudett, CEO and founder of STELLA Automotive AI, describes how dealerships have shared their feedback about hiring and training staff.  Watch to learn how STELLA AI can take a huge workload off.

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Q&A- What types of problems does STELLA solve for dealers?

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Kristian Kime, Director of AI Engineering & Analytics, explains the functionality of a Dialog Manager and how it guides a person through a conversation.

Kristian Kime, Director of AI Engineering & Analytics, explains what a Dialog Manager is and how it guides a person through a conversation.

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Q&A- What is a dialog manager?

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[Originally seen on Auto Success magazine](https://www.autosuccessonline.com/stop-making-your-bdc-staff-do-it-all/)

**By: Jennifer Sanford**

Process implementation and consistency within dealership Business Development Centers (BDC) doesn’t have the best track record. Though many dealerships have processes in place for service BDCs, they are hard to manage and maintain. 

Traditionally, a dealership BDC trains employees to handle both outbound and inbound calls for the store. In the case of the service BDC, that effort is focused on setting service appointments, alerting customers to vehicle recalls, ordering parts and conducting follow ups, just to name a few. These are all individually time-consuming tasks, so it’s no surprise that new and used car dealerships have opted for extra help via automated phone systems. 

With automated systems, the options are preset: “Press 1 for Sales, Press 2 for Service,” etc., which, in theory, seems like it would help. But what about customers that call with questions that don’t fit nicely into one of those options? That customer gets rerouted until he or she either hangs up and goes to another store — or sends an incredibly frustrated email, posts a negative review about the store’s “customer service” or, perhaps, does all of the above. 

Even dealerships with audio interactive voice response (IVR) systems experience this problem. If a customer can’t get through the yes or no voice prompts in a timely fashion to reach a live support representative, that customer is gone. Additionally, since customer data isn’t captured in these systems, there’s no history of the customer’s concerns for an actual BDC rep to address. 

From the customers’ standpoint, the dealership’s phone system should route them to the right person or department. The problem is that purely automated systems don’t do that. Instead, customers experience inconsistent options, longer hold times, awkward pauses and a general lack of professionalism. During a recent mystery shop experience, an 18-store dealer group with a centralized BDC of just under 20 representatives had an average customer wait time of over three minutes — just to answer the phone! 

While your people are, and should be, your highest priority, simply hiring additional BDC staff isn’t the solution. Spending the time and money to hire, train and manage additional staff doesn’t make sense if their tasks aren’t better defined. Ever heard the expression, “jack of all trades, master of none”? Well, that’s what your BDC becomes, no matter how much staff you put in there.

The solution is two-fold. First, your BDC staff simply cannot do it all. There are not enough hours in the day or days in the week to handle every inbound call, and make revenue-driving outbound calls, follow up with every customer, alert customers to vehicle recalls, schedule service appointments and check on inventory. This creates a never-ending cycle of underperformance for employees, which only fuels their desire to leave your store and work for someone else. If you haven’t mystery-shopped your store in a while, I highly recommend doing it. You’ll be able to experience the exasperation of your employees firsthand. 

Second, as this may come as a surprise, your BDC staff doesn’t have to do it all. Take your service BDC for example. Would you rather have your staff handling in-bound service scheduling or outbound vehicle recall conversations? Would you like your staff confirming preset appointments or contacting customers about available vehicle parts that are in inventory?

The mundane, repetitive tasks, such as service appointment reminders or service scheduling, can be easily handled via conversation artificial intelligence (AI) technology. In addition to answering the call in one ring, the use of dynamic dialog AI, not automated systems, doesn’t limit customers’ options. Rather than being frustrated, customers have productive conversations with natural language AI technology, while your focused and trained BDC staff is targeting more important tasks for your store. 

Rather than generalists, your employees become specialists, elevating not only employee satisfaction but output as well. By lifting the burden of time-consuming, but simple and repetitive, transactions from your BDC representatives, dealerships can flourish with productive employees and happier customers. 

Jennifer Sanford is the vice president of marketing and industry relations at Telepathy Labs for STELLA Automotive.

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Auto Success April - Helping your BDCs

[Originally seen on Auto Success magazine](https://www.autosuccessonline.com/ai-for-automotive/)

**By: Hunter Swift**

## What is AI, really?

We use this to describe all kinds of technology these days- predictive analytics, dynamic chat, digital assistance, and bots. But true Artificial Intelligence, as defined by Oxford’s Dictionary, is “the theory and development of computer systems to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages”. Given that definition, does your dealership’s technology actually offer you an AI service? Does your automated phone menu respond to customers’ questions? Does it even sound natural? Does it recognize vocal tone or inflections that can provide indicators of a customer’s frustration? Are there long pauses between when a customer responds and when the automated menu proceeds to the next question? A chatbot, an automated menu, round robin phone system or an automated interactive voice response system is not real AI.

### Why does AI matter for Automotive?

The overall goal for using AI within retail automotive dealerships is to improve productivity.  Today, AI can empower your teams by handling the most basic items – service scheduling, for example – that can require a lot of an employee’s time. It allows employees to focus their skills on more complicated issues, while also providing a consistent, fast, and easy experience for the dealership’s vehicle owners. Current tools that may be referred to as “AI” really don’t help ease the workload on dealership staff; they often are just used as a back up when staff members are busy. This is compounded by the fact that it has become increasingly difficult to find, hire, train and manage automotive BDC personnel. But the obstacles don’t stop there. If your dealership is lucky enough to find and hire great employees, inbound appointment phone calls can take up to 80% of an agent’s time in the store. This prevents BDC employees from being able to focus on revenue-generating outbound calls, not to mention true customer complaints, and leaves phone systems flooded with thousands of afterhours and overflowing voicemails. 

Automotive customers are bombarded with poor dealership experiences. Outdated IVRs contain inconsistent steps and extensive call waiting times. It’s not uncommon for customers to sit on the phone for over a minute before speaking to a live person. The traditional phone directory assumes that customers know exactly whom they’re trying to reach, while the automated phone tree offers a limited number of options. If the customer’s need doesn’t fit nicely into one of the preset options, that customer gets bounced around in an endless loop.

And, this is just the beginning.  As these AI tools mature, they will be able to handle more processes to empower and enable your teams. We will rely on AI for processing information the same way we became dependent on Internet Search Engines to help us get answers and the same way our grandfathers and grandmothers embraced the telephone.  

#### What’s the Next Step?

Do your research and identify where AI can improve your business.  One of the biggest pain points is in phone handling and staffing.  While there is absolutely no replacement for talented, well-trained and effective employees, we all know that we would prefer that these talented people handle important jobs.  Artificial intelligence tools can provide the knowledge and skills to allow that to happen. Using artificial intelligence to relieve your employees of mundane tasks, such as appointment setting, in favor of larger ones is vital in order for your dealership to flourish.


Hunter Swift is the Vice President of Product of STELLA Automotive AI, automotive’s most intelligent digital assistant that handles inbound calls, answers questions and books appointments.


Ok, Automotive, It’s Time to Start Talking About AI

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Auto Success March - AI for Automotive

Clubhouse: Pitch Tank by Auto Genius, featuring STELLA Automotive AI and Hunter Swift

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