Sterling Cars save time and money by automating sales process
In the very tight margin industry of car dealerships, anything that can improve efficiency is a must have. Sterling cars successfully sells hundreds of cars a month, to many happy customers. Sourcing most of them from British Car Auctions creates a significant administrative challenge. Capturing car details and images for onwards listing is a laborious and manual process prone to accuracy problems. Our sales automation Bots quickly and cheaply revolutionised the problems faced by so many dealerships.
Sterling cars needed to make the process of listing cars faster and more accurate
Sterling Cars Ltd have developed a very successful car dealership over the past 10 years. They have built a long term relationship with British Car Auctions, one of the UK’s leading car remarketing businesses. Every month they successfully sell hundreds of vehicles online. Correctly capturing the information for each of their listings, from a number of different sources is critical to the success of their business. They have to log into one location to identify all the invoice information and documentation and another location for high quality images. From these various systems, they add them to their stock system and develop the appropriate sales information to list their vehicles online. Sometimes just identifying a vehicle – make, model and colour from the original system can take significant time. This has been a challenge for many dealerships for a number of years.
Trying to do this up to 20 times a day is very time consuming and prone to accuracy problems. Never mind the cost of holding a vehicle for too long before it is listed. They decided to consider automating the sales process.
Our bots accurately capture all the relevant listing information and create a new sales listing in seconds
We sat with the team and quickly mapped out the daily processes they undertook. The Sterling team logged into the BCA site and once a vehicle was identified; they manually gathered descriptions and pricing before using the registration details to cross reference information for a catalogue site to locate images. Once the process was clear we were able to create a bot that replicates this process. It accurately identifies vehicles, capturing the appropriate data and images into a detailed spreadsheet the team were able to work from. The bot is able to accurately discern relevant information from free-form data fields.
Initially this was all the team wanted. However, they soon realised they could easily take the next step to full sales automation.
Once the spreadsheet data was validated a second bot loads the information onto the Sterling Cars ebay site. It is then ready for sale. The team just approves the content and clicks a button to list, dramatically speeding up the entire sales process.
Sales Automation saves over 50 hours of administrative time per month whilst increasing accuracy
Sterling were absolutely delighted with the results. In just 4 weeks the bots were live and working. On average since implementing their bot team they have saved over 15 hours of administrative time every week. They have also enhancing their accuracy levels by more than 20%. The Sterling team are freed up to focus on delivering their excellent customer service. The have even started to look at other automation projects to further enhance their business.