It looks like the same "chat-bot" -- and yep, not at all what is "sold" to the dealers. I can show more examples if anyone wants a good laugh. The more I dig into it, the more I am horrified that dealers are even using the product.
Cars.com launches AI Chat (Conversations Starter Package)
- Thread starter Jeff Kershner
- Start date
It looks like the same "chat-bot" -- and yep, not at all what is "sold" to the dealers. I can show more examples if anyone wants a good laugh. The more I dig into it, the more I am horrified that dealers are even using the product.
- Feb 11, 2015
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- First Name
- Alex
That's interesting and good to know. @Alex Snyder @Jeff Kershner definitely something worth asking Joe and Alex about Friday.
Groups like this are unable to scale their promises, unless they plan on getting live agents lined up in the Philippines or Ukraine.
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If it's anything like they've done for Facebook Marketplace, I'm out! Their managed chat was awful. Terrible greetings, terrible responses. It was a mess. Then switched to Ana Bot who then jumps in during your conversation with the customer on Facebook-continues to attempt to close the conversation while you're speaking to the customer causing frustration on both ends. The relationship between Cars.com and Dealer Inspire has been frustrating to work through. We've been working through "growing pains" for a few months with the "Ana Bot". When concerns were brought to Cars.com I was directed to Dealer Inspire. The answer I got from Dealer Inspire was "we'll get to it but can't give you a time". Or "we've stopped working on that for now but we'll let you know when we start working on that problem again". Now we have to sign in through ANOTHER website Conversations to be able to speak with the Facebook customers without Ana Bot interrupting. Seems like they launched WELL before they were prepared. After working through this for months, I'd say its mediocre and a properly trained person in the dealership would do a better job. It's nice to have for after hours but you can set an auto response on Facebook itself for that.
Hi Stevie,
Sorry for my delay. First, I would like to say support is everything to us and those responses from our team simply aren't acceptable. We can and should do better. In the future, if you get a response like that I'm one phone call or email away (not that you should have to reach out to me). My email is jchura@dealerinspire.com and my phone is 773-225-0542.
As for the bot and these examples- While the bot certainly isn't perfect, many of the examples we're discovering are due to settings configurations. This is a huge point of frustration for my team and me as well. We have also brought this up to the Facebook Marketplace group as we need FB's help to fully automate the configuration set-up vs. providing instructions that may get lost in translation.
There are two settings in Facebook Business Manager that need to be configured when setting up Social Sales Drive (Cars Marketplace Product). Those two settings are required through Facebook:
1) Response assistant needs to be disabled. When the response assistant is enabled, an instant reply gets sent which interrupts our chatbot. This can cause confusion and creates a duplicate message.
2) Cars Social Sales Drive needs to be set to primary in FB. This is a second setting that needs to be verified. It's located under Messenger Platform > Connected Apps. The Social Sales Drive app needs to be configured to primary to ensure that Conversations is the primary receiver for the chat. Without this setting, Ana will "jump into chats" (this is a general statement and not necessarily your example). We are finding dealers are responding to chats in Facebook Messenger and not Conversations. In order for Facebook chats to route to your CRM, you need to be in Conversations. Answering directly in Facebook Messenger can cause conflict with our system.
I know there's always work to be done and I am committed to making this right for you and our dealers. In addition to providing answers to FAQ's, etc, AnaBot can do some valuable things like provide trade-in values automatically, lookup private incentives for customers, and route customers to departments instantly. We also have the ability to connect FB Marketplace to self-managed chat at no additional cost.
I will not rest until we get this right. I can't promise there will not be other issues but I can commit to a much better resolution and working together to create a much better consumer experience.
Joe I really appreciate your response and thank you for reaching out. You're right, settings were causing a number of issues. When we first signed on it was quite the struggle. Anytime we start something new I fully expect there to be growing pains and learning along the way. Unfortunately, it felt like we were guinea pigs in the beginning. I believe we have all of our settings and user logins up to date/corrected now and the program is working as it should. In my opinion, that was the biggest growing pain. Eventually it all worked out and we are still using the product today but there was certainly a breakdown in communication from the beginning. It could be possible that there were just too many people involved and things didn't get communicated clearly. Thanks again for reaching out!
Thank you. Definitely, lessons learned on how we could have rolled this out better and created a more efficient escalation process. Feel free to reach out if you need anything. Thank you for your feedback.
- Feb 11, 2015
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@joe.chura I've never used a specific DI tool that performed poorly. I don't know if you can answer this, but the aformentioned chat tool (AI, scary terminology these days) looks like legacy software, stuff that was installed previous to DI being bought by Cars. Just my two cents.
I appreciate your support and kind words Alex.
The screenshots that I saw seemed to be from Marketplace and FB Messenger which DI Conversations controls. The settings really jack things up if not configured properly, as they can create a circular reference where the FB auto response communicates on top of, and in some cases with AnaBot. On top of that, if a response is created in Messenger directly, that throws things off too as the system is set to work with the chat itself. FB does not make this easy and I'm pushing for better automation.
