Volie Session: The Future of Volie - AI, Intelligence & What's Next

Welcome everyone to today's Volley session. We have a really, really exciting session here. We're, you know, it's been a few months since we've done one of these, but we're really excited to put this together and show you all what we're working on. We're very excited to walk you through what our strategy is for the short and long term here at Volley. We have some exciting updates to share on some existing functionality and features and products, as well as things that will be coming out soon. Sam is going to take us through it all, and we will have a Q&A at the end. So on today's session, we want to walk you through what's going on with Volley and our BDC platform. We want to take you through Carly, our digital service assistant. We have a lot of exciting updates to share there. People keep asking us about it. We have some new functionality and releases for Pulse. our call intelligence platform. And we're gonna walk through some of the new reporting that we have already released, as well as will be coming soon, including some new ROI reporting and a few other things on the roadmap before we wrap up and take Q&A. So with that said, we're very, very excited to walk you through. And Scott, before we let Sam take over, why don't you kick us off?

Yeah. So why are we here today, guys? Really, our platform is to become the platform for dealer communication and to be your operating system for all things communication in the dealership. We, you know, this is a big moment for Vali as we move from being essentially a single product to a multi-product company, but everything we do is centered around helping you to be— to better please your customers, improve your business. A lot of businesses inside auto and outside of auto offer promises that if you buy their product, you won't have to lift a finger, your business will magically grow, and all your problems were sold— will be solved. We've heard from many companies that if you buy, uh, or, um, that the robots are coming and will solve all your problems and you won't need people anymore. Um, This is scary for workers, and it's kind of— it gets intoxicating and provocative for business owners who are face-mounting pressures to run profitable businesses. Um, to not daydream— it's hard for them to not daydream what might be true. Um, we don't believe the robots are going to take all the jobs. We also believe— don't believe that you cannot adopt this great technology that we're going to be talking about today to help people do way more than they could before. So Volley believes AI is very possible, very powerful. Our philosophy is that the robots and the humans need a platform to work together, and that's Volley. We know that using Volley, a lot of you guys signed up, you wanted to put a plan together to run your BDC better. If you're a central BDC, you'll save a lot of labor while helping grow your customer base. We believe that our transformation into the platform for dealer communications will help you schedule more appointments again with less people. We want to double that ratio again. Vali's AI-native products will help you do this. We're also excited— we're excited to talk about Pulse and Karla today. We know that reporting, the new communication center, and our opt-in consent management application will also keep your business safe, keep you guys scalable in the age of AI. And really, I just Kind of on my soapbox before Sam gets going. I know you guys all wanna get to Sam, but no one knows what's gonna happen in the future. No one. It's just so easy to say or imagine otherwise. We've all heard all over, smart people that we all admire have made predictions that are hard to refute, that of the big changes that are coming with AI, 'cause there's no other evidence that it's not. No one truly knows what's going to happen. Outcomes are still subject to luck and hard work. As business leaders, we can control how people feel. So everything we do is, is to help you do better with your customers. That's our goal. We know one thing will never change: people want to be treated well. Businesses that do this will thrive. Does that mean there won't be changes in the car business? No, there are going to be winners and losers, and, uh, and no one knows what that looks like. But, um, we've got a good strategy. We don't want you to spend too much time with the doomers. They were here at the dot-com crash. They're here at Cash for Clunkers. They're here when oil spiked gas to record levels in 2016. They were here with COVID and, uh, they don't know what will happen. So one thing I'm certain about that will never change though, is that people want to be treated well in life. They want good service at a business that they're going to spend their money with. If I have one bit of advice for you guys, not that any of you guys asked for it, but if you want to thrive in life and in business, make yourself invaluable to that business by making sure that the people doing business with you are happy. Make sure you review those 30 calls that Pulse bubbles up every day. That where you could have revenue leakage. Dealerships are complex businesses. It doesn't mean you're doing a bad job. It's a lot to get through, and this is only possible because of AI. Things falling through the cracks happen because dealerships are complicated. It's, it's whether you use technology to find those leaks and then do something about it to make your customers happy that'll make a difference. It'll enrich the business and it'll make you invaluable. in the age of AI. And I would just say that everyone should make themselves invaluable. Same thing with AI digital assistants. Let's let the robots do the easy stuff so we can blow the customers away because you took the time to help them for the hard stuff. AI helps you with that. So as Sam goes, I'm gonna, I'm gonna finish here. Our goal is to help you work with AI so each person can do way more. We can have— we can schedule way more appointments per customer and help customers and make them happy. We believe that we are the platform that helps you work between the robots and the humans, and, and it isn't meant to cut employees. But if you've got good valuable employees, there's a lot of things in the dealerships that they can do to help make your customers happy. So this is the vision that Sam and Jake are going to present today. our next 4 to 6 month roadmap. So in any event, thank you for coming today. That's the why, that's why we're doing this, and I hope you enjoy the Vali session today.

Thanks, Scott, and thank you everyone for coming today. We're very excited to walk you through what we have coming. And with that said, you know, I wanted to highlight a couple of the things that we've released over the last couple months. You know, it's easy to see The big things that come across, but sometimes it's not always obvious what little things we've done. So I just wanted everyone to know that we are committed to having continuous improvements across the platform to help you guys communicate better with your customers. We've released so many updates in the existing Communication Center regarding call quality, Get Next optimizations, calling UX, performance load times. We've enhanced all of our integrations and are continuing to do so. We've got a brand new communications hub coming out that will make that even more clear, starting with CDK. We've, we've updated campaign settings. We've given you guys more tools for opt-outs, SMS calling, and of course, lastly, reporting call UX. But we're very excited to continue to improve the platform for you guys, and we want to be the platform for dealer communication, like Scott said. So. With that said, I want to introduce Carly. We're very excited to bring Carly to the market. We believe that native AI matters. And like Scott said, we believe that Carly is the perfect handoff from the robots to the humans. That is our big shtick with Carly. We don't see it as a replacement of the BDC by any means. We see it as a tool that is going to help streamline the process to make sure that when the agents do get the harder calls, they have all the tools that they need. In order to assist those customers the best they can. So to start, Carly's gonna be able to handle these 3 main use cases. She's gonna be available for after-hours and weekends calls. She's gonna be able to do overflow and of course first touch. And you guys will be able to decide what you guys want her to do. And everything that she speaks on will be configured to the FAQs and the permissions that you guys give her. She'll be able to schedule appointments starting with X-Time and Tekion. With Update Promise and MyKarma being fast followers here going into Q4. A couple other things with Carly, you know, because you have Volley, because you guys have the BDC, Carly is not limited by the fact that when a customer says they want to speak to a representative, they have to keep them on the phone. When Carly gets presented with the fact that the agent— that the customer wants to speak to a human, Carly's gonna say, No problem. Let me get you over to an agent ASAP, and we're gonna make it just that easy for you. And even better yet, when the agent gets live handed off the call, the agent's gonna have all the information at their fingertips in order to make that a successful completion of the call. They're gonna know what happened. They're gonna have the intelligence visible to them so they can see the sentiment and how Carly, you know, where Carly got to. And if they care to, they'll even be able to read through the turns and see where they might have got hung up. Carly will let them know the sentiment and the overall temperature level so that the agent's not walking blind. Additionally, you know, as we all know, a lot of inbound calls that we receive are status checks. A good percentage of those calls, when transferred to the advisors, are not answered. And with Carly, we're gonna make it really easy for you guys to get those customers back on the phone. So because you have volume and because we know that those calls won't be answered, we'll requeue those calls for an outbound call. So that your BDC can recover that revenue, recover that lost customer, whatever it may be, so that you guys have no slippage or leakage on that side of the house. And Carli is there to give you guys the perfect handoff from the robots to the humans. So Carli in practice is very simple. The customer will call in, AI will enter the conversation whenever you guys decided to, whether it's as a first touch or it could be overflow. It could be overflow after X amount of seconds. You guys will be able to choose what you wanna do. If Carly's able to finish the call, that's great. Carly will be able to schedule the call, answer questions, and get that customer taken care of. However, if that customer wants to go to a human, Carly will make sure that there's the perfect handoff from the robot to the human. It'll come into your BDC inside the communication center in Bali, and the agent will be able to take it from there, which will deliver you guys a continued outcome. Carly's gonna launch with a lot of really nice interfaces to make sure that you guys have everything you need. We believe at Volley, like Scott said, that AI is in abundance, but also needs to be transparent. So everything that Carly does is gonna be available and visible. Carly's gonna be limited to speak on what you guys let her speak on, and you guys will be able to see what she does, what she converts on. Additionally, when you're viewing the details of the calls, You'll be able to see all of the turns, everything that she said, even how long it took for her to respond. If she goes to xTime to get some available appointment slots to schedule an appointment, we'll even show you the appointment slot that xTime returned so you guys can know what Carly was dealing with. We'll show you how long the overall latency was, as well as the old general intelligence that you would expect from an AI assistant nowadays. We'll be able to tell you what percentage of your calls The, uh, that needed to be handed off to a human, which ones were hot, etc. Carly will also launch with really good reporting right out of the gate. You know, we believe that not only is it important for you guys to be able to see the revenue that Carly captures, but also we'll make it easy for you guys to see the revenue that, that is captured from the handed-off calls to the humans, because we believe that this is a partnership between the robot and the human. And this will enable you guys to put an ROI on totally everything that you guys are doing in your call center. Which brings us to Pulse plus Carly. You know, once again, we want to be the platform for dealer communication. And with that said, if you guys already have a digital service assistant and you guys aren't looking to use Carly, no problem. We'll be able to pulse those calls as well. We have great integrations with Flye. Mia, Blink, and Stella, and you guys will be able to continue to do those things today. Those calls can be sent in through those integrations, and you guys can take them, and with Pulse, we'll be able to tell you exactly how they're performing. You know, essentially, we're going to give you guys the ability to have the AI that talks, intelligence that watches, all one loop inside of Ollie. So together, Pulse plus Carly plus your BDC will close the loop Every conversation, human or AI, will be covered and visible for you guys. So Carly, you know, if you guys decide to use Carly and you want the full suite, Carly's gonna be able to take over at the start of your journey. The humans will be able to make sure that everything is good when they want a representative, and Pulse will be able to tell you what happens on the human side of the call. So you guys are gonna have full coverage across the entire side of your calling communications. Speaking of Pulse, a lot of you guys know since the spring we've rolled out direct certified integrations with all the major CRMs. You guys will be able to do click-to-call. We can push details back in, and it's a really seamless experience. We've released a lot of other things with Pulse over the last month. You guys now have the ability to do voice printing. Dynamic number insertion. We're also just about to release keywording that will give you guys the ability to do enhanced filtering. But there's even more stuff that's going to be coming. Like I said, you'll be able to use Pulse to actually grade your non-parley AI assistant calls. You'll be able to have people return calls and follow-ups directly from the Pulse alerts, which will be really important because you won't need the advisors to have to log into Volley at all. They'll be able to take that alert. Follow up from it directly from that alert in their email or their Teams or Slack, because we can also post the alerts into them as well. And with those—

Let me jump in here, Sam, just a little more on the why here, because a lot of folks, though we rolled this out in the spring, we've been pretty quiet about it. With our CRM integrations that we have for the front end, we can now do call intelligence. Across all those CRMs, click-to-call, as well as inbound call tracking for sales and service, along with your lead sources and those type of things. And since we do it at the customer level and we'll match it up to DMS data, it'll be very handy. Just wanted to give a little context there 'cause we've been pretty quiet about it up until now. We've really only advertised that we do it for the volley calls. We do 200,000 volley calls a day, but I'm excited to get this going. Go ahead, Sam. Sorry for jumping in.

Oh, it's great, Scott. Thank you. You know, from call to insight, you know, AI, of course, is fairly complicated in most regards, but really Pulse is quite simple. We want to give you the tools and insights to effectively follow up back with your customers so that you can recover any revenue. before you lose it. Like I said on the previous slide, if any of the employees at the dealership receive a Pulse alert, they'll be able to call that customer back directly from the alert, either through a browser call or through a click-to-call. So you won't have to have them to have 2 logins. So a call will occur. Pulse will identify the issues or the opportunity. It could be based on sentiment. It could be a missed opportunity, an escalated customer, a suspicious call. Or any of the other things that Pulse can look out for. You guys can specify whatever you want to be alerted for, and we're going to make sure the right employee or manager is alerted either through email, Teams, or Slack. And then you guys can track that those follow-ups occurred. You'll see right here, this is—

Sam, let's, let's, let's dig into that a little bit, just, just a little bit more, and we'll finish up there. But so when we talk about the things that make our business special and pleasing to our customers, We make it very easy for you to look at the 30 calls you need to look at every day, whether it's a missed opportunity or an upset customer. Pulse was designed to, to make it so you can filter down to those calls quite easily. Sam's going to show you how we're rolling out how you can, you can take part in true revenue recovery by calling them back in the tool. And then, and then how we manage whether it got done. One other thing I did want to say, and this is the main reason I jumped in here, Sam. A lot of you guys are like, geez, I don't want my service manager to have to log into one more portal. I mean, no one needs something else to log in. If you're not currently logged into Vali, these alerts you get when this gets rolled out, they can click on an alert, they can do a browser call like our Vali users, or they can do a click-to-call. So every, you know, if, if you're a central BDC and you send alerts for negative sentiment to your service manager at the individual stores, they can click on that, do a click-to-call and follow up with the customer. So go ahead, Sam.

Thanks, Scott. We have a brand new work plans dashboard that's going to be really nice to use alongside Pulse. It's rolling out in the next few weeks and it's going to give you total visibility to see what happens. You'll be able to have visibility as a manager into your pulse promises, your leads and their follow-up, any calls that get requeued with Carly, callbacks, and others. It's gonna give you a one-stop shop and as a tool to make sure that revenue doesn't leak and that it's recovered across all of your communications. We also have the ability to make the calls like Scott said. And if y'all didn't know, we do support dark mode in our new user interface. So I have a dark mode picture here, but they'll be able to do click-to-calls or browser calls directly from the alert when they go to the screen. Which brings us to our new reporting platform. We're very excited to bring this to you guys. We have 8 reports that are currently launched. We've got more that are very close, and we've got a lot on the horizon. Our new reporting platform, everything's fully exportable and schedulable, and our goal is to make it a continuous investment for you guys so you guys always have the numbers and reports that you guys need. One of our most requested reports historically was always an SMS report. We're pleased to announce that recently released is a brand new campaign message report, which will give you guys great roll-up reporting for SMS stats across your guys' BDC. We also— one of our first reports that we're going to be building once we get past re-releasing all of our legacy reports is a brand new ROI report. The ROI report, you'll be able to break it down by organization, campaign, or agent, and you'll even be able to report on the calls that were the— on the revenue where an agent didn't directly schedule the appointment, but you guys touched them one way, shape, or form, because we know you guys are working hard to get these customers into the stores. There's many reports on deck here. As I said, this is the continuous investment. It's a brand new modern platform, and we're very excited to bring these reports to you guys. As always, if you guys have any feedback on more reporting that you'd like to see beyond what's listed here, we're always open to feedback and we're very excited to bring any and all reports to the platform for dealer communication. An updated Volley experience. You know, as I said at the beginning, we've been continuously investing in our core platform alongside of these new products, and we understand that a new communication center is ready and necessary for you guys. And we're very excited to announce that a brand new communication center is coming going into Q1. The new communication center is going to be in the new front-end framework. It's going to be modern, beautiful, but best of all, there won't be any worry or stress about moving to the new communication center because it will launch with a legacy view As well as the new views. So it's going to be extremely easy for our customer success team to get all of y'all moved over because the look and the feel on the legacy side is going to be the same. But all of the benefits of the new screen are going to be there. There's going to be better tools for customer success to help you guys resolve issues faster with better insights for us to diagnose. There's going to be a native appointment scheduler with X-Time and Techion to start, with X-Time or with Update Promise and MyKarma coming shortly. And our 2 most requested features of all time are going to be live in the, in the new communication center from the start. First, the ability to make multiple dials per attempt. So if a customer has multiple phone numbers, you'll be able to call both of their phone numbers while the customer profile is pulled up at that same time. And you guys will be able to choose whether or not you want the agent to disposition both dials or a single dial. And then secondly, Our absolute most requested feature. We're very excited to announce that the new Communication Center will launch with multitasking. Our message screen has a lot of great things in it, but it has one major issue, and that's that you can't be in the message screen and be on a call at the same time. But look no further. In the new Communication Center, you guys will be able to do this. You guys will have a seamless view where they'll be able to manage messages and emails at the bottom nav, similar to like a Facebook like where you could do a quick message. They can even take it side screen and have access to the customer profile, and they'll even be able to take it full screen and move between the calls and the messages simultaneously so that when the agents are dialing out or they're waiting for a warm transfer, they can be as efficient as possible. Here is a quick look at some of the mockups that we are working off of for the new Communication Center. And these are the new views that I mentioned. The new views are going to launch with what we call the Power Mode and the Lead View. The Power Mode will work very similarly to what— how it works today, where you guys will be able to do save and dial next. The Lead View will give you guys a different interface where it'll make it easier for you guys to send a text message to every phone number, call every phone number, and email all of their email addresses all from one experience. And just like with the multiple dials per attempt, You guys will be able to choose whether or not you want the agent to disposition all of those communications or one single one as a bundle. You can see here that they'll be able to quickly move between the bottom and go across, as well as have the V message up for email and message at all times. They'll also be able to take it full screen here at the top. They'll be able to switch between the profiles while they're live on a call. The calling itself will be a draggable control, so the calling will not be limited to the space anymore. Agents will be able to customize where they want to stick the stick to profile. And the survey template, I know a lot of you guys like it. Feedback we've received is that a lot of you guys don't use it. No problem. If you guys want to use it, that's great. For the folks that don't want to use that space, you'll be able to collapse it in with the rest of the tabs so that you guys can maximize all the space on the screen. What else is on the roadmap? Well, we've got Opti, a brand new consent and opt-out management product that's going to be launching at the end of the year. We've got continued Pulse improvements. Like I said, reporting is going to be a continuous investment. We're going to really focus hard on the integrations. We've made a lot of updates to our CDK integration, and we have plans to upgrade most of the integrations that are already there and then continue to improve our core platform, both for scalability and for speed load improvements for you guys, so you guys have the best experience of all time. Additionally, go ahead, Scott.

Oh, just when I talk about integrations, when Sam did, a lot of the schedulers, we're going to knock off every one of them. We meant the 4 he mentioned are the ones he mentioned because they're done, or either, or they're furiously being worked on in the case of MyKarma. But we want to, we want to make this as seamless for you as possible. And, and I know that question is going to come on up here. So go ahead, Sam.

Oh, thanks, Scott. And I guess another note on that that I should mention, and I mentioned this briefly at the beginning, it was a bullet point on the What We've Done Recently tab, but we have a brand new integration site that's, that's coming out. It's going to make it a one-stop shop where you guys will be able to manage your integrations in Volley. as well as have the ability to explore and dig deep into what we're seeing and doing with the data. CDK is the first integration that we'll be rolling out with this. And with that, as an example, just to show you how transparent it'll be, you'll be able to see the onboarding sections that we get through CDK, as well as the daily allotments of data that we pull with the ability to dive and dig deep into the Explorer so that you guys can see how we came up with the numbers that we did and how those customers can translate into your campaign strategy.

One of the— just a last thing and then you can move on, Sam, with integrations. We have been working besides all the basic click-to-call integrations that legacy people have done. For a handful of them, we have these done. The other ones are in flight. But updating the CRM, adding notes, checking statuses, all— a lot of the things that you care about if you're using us for call intelligence, but you want to do list calling or something like that. It's really quite robust, and the guys have built this so that it's easier to add other people on. Go ahead, Sam.

Thanks, Scott. And then the last thing I wanted to mention on this screen is we have a brand new customer matcher coming out. It's launching in October, and we'll be rolling it out through the rest of the year. The new customer matcher, what makes it Different than our current customer matcher is a couple things. For one, we— the algorithm is slightly different and focuses a little bit more on exact matching. And what that means for you guys is you guys will have a faster experience when searching for customers in the Communication Center. Additionally, the new customer matcher will launch with what we call the redo queue, so that when we believe there was a false positive or a bad match, it will be automatically reprocessed and merged. so that you guys don't have any duplicates in your account anymore. As far as the merging goes, later in this year inside the admin, you guys will have a UI where you guys will be able to manually merge customers that you think we missed. But also it should be said that everything, you know, if you had some communications that happened on one profile and transactions and communications that happened on another profile, when you merge those profiles together, All of their information will be put together. So you guys will not lose any of the history that you guys have done for that customer inside of OLLI. We're very excited to bring this to you guys, and we'll begin rolling it out in October, like I said. Thank you guys for the patience on that, and we're very excited to bring that to you guys.

Okay, so here's the legal part of the call. So on January 31st, there are new FCC— there's new FCC guidance coming out. Where you're gonna have added expectations on how you manage customer preferences, namely opt-outs. There's like 15 million SMSs sent in volley every month, 11% answer rate. A 3rd of those are opt-outs. Well, when this new guidance comes out, unless they change their mind, it could be possible, but an opt-out for an SMS will also be akin To, you know, you'll have to opt them out for a phone call as well. And if you have one vendor product, you need to manage it across all vendor products, and this product will allow it. I'll let Sam go into the how. I just wanted to talk about the why we're doing this. This will be nearly free for our Volley customers, and then we'll sell it separately. And you'll be able to collect consent, you know, for like in Florida, the consent Expires in 180 days. It's very, you know, most states this doesn't, this doesn't expire. Our goal is to help you, help you keep yourself safe, keep yourself scalable, and, and not have to worry about, about calling the wrong customer at the wrong time. We already have tons of belts and suspenders for that. This is the next leg of this. I'm gonna— I know Sam's dying to talk about this. I'll talk about outbound AI a bit. Um, if you were on our last webinar, we talked about the dangers of outbound AI and how it needs special consent. Uh, you will be able to collect that in here and, uh, and use it for the people. With outbound AI, you need a specific consent. It can't be established business relationship. It can't be it's okay to communicate. There are specific things. Right now, we monitor this every month with our attorneys. There, there are dealers using this. There are AI companies selling this. Some of them care about it. Some of them don't. But right now, there's been no big litigation in automotive for it yet. There was a law firm, though, that was doing outbound robodial calls with AI, and they just paid a $7.6 million fine. You know, it's interesting, um, robots can run up big classes, uh, very quickly. Their, their original lawsuit was something like $93 million, and it was, it was, it was done down to that. But we want to help it so you guys can, uh, can, as, as the technology evolves, even if you just only use it for voicemail callbacks, um, we don't have a clue, uh, uh, what the response will be for that, but But we do know if we're going to be the platform that helps you have communication and call intelligence, it's an important part of it. So just that's the legal part of it, Sam. You can go ahead and talk about what it'll do.

Yeah, thanks, Scott. And, you know, as Scott mentioned, the opportunities to use outbound AI might be limited for a while as this becomes adopted. But with Carly and Appti together, we'll have you guys a safe and consented way In order to actually do those outbound AI calls. With Opti, it's very simple. You know, we want to give you guys the ability to have the one-stop shop for all of your other vendors to be able to use your opt-out preferences that you guys are already collecting in the BDC. You guys, there'll be a vendor hub that you guys will be able to have the other, your other vendors integrate with so that they can use your data. So that they can manage the data through Volley. We'll be able to push the opt-outs back in to keep all the other systems in sync, and collecting consent will be very easy. So here are a couple examples. When an advisor goes to speak to someone inside the dealership, they'll be able to pull up the customer's profile and give them a preferences view where the customer will be able to actually choose their consent right in the page, and they'll be able to collect that right in the way. Additionally, when they're at the F&I desk and they're checking out, they may or may not be selecting these preferences already on a piece of paper that most dealerships are not doing anything with. With Carly, you'll be able to go— or excuse me, with Opti, you'll be able to go to the customer's profile, take a picture of the document, and upload it to their profile showing that you guys have the consent for this. So we're going to make it very easy for you guys. Probably some of you guys are wondering, Is there an eventual mobile app coming for this? Absolutely. And that is going to be present on our 2027 roadmap. The mobile app, just to say, will also cover some of the Pulse capabilities, and we're very excited to bring that to you guys as well. But we're very excited about Optie. We understand how important it is to remain compliant and to gain visibility across all of your communications and your vendors. And we want Optie to be the one-stop shop to make it simple to manage your consent.

Sam talked about the other vendors, so they'll be able to push in their opt-outs, pull the consent. We're going to report on their opt-outs if they so choose. And just for some of you dealer groups that you're listening, if you want this to be the hub, and then if we need to push this into Snowflake, if that's where your customer data sits or whatever, we can do that for you. But— This will be a great product, a great way. There's a war on communication. We have to get this done by January 31st. We've already done the back end of it, but, uh, but we set it aside to, to get Carly launched. Um, this will be a very useful tool for people.

Yeah, and I guess just to reiterate one thing Scott said there, um, I know I, I've mentioned this a lot to folks over the years as we've done As we've done calls, but just to say it for everyone, there's many ways in which we can share data, Opti or not Opti. You guys, you guys can all utilize our real-time webhooks for all of the events, and we can send your guys' calls, emails, SMSs, opt-outs, appointments, whatever it may be. We can send it wherever you need it. We also can schedule data export for you guys. We can deliver it to an SFTP. We have an open API. And as Scott mentioned, Snowflake is our data lake, and there are lots of sharing capabilities through data lakes today. So lots of opportunities to make sure that you guys have access to the data that you guys need to have access to.

Just real quick here, and there are a few questions coming in, and we'll get to all of them at the end, or at least as many as we can in the time. But this one came in, and it's very relevant to this, and it's a great point. Sam, can you talk about this? If an opt-in/out customer opts back in when they're at the advisor, how does Opti help them opt that customer back in when they have that opt-in/out customer back in the store?

Sure. So right now in the communication center, agents can— they can manage the customer's preferences. But depending on the way of actually gathering the consent, it's not always easy to get people opted back in. So when they're dealing with the— when the advisor is dealing with the customer right in the way, they don't have to jump through the hoops of having the customer re-opt back in through email or doing whatever they may be. They'll be able to actually just capture that right on the tablet, right in the store. The agent— the customer will be able to essentially sign the consent right there in the profile. And this will all just be seamless. So from the interface's perspective, it won't necessarily be different than the Communication Center. The power is really through the acknowledgement of the customer doing it live with the service advisor and that being captured with all that information.

We will do simple things too, like screen pop the customer on an inbound call if they've revoked consent, or, and have little digests for people coming in who don't have valid consent. So this will be a very handy tool.

Yeah, and I guess on that note too, I mean, the nature today is to make it really easy, not just in Volley, but in every communication stack. It makes it really easy to opt people out, but there's not always— it's not always easy or a well-versed path to get people back in. So to Scott's point, part of Opti as well, will be that in the new communication center, we'll make it obvious when people are opted out when they call back in so that agents— so it can be part of the agent's regular flow that they can work on regathering that consent in a legal way so that you guys can restore that customer to your bank. Great question.

Jake, you're up.

Jake, pass it to Jake to put it all together.

Yeah, so I hope you all can see our strategy and what we're working on. This is our strategy to help your agents communicate with your customers more effectively and efficiently. We do aim to be the platform for dealer communication, and in that, we do aim to make it really easy to communicate with your customers. Your agents working in the stores, in the service department, you know, on the drive, And in the BDCs, working with Pulse and Carly, we hope to really augment your people and turn 1 person into 4, with all— with the visibility of what's going on, so you know where you need to jump in. And what this means for your dealership, if we go to the next slide, this means that you can more efficiently, consistently, and effectively communicate with all of your customers. while having the important visibility you need to make sure that every customer is taken care of. And one thing I wanna just cap this off with, because this is important, Scott said this at the top, but we, I mean, obviously that's what this whole presentation is. We believe AI is an incredibly helpful tool and the technology can really, really help us. We do not think that it is going to replace all the people in your stores. And we hope that working with these tools, working with these tools, AI can help your people become a lot more efficient and effective. So that's what it means bringing it all together. And let's go ahead and kick it off over to Q&A. Oh, road timelines. So we do have Carly will be entering beta here pretty shortly. And we're aiming for a launch here, a full launch in November is our goal. We will be taking registration here shortly. If you want to be one of the first few people we turn on for Carly, feel free to reach out to us. And then Opti, we're aiming for end of the year. Is our goal there. Like Scott said, a lot of these FCC changes to their guidance is coming out at the end of January, so we do need to push this one along.

We do have pilot dealers starting in October on Carly. This will be a very strong offering.

Yeah, and then a couple other things to mention too. So it says it there at the bottom, and we said it already a few times in the presentation, but just to reiterate, You know, we have continuous investment across all of Pulse reporting integrations in our core platform. We're committed to continuing to improve these platforms in addition to making Carly and Opti incredible experiences for you guys. A couple things of note as a reminder, the new customer matcher will begin rolling out in October throughout the rest of the year as we get all of you guys moved over to the new matcher. The new communication center, we will be moving towards early 2027, and we will keep you guys posted with all updates on that. And with that, Q&A. Thank you guys all for the time and love to tackle some of your guys' questions.

All right, I'm just going to start at the top here and go down here. So, will Carly be able to schedule service appointments in CDK Service?

All of the schedulers, we're starting with, with Techion Update Promise and xTime, and we'll be— we're working furiously on MyKarma. We're planning on doing Techion or on Doing CDK next. We just went through their Fortella switchover, and so we didn't want to start with that, but we will tackle that. Other ones that are Reynolds, TCC, Autoloop, we started with the ones we did because they're the easiest to work with and they're the easiest to integrate with. We will tackle all of these this next year. Candidly, I don't know what order Reynolds will be in. Just because that's always a different cat. But if they do not have an integration, Carly will collect the preference and through your workflow, you can, you can manage that. Good or bad solution, but, but that's, that's our rollout plan.

Yeah, and one thing also, one more thing too, you know, I mentioned the integrations hub a couple of times. So the integrations hub is going to be the one-stop shop where you guys will be able to see and manage all these things. So as Scott mentioned, all of these new schedulers that we're gonna be integrating with, you know, as they come live, they will all be available in the Integrations Hub so that not only will it make it easier for our customer success team to better support you guys, but it will give you guys the tools to investigate some of the things. For instance, like I showed in the Carly Assist calls details page, you know, it's nice to be able to see what Carly said and how long it took and then what the customer said and how long that took. But it's equally as nice to be able to see that we sent a request to X-Time looking for a specific date and time, and they gave us these time slots, and the agent chose this. And you guys will have full transparency into all that.

I believe this question was when you were talking about reporting and you mentioned the new SMS report. Will agents be able to— will you be able to filter messages Sent by agents, and will agents have that visibility?

In the new SMS report, you could absolutely— you can definitely filter by agents. As far as can agents have that ability in the new Communication Center, so there are in the existing Communication Center, right, there are a couple results reporting that are available today. In the new Communication Center, there will be a handful of additional agent-facing reports that they will be able to see, including what you are asking for. And that is already part of the Communication Center rollout. And we're very excited to bring that to you guys. There will definitely be more than 2 results reports, and this is one of them. Great question.

For the ROI reporting, are you— and appointments that you schedule, are you able to categorize calls as sales or service? Do you have all reporting for sales too, or only service?

It's another great question. So of course, at the campaign level, you'll be able to categorize them by the campaigns in which they are. But what's really neat with Pulse, we will also be able to tell you through the topics if a service call came in on a sales line, for instance. So between the 2 reports, it should be really easy for you guys to see that. And our goal is to make it extremely transparent for you guys to be able to have safe and good numbers on those.

Everything with the new reporting platform is either centered around agents, campaigns, or organizations. They'll all be filterable.

So. Does Opti allow per-category or per-topic consent management?

I assume by that you mean like marketing versus transactional. And yes, Opti will be able to break those down by that, which is probably the biggest change that will be available in both the new Communication Center as well as Opti itself. Great question.

Will we do AI marketing through text? I assume the question, just to restate it, I assume the question is, will Carly do outbound AI texting in addition to the calling once we get there?

It's on our roadmap for next year. I don't want to give the answer on when we think we're gonna have it rolled out, but we're not only gonna do that for marketing. We're gonna do it for things like missed calls and those type of things too. So I don't want to commit to that timeline until we're past this launch, but it is specced out and ticketed out.

Yeah, I guess one thing to add too is with Carly, the first focus with Carly's launch is all based on inbound calling. The second main release, which which will be available in every timeframe, will be the ability to do the outbound AI when coupled with Zopti. The next thing after that will all be focused on messaging, and it could even be as simple as on your hold IVR when a customer calls in and they're holding and they press 1 to save their place in line, etc. They could press 5, let's say, to go into text message mode and go straight to Carly. So we've got a lot of ideas on this. And it will be a big focus of ours in 2027.

Sam didn't mention, you know, as far as the calling, it is on our roadmap after the first of the year to do a Stratus receptionist mode also. And I don't want to commit to a rollout date on that, but we're set up really well to move pretty fast on that once we're happy with her in service.

That's a great point, Scott. Yeah, we've got a You know, really the Carly stuff today was really about showing you guys what's upcoming here in October, November. We've got a really aggressive Carly roadmap as well as all of our pieces, and we believe that we're very well positioned to execute on these things. We're very excited to bring them to you.

We think that Carly is going to be a very strong offering because it's native and we can have the perfect handoff. We do want to reiterate too, as the platform, We'll work with your other providers besides the ones we mentioned on here. A few, a couple of the other ones I don't want to mention because they're not done, in case they don't get done, but they're working on integrations with us. If you have someone else that you love and you want them to be integrated with us, just connect us.

So with Carly and the outbound calls, can we upload a list? And have Carly mow through those?

Well, you can campaign it in the exact same way that you can with your normal campaigns, with the normal gates and marketing exclusions and that type of thing. That being said, they have to have a special consent to do it. So, I guess the quick answer was yes there, but But yeah, these companies that are telling you that they can do it with just an EBR, established business relationship, are going to get some dealers creating big glasses. So.

But I think just one thing to add to that. I mean, the answer to that is definitely yes, with Scott's caveat that you guys will have to have the special consent, which Opti will let you guys get. With this feature rollout though, in our, in the campaign strategy, we will give you guys the ability to basically say, Every customer, if I have 100 people from this list, every customer that has this consent, I wanna put them into Carly outbound AI bucket and every, and the rest of the, the people put them in the regular BDC bucket. So it could be 4 people going in the outbound AI bucket and the 96 going in the other bucket, but we will make that easy for you guys. Yeah.

The, the other thing, and, and really, I don't wanna do too many more questions on this because I know we've got a ton of them. But We don't actually have a clue how outbound AI campaigning will work. It's not something that I would like as a customer. We're very certain that outbound AI will do good with voicemails, appointment confirmations, CSI, things like that. But as far as the other, I mean, we're building it because our customers want it. We don't, you know, I can't imagine your typical Store, Highline store, having people enjoy the robot for some of these calls that have to be made. I mean, a lot of these calls still are going to need to be made by humans. And so let's move on, Jake.

We've had a couple people ask about the recording here today. This will be posted on YouTube. So no worries there. Check our YouTube page. I mean, I'm not the one handling it, but I take for granted it'll be up there by, you know, end of day tomorrow. And reach out to your rep if you don't see it, reach out to us, but we'll get it on YouTube. But then anyone who joined late or you want to show it to someone else within your business, no problem at all. Okay, um, will there be a charge to call your Opti API for a dealer for other vendor companies?

So, like I said, this will be nearly free as we roll it out for our existing Volley customers. We'll sell it separately. We are going to— we're not going to allow other vendors to just hammer our API. That being said, At least on rollout, we're planning on, on making it available to your other vendors to use as the hub. We do not plan on charging for it. It's just if we start getting hammered through our API through it unmercilessly, we're going to have to look at that. But that's, that's not in our plans. No charge. It's part of your—

And it'll be very seamless. It'll be a very modern process for requesting the data. So, for example, if one of your vendors wants to get data over a time period, or, you know, if you guys give them permission to get historical, whatever it may be, they'll be able to make that request. And then as we process the data, we'll send them a webhook with a file that they can get and download to make it easy for them. So it'll be very streamlined, very modern, very easy.

With Pulse, with all the updates to Pulse, will a manager be able to see which calls they've reviewed, which flags they've reviewed and took action on?

I'm glad that someone asked this. Very excited to announce on our next release, this feature is going out. In fact, we've already even demoed it for some folks in the new Pulse dashboard. You guys will be able to mark these things as reviewed. There's a brand new filter for all reviewed or not reviewed. And because the dashboard sticky, if you want to just always use it as a to-do list, you can just keep it pre-filtered for not reviewed so that as you guys tick these things off your list, your Pulse dashboard will go down to 0. So that you guys can make sure that you guys are always getting through every single call that you want to. So great question, and that will be live here at the end of the month.

You had mentioned keywording for Pulse. Is that for hot alerts, or how does that work?

It can be for hot alerts. You guys can, you guys can use, you guys can certainly set up alert preferences for keywording. Keywording is very simple. You guys can input whatever keywords you guys want us to look for in the transcript when you're looking at the call in the Pulse dashboard. Any of the keywords that are in there will be highlighted, so you guys will be able to quickly scroll through the transcript and see where they were if you guys want to read through it. And then you guys will also be able to filter by the keywords. So lots of great options. That is also launching at the end of the month, and we're very excited to bring that to you guys.

Yeah, um, we, we didn't plan on, on having keywords. You really don't need them. You know, we understand the entire phone call, but we have had a lot of our early users say, hey, we want to put in purple banana and then filter it by this lead source with this, at this campaign or this agent. So we just put it in for added filtering. We listened to you guys and you guys wanted it. So.

All right, we have 4 minutes left and more questions than we're gonna get to in 4 minutes. So let's go a little quick on a few more and then we'll wrap up here. Can you talk about multitasking when it comes to texting when on a call? What is that gonna look like?

Of course. So really, and I'll go back, And this is a proof of concept, so this is not necessarily 100% of what it's gonna look like. But in the new Communication Center, we foresee there being 3 modes for multitasking. So the first is that you'll be able to have kind of saved conversation groups that you want agents to be able to commune with while they're actively working on something else, and they'll be able to click pop them open and send them a quick message if that's all they need to do. From there, they'll be able to take it full screen. It's not depicted in one of these 2 screenshots, but you'll be able to take it side screen, excuse me, so that they'll be able to have kind of a side experience in addition to their actual phone call that's up. And from there, you'll be able to access their customer profile, disposition, check their transaction history, communication history, communication preferences, vehicles, whatever it be. Additionally, if you want to take it full screen and you want to switch between the call screen experience and the message screen experience, you can see here in this example. And so Daniel is up here as a phone call. Like I said earlier, the new call controls button will be movable. You guys will be able to move them wherever they want. And from there, you'll be able to toggle between the different conversations. So if you're dialing out to Daniel in this case, you could switch to Mia and seamlessly you would see Mia's profile, then you could go back to Daniel. And you can even see here in this example, Mia is actually up, but Daniel is on the phone. So you'll be able to have a true multitasking experience, which will mean, of course, you won't need to have multiple tabs open anymore. Though I will say that particular issue will be resolved in the new Communication Center as well, that it was an architectural problem and that will be corrected. In the new Communication Center.

Within the new Communication Center, will that pop-up view of the texts and emails be user-based? Can you give access to some users and not others?

Absolutely. And that's a paradigm that we're—

Let's go with the one question answer here. We got— we want to answer everyone's. Yes.

Sure. Yes. Okay.

With Carli, taking in mind loaner cars, you know, and other policies at the stores, how does Carli handle certain types of appointments and knowing what's going on within the dealership? Sure.

So a couple things here, and I'll try and answer very quickly. So first and foremost, Carli has a brand new interface for inputting your guys' FAQs. You guys will be able to choose exactly what Carly's able to speak on. So for Jake's Toyota, you want him to— you want Carly to be able to speak on loaner cars, and at Scott's Toyota, you don't want him— her to be able to do that. Then if a customer who calls in for Scott's Toyota, she will just tell them that she can't answer that. She can take down their preferences and we'll be able to get an outbound call scheduled for the BDC. Additionally, as far as scheduling the appointments goes, All of the opcodes, you know, differs by the schedulers, but not every opcode necessarily will you guys want Carly to be able to choose to actually schedule for people. So you guys will be able to see all the opcodes and tell us what opcodes you want Carly to be able to schedule. And that will also be true for the agents in the communication center. So if you guys have 900 opcodes available for X time, for instance, maybe you only want your agents or Carly to be able to choose between 30 of them. You guys will be able to set that so that they are bounded by what you guys want them to do. Carly has been programmed very aggressively to not make things up and to only speak on what she can. If she does not know the answer, she's been programmed to take preferences, get that outbound call scheduled, and that will then be helpful through the work plan screen, the missed calls, etc. And that will just happen organically through the new communication center.

We have a heavy bias on Carly not to make your customers mad. So in that instance, we're going to promise a little less. Not that we're going to do less, but we're— that's— we've engineered this to make it the handoff, the key where it needs to be. So go ahead, Jacob.

Okay. Will Carly use the xTime scheduler, or does the agent need to schedule?

Carly will use the XM Scheduler. Agents won't.

Yeah, and in the communication center, we will have that hooked up to the XM Scheduler too. Sorry, Sam.

No, we're gonna say the same thing. So the answer is both. We want it to be a native experience for both Carly as well as the agents.

Is there a demo? How can folks get a preview of how Carly sounds on the phone?

We are not publishing that. As soon as we launch our beta customers, we will have a demo number for Carly. And like Jake said, we're going to take reservations, and the reservations are just interest, nothing else, and we'll hook you up at that time.

Yeah, just one additional thing with Carly. You know, she's been engineered from the start with what we call the supervisor view. So Carly is gonna grade Carly. So, you know, we're gonna have a really great insight into, into how she's, she's doing with the ability to make safe and prompt changes to the actual AI itself. So our goal is to make Carly a really, really nice experience. And we'll definitely have that for you guys when it's available.

Couple more, Jake, and we'll wrap it up.

Yep.

DealerFX on the list for integrations?

Yeah, I mean, DealerFX, Autoloop, TCC are 3 that we need to get to. If we're not integrated at the start and you want to use this, Carla will just collect preferences and we'll make it easy. That might not be a good solution for you. Like I said, we started with the people that were easiest to work with. We intend to do all of them over the next year as our customers demand it. So.

Not a question, but— or not a full question here. Will we be adding scoring back into Pulse? Also, it would be great if we could add notes to Pulse calls and send it to the agent.

Great question. So as far as the first piece of that, we've got a brand new— and we didn't speak about it today, but, you know, on the Pulse roadmap moving forward, we've got some additional dashboards that are going to be coming out where you guys will be able to actually have a hand in the loop of giving us real feedback, including we've got quite a few things on the list for actually scoring and giving you guys flexibility in choosing what you want to be scored on. And what not to be. So that is that is definitely coming. It's it's on our roadmap already. Additionally, we call it agent coaching. That is also on our roadmap. It's on our quarter one roadmap. But we have a whole plan and set in place for giving you guys some really great agent insights so that we can help coach them, giving them tips at the macro level for how they can improve. a few things so that they can drive huge revenue gains for you guys. So we've got a lot of great things on the roadmap. And like I said earlier, Pulse is going to be a continued investment just as everything else. And we're going to be very aggressive at delivering a very, very well-rounded product for you guys.

All right, we're going to get to 2 more questions here. Will there be any additional options for SMS routing within Volley? For example, A single number or 10-digit short code per org that we can send messages from that will route regardless of campaign. The idea is to not have dozens of outbound SMS numbers.

I guess this one's a little bit hard to answer just without knowing the use case, but I'm gonna say yes. Yeah, let's—

Sam, this one is— I can think of 10 answers here. Whoever asked this one, email your rep and Sam will We'll give you a—

oh, Scott, you know him personally. I'll, I'll, I'll just text you who it was.

Okay, go ahead. Then go ahead, Jake. Last question.

Yeah, last question here. How does Carly handle other languages?

That's a great question. So, so Carly is launching with just English, but on our roadmap will be to support additional languages. Our transcription engine, and as well as the live transcription that we're using to support Carly, Does support other languages. So this will be a follower for us after launch. So English to start, but we absolutely intend to make it available for Spanish, French, etc.

Sounds great, everyone. Well, thank you all for joining. Scott, why don't you close us out here?

Yeah, not much more to say. It's been a great session and We'll do these a little more frequently. We've not done one for about 15 months. Um, we were doing a lot of backendy type things, um, that isn't as fun to talk about, but, um, I guess that's it. Every one of us will answer our phone if you guys have any questions. Uh, just reach out to us and thank you guys. Have a good day.

Thank you. Thank you everyone for joining. We really, really appreciate this. For any of you who missed it, this recording will be on YouTube. And, uh, so reach out to us if you have any questions and have a fantastic day.