One AI Service Team Now Books for All Four of Auto Corner's Brands

The problem

Auto Corner run four franchise brands out of one site in Mackay, North Queensland. Toyota, Mazda, Isuzu Ute and Hyundai, plus used cars, which means their central service-reception team is a critical front door for every service customer, and increased demand was becoming overwhelming for the team.

On a normal day the central line takes 300 to 500 calls. At the busy times the phones ring faster than anyone can answer them, customers sit on hold, and a lot of them give up. Almost one in five callers were hanging up before they ever got through, after being met with extended hold periods or a voicemail.

Across four brands those missed calls add up to real money walking out the door every week. Dealer Principal Kane McHardy didn't want to fix it by stacking more people on the desk. He wanted every call answered and every service booking captured, even at the busiest hour and after the doors close. Pick up the phone, find the customer's car, book the job. Across all four brands.

What we built

CFive put an AI service team called Hayley across all four brands, in two roles. The AI Service Advisor answers the service call, looks the caller's car up in the dealership's Revolution and Tune systems, finds the right service for that vehicle, and books it straight into the workshop diary. The AI Receptionist sits behind the phones and catches the calls the team can't get to, the overflow at peak times and the after-hours calls that used to hit voicemail, so nothing rings out.

Every brand books into its own system, and the whole group reports into one consolidated dashboard, so the team can see and compare all four brands on a single page instead of clicking between accounts.

Hayley runs straight through the group's existing phone systems. Unanswered and after-hours calls forward through to the AI automatically, which means the busy-hour overflow and the calls that come in after close are now getting answered instead of lost.

Results

In a recent 30-day window Hayley answered 920 calls across the four brands and booked 375 of them straight into the workshop diary. More than half of every service call she takes is now booked end to end with no human touching it, and the strongest brands are running at 55 to 56%, led by Mackay Toyota.

The calls that used to ring out at the busy times, and the ones that came in after the doors closed, are now getting answered and booked instead of going to voicemail. Because the booking writes straight into the system rather than a callback queue, the customer walks away with a confirmed time in the diary then and there. And the reception desk is no longer the bottleneck, with the floor staff feeding back on Hayley directly so she keeps getting sharper week to week.

In their words

"The high level of abandoned calls across our business was a point of frustration, not just for us, but also for our customers. Before our customers had even interacted with us, we were creating a negative experience, and it's difficult to recover from that. The introduction of Hayley AI not only assisted in reducing our abandoned calls, it has also delivered an efficient phone booking process for our customers, and allowed our Service Reception team time to be more effective in their role. What can be a highly complex process to implement, based on the configuration required, the team at CFive have been extremely supportive, responsive and persistent to ensure a smooth implementation, and ultimately success."
- Kane McHardy, Dealer Principal, Auto Corner