#26 - Chatbots And Why We Need Them

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Independent Dealer Podcast. Today we are going to talk all about Chatbots. Kind of a fun little buzzword that's going on right now. We have got Rob Macbeth with the Alchemical Bot out of Mexico City. Rob, say hi. Tell us just a couple minutes about yourself and what you do.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. It's a great pleasure to be on the show with you guys. As of about three years ago, when I first found out about Chatbots, I got super interested and super excited because as much as I got my start in social media marketing for clients, I'm very much a little bit on the antisocial side. So the ability to sit behind a chatbot, crank out conversations and watch people interact with the whole thought processes that I want them to go through to reach a transaction with one of my clients, that was like the best thing ever. So I actually got into the chat box. Since then, my agency works exclusively with ManyChat. We consider it to be the best one. We tried out a couple of the other ones, but that is the most comfortable and user friendly intuitive platform that we found. So, yeah, that's what we do. We've spent a good number of years in it. We watched it grow, we figured out how to keep everything cutting edge and that's where our passion lies.

Awesome. Great.

I'll tell you this, we're going to.

Talk everything about Chatbots and how it's going to free up our time, how it's going to drive more leads, the different applications that we can do, and we're also going to talk a little bit about how to get started today. Welcome to the Independent Dealer Podcast, the podcast for auto dealers to learn and grow together. Here are your hosts, Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson. All right, so here we are with Rob McBeth of Alchemical Bot. Now, Rob, this is something I've really wanted to get on the podcast. I got into Chatbots maybe a year ago. I kind of built my own for the dealership and I run an ad through it to try to create kind of an automated sales process. And that's the whole idea, right? With these Chatbots. Maybe you could summarize for us, what are they? Why do we use them? How is it going to make our life as a dealer easier?

Of course, basically the whole concept around Chatbots is, like you said, to automate the process. More to the point, with car dealerships, which is something that we've gotten into recently as a company, is pre qualifying a lot of the leads that come through, freeing up the Time of the car salesmen and women to take care of the hot leads. And that way we're able to handle giving people the information they're asking for, being able to answer questions about bringing their car in for a checkup for service, getting information about replacement pieces, finding out what cars are in the catalog, what inventory you have, be it new cars or used cars. All that kind of information, which doesn't necessarily end in a transaction, can be taken care of by a chatbot. So that means that by the time leads arrive at your dealership, they are ready for the transaction and they are prepped and primed.

Aha. So basically it is a programmed semi intelligent sequence that you can put any cold lead into, almost like a receptionist or what we call a bdc, like a business development center. Someone who's kind of fielding all these incoming inquiries and helping divide out who is serious and who needs to get to a salesman and who needs to get to a service writer and who needs this, that, or the other, that kind of it.

Yeah, on a basic level, that's exactly it. Basically, chatbots are not artificial intelligence. They are basically. Well, they're the most primitive form of artificial intelligence in as much as we do pre program sequences in and we do pre design and develop conversations that we encourage people to go through, and we set up deadman switches to where subscription. You know, a subscriber is not wanting to play along with the chatbot anymore. It disconnects and connects him up to a human in the live chat function of the platform. However, these can be built out to the extent where, for example, last summer there was an influencer in China who used his own chatbot to sell 100 mini Coopers in five minutes. So the chatbots can go as far as to handle transactions. You integrate stripe right into your ManyChat account. And you can obviously at the beginning, as people are getting used to it, they'll probably be most comfortable covering expenses like a replacement piece or something, maybe a checkup fee. And then as the world progresses together with chatbots as business tools, like you mentioned, we will get to the point where people are full out buying much, much bigger things, potentially even cars from your dealerships through a chatbot.

It does. Well, it does make sense, and it doesn't. It's. It blows my mind really. But so, you know, so one day I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna have to pay a chat bot a flat big on a car to sell it, right? I mean, really? Yeah, I don't think they do.

They get a Commission plan. That's nice.

Yeah. Are they. Are they based. Are they paid on gross or flats? I'm not sure, but I guess, I mean, my first question to Rob is, how long does it take to set this thing up? To me, that seems like, you know, the series of questions that. Yeah, can we leave a lead a customer down a typical rabbit hole? Yes, we can do that. But how long does. Rob, do you see a normal process of setting up this bot take for a dealership? What all is involved?

Right. Well, basically, I'm glad you bring this up. The structure that we were giving dealerships, car dealerships, is to have a help desk module, which is basically all the information about how to contact them, how to contact the dealership, and getting information like, what are the hours that you're open, the business hours? Do you accept this kind of service or do you offer all the general basic FAQs? That is actually pretty simple. And it can be done in as little as eight hours. Have it set up with all the information that's involved. The modules and the flows are a little bit more complicated, are the ones that are basically about your inventory. And it's a bit of a headache in as far as the inventory goes, because when you set up a flow. In fact, here, let me pull one up that we've got for an Escape for a Ford Escape. You can see my screen.

That's what I was thinking. It might be easier for a franchise store to set one of these up because they have the same inventory all the time for independence. What are you seeing? How, you know, how do you go through all the inventory or do you not go through all the inventory? I guess is the question.

Yeah, it's a good question. Normally, are there five questions that everybody asks about used cars?

Down payment, how much mileage, color. I mean, is that what we're talking about?

No, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Because what you can do is you can set up a flow per car. And if you have information that is always consistent, like, for example, down payments, if you have any sort of credit programs, anything that is stable from one car to the next, you can just duplicate that. There's no issue whatsoever. But what you end up doing, you'd create a card, for example. I mean, obviously this is a new car. This is the Ford Escape 2019, but you'd be able to develop a, what I call the slide show the cards, and you put up a picture of the car, you add the title. You can even add. You can simplify it a lot but you have the title and then underneath you can have all the information. You know, the mileage, the cost, things that are specific to the car. So you can actually set up a car. You can have up to 10 of these in a horizontal slide presentation sort of thing. And you can set up each one of these cars is a car. And below you can add the information and then you can have the call to actions. Below you can say, you know, come and test drive it, come and look at it, ask us for more information about it. So it's not necessarily an issue of is it possible, it's just a matter of how you'd organize the information so that it's comfortable to look into from your Facebook Messenger. And as of this coming year, we're also going to have our chatbots in WhatsApp and Instagram, and as of next year in the iPhone messenger, and at some point in the next 10 years in the Google Android Messenger.

Sound like you got some hound dogs behind you. They're trying to get in the house.

Yeah, neighbors.

That's great.

So, Rob, help me think about this from a general dealer standpoint. Um, there are also options. Like, I don't have to set up a bot for every single car, right? I mean, if I wanted to just dabble in it or dip my toe, I could do one. Like you said, I can do the general FAQs of my dealership. When are we open? How are we open? How do we get ahold of me? What are the directions? Here's a map. Here's this, this, this. One of the bots that I set up is actually just a funny little process that I created. Kind of a quote unquote pre approval bottom. So these people go through a series of steps. They answer the pre. They answer the questions based on the answers that I've given them. You know, they can say, hey, I've been in the area for five years. I've been in the area for 10 years. And every answer gives them a number score. And then those are added up at the end and says, hey, here's your pre approval number and here's your score. We can get you into a car. What car do you want? You know what I'm saying? Like, that's a bot that I can. I set it up once and I've ran that ad for four months and it generates leads every single day and does kind of what you said. It brings the masses that might just have like a question or might just want to know. But if they go through those four steps, they're pretty well like pre qualifying themselves. They're serious about it.

Yeah. And there's also, I mean, obviously the idea of setting up a module for each one of your cars through the flow so that they can check out each car and see how many dents it has and whatever, that's incredibly detailed. But what you're bringing up right now is lead generation. And at the end of the day, lead generation would feed every single business on the planet. So there are a lot of different ways that a chatbot can be used in generating leads for your agency, for your dealership. And what you just mentioned right now is an incredibly useful one because it's, you know, getting pre approved is roughly 8/10 of the internal battle of a client of a lead not wanting to go through the whole process and having to go in and filling out papers and then waiting. And that whole process is a big turn off for clients for leads. So being able to take care of something like that in a chatbot is incredibly useful, very powerful. And like you mentioned, you've got it hooked up to an ad. I mean, that kind of thing is great. And you can utilize the same general method of bringing people in to participate in a flow or two as a part of a qualifying process is a great way of generating leads.

Do you have one that can set appointments? Is that possible?

Yep, that's absolutely possible. It's one of the custom fields. It's a custom field function. So when you utilize ManyChat Pro, for example, which starts at 10 bucks a month, basically two coffees a month, one of the perks that you get is being able to have unlimited custom fields. Now what custom fields are, they are kind of like fill in the blanks so you can determine what that value that field is going to contain. So, for example, here, let me, let me pull up an example here so I can walk through it as well.

Is it essentially a set of either or questions? Is that how it goes about?

Yes, and there's several ways of doing it. So. Okay, so let's go with this one. So, for example, one of the flows that we have is a test drive. Scheduling a test drive. So the first question we ask, and currently we're operating in Mexico at the moment, but we're translating all of this stuff to English this week. The first question we have is what date would you like to schedule your test drive for? So what we have there, that's a free keyboard input from the audience, the person on the other end when we go to edit and set this up again. Okay, so basically the user input is the following. I'm setting the reply type to a time and date. So what happens is when you click on it, there's going to be a button says choose date and time or you can actually change the text on the button. When they click on it, a pop up is going to appear on their screen with a calendar and then one of the rolling time choosers, so you can scroll through the time to choose, you know, 4:30pm on July 18 and then they set that time, it gets saved to a custom field which in this case, in my example, it's set to test drive date and time for the demo and then I can actually set that. When they've completed that successful input, I can set it to either shift to a different question, move on, or even import or I'm sorry, export that information to a Google spreadsheet. So if you use Google spreadsheets as part of your mini CRM client relation manager in your dealership, you're actually able to export all of this information about the leads that you're generating straight into your HubSpot, into your Google spreadsheet, into any of these systems that you have and that information gets carried over.

So does this chatbot know how to ask for someone's phone number and email and this, that and other. If I set it up to do so, correct.

And the cool thing is that what Facebook is actually doing is because we used our own personal emails to set up a Facebook account and then Facebook has spent the last three years harassing us for our phone numbers as well. When you ask somebody for their email or for their phone number, it'll actually offer it to them. So you have a user input and you put in text of what's the best email to reach you at. And then you set up the user input to as a reply type of email. And you don't see it because it would be a breach of privacy for Facebook. But when somebody's going through the the flow on the outside of subscriber a lead, they all get a little image, rather a little line that pops up like a little bubble that pops up at the bottom of their screen offering the email that's registered to their Facebook account. So you can even add to make it even more native, you can say what's the best email to reach you at? If it's a one below, just tap on it. If it's not, feel free to enter it below. And the same thing can happen with your cell phone.

And I've seen certain situations where you can take these bots and actually integrate them with other products like you say it can be exported to Google Sheets. It can also I think integrate with like a calendly if you use that. I don't know about any of our specific dealer management tools actually, you know, trying to link to the physical calendar that you're using inside your CRM or things like that, but takes another level of sophistication. But what are some other applications you've seen for bringing in leads? You know, obviously we have the hey, get pre approved with an automated system or here's the information about my dealership. What other ones have you seen have worked well for dealers that they can throw this thing out there and it just automates the process for them.

Right. The easy ones for me to think of right now is having a quiz. People love taking quizzes. So for example, you can set up a flow that says what car are you? And what car matches your personality or any of these pop quizzes that have been on Facebook since forever and buzzfeed had them and cracked and whatever. And then based on the answers, you can actually recommend a car that's in your inventory at that moment.

Wow.

One car of each type. So you can have a pickup and you can have an SUV and you can have a roadster, you can have a sedan, whatever. And then you can have one for each category. Let's say that they're the ones that you're most eager to move or the most expensive ones. And what you can do there is set it up to where depending on the like, like mentioned before, you can set up a point system. And depending on which numbers get turned out at the end or the answers in general, you can actually point towards one of your cars. And here's actually a neat little trick. There's a website called Pic Snippets that allows you to take a picture that you're uploading and putting custom field information. So for example, let's say that you're selling Sequoia, a Toyota Sequoia, and they go through the test, the quiz, and then it turns out that they're into luxury SUVs. And so you can say to them, hey, you know, I happen to have the Sequoia here and I just put your name on it so that you can come by and pick it up for a test drive. And what happens here is you can connect the name that's recorded inside manychat with Pic Snippets so that when Pic Snippets sends the image over to the chat you can already have written their name on the windshield in a grease pen type font with bright pastel color. And it has a name, you know, car reserved for Jeff. And that's actually a really useful tool to get people going. Whoa, that's really cool. And it looks real, right? Right. I mean, wow, they're really caring about me. They're taking care of me and they're attending me. And even if they don't go for that car, you still stood out in their mind as the best dealership in the area simply because you were attentive, even if it was completely automated, and it is. You were completely attentive to their needs, and you even sent them a picture of the car that you recommend them.

Yeah, that's very interesting. I like the concept of getting, you know, getting people to interact with a. With a quiz or, you know, little game and then being that specific on. On your personalization of it. That's incredible. I mean, I wouldn't even. I don't even think that far in advance.

Yeah, that's the fun thing about this that I've seen some of these guys build is the gamification. You can really create fun little games inside of Facebook messenger that these people can get, you know, into. I've seen ones that are like little mini casino machines. Like little mini, you know, and they hit. They take little bets, and then the bet returns these little emojis and that gets. Gives them more money and they can come back later, and then they can spend it at your dealership or your restaurant. And I mean, those. It's just. It's crazy. The kind of fun little things that can just draw people in. I've seen ones where people will offer free PDFs, you know, hey, here's the top five things you need to know before you buy.

Yeah, I've seen.

Yeah, yeah. That you offer to them and then you follow up with that 24 hours later. Hey, how did you like the video? How'd you like the PDF? Did you learn anything? Great. What's, you know, doing now? Here's another video I made. You know, and so it's just all automated.

Hey, I got. I got one question for Rob. You know, we're. We're talking Facebook specific here. Does. But can we install on these bots on our website or no?

Yep. In fact, basically what we use as portal to get people into the chatbot. I mean, here's the thing. This isn't. These chatbots aren't Facebook chatbots. They're just softwares that utilize the API Keys to perform through the Facebook Messenger. So one of the things that we use, we use growth tools in order to get people into our door and into our chatbot. And there are a number of them developed for websites. In fact, you'll recognize the overlay widget, you know, the bar, the, the page takeover slide in that sneaks in from the side of the website. But more to the point, the one that's really interesting I want to talk about right now is the customer chat. So you can actually get a little Facebook messenger icon bubble to float on the bottom corner of your website. And this, when they click on it, it'll take them straight into a conversation. And you can build as many of these as you want. And you, when you're setting them up, you actually put in the URL with the extension the path to tell it which pages to appear on or which pages to not appear on. So you can actually personalize what conversation is started from this by clicking on this bubble based on the page that they're on. So for example, if they're on a page of your dealership where you're talking about getting pre approved, it can be a conversation that starts immediately with the little flow of, yeah, answer these four questions. Again, pre approved. But when they go to a page that's talking about any maintenance service, you know, mechanic services going on, or about a car or anything else, you can actually change the conversation that's triggered when they click on that button. So you can have a little floating icon that people can use as a customer chat support.

This is so interesting. I think that you know, the two main places I think people dealers need this on your website is, is on your service page, of course, and on your finance app page. I think this would be huge for anybody to have.

Yeah.

And Rob, right now, any of these widgets or plugins, right, they do take you into the messenger platform, right? So that person has to have a Facebook messenger or can they chat outside of Facebook Messenger?

At the moment, it's only in the Messenger. It's going to be interesting to see what happens over the next two or three years as we go adding more platforms, more channels of communication to chatbots. But at the moment, in fact, if you're not logged in to Facebook, let's say that you're on your laptop and you're not logged into Facebook anywhere, but you do have a Facebook account. When you click on that button, it'll actually prompt you to open up, you know, log into your Facebook in order to chat. So it is a small, minor Drawback in as much as it's a tiny little hurdle that people have to sometimes climb over. But for the most part, as our buyers market becomes younger and younger and gets flooded with the millennials and the centennials coming up behind us, it won't be that much of an issue because everybody has a Facebook account at this point.

Yeah, I would think that typically most people are logged into their Facebook account anyway.

Yeah. And the younger people, this very soon, like you mentioned earlier, this is gonna be integrated across Instagram chat as well. So there's young millennials that only have Instagram pretty soon. I mean, don't think that if you invest in these bots and build them out that as the generations get old and Facebook becomes less popular, it's gonna be in your WhatsApp pretty soon it's gonna be in your Instagram. So we're still gonna be able to use these.

Not only that, I mean, it's. Apple is releasing the API to their messaging software, the iMessage next year in 2021. By 2021, and the Android situation is that every single Android company has their own SMS platform. So what Google is actually trying to do right now is unify everybody's SMS on Android under one. So as soon as they've done that, they'll also be releasing the API. Because for them on their end, it means a lot of money to be able to get people onto their platforms and using them. That's one of the reasons why Facebook bought WhatsApp about two or three years ago. Simply because the more time you spend on a platform, the more money they stand to make because you are basically transacting through their platforms. So eventually it's not even going to be an issue of oh, do you have social media? It's no. Do you have a cell phone? You have a burner phone with a texting SMS platform.

There's so much more to come from this technology. It's just amazing. We're going to probably have to have this conversation every six months or so to stay up to date with it, I would think right now.

Rob, tell us before we leave, give us an idea. How can the average dealer get started in this? Where do we go? Do we, do we download manychat and start playing around with it ourselves? Do we find a bot builder that already has some pre built bots that they can just sell to us or license to us? You know, what's the basic process for a guy like, I mean, it was confusing. I built my own, I built a couple. And the first Few weren't that great and the one I have now isn't that great. Comparatively speaking, it gets the job done. But if I don't have four or five or eight hours to build one, where do I go to? Just say I want to turn one on tomorrow. I want to get one on my Facebook page tomorrow that has all my basic answers. Where do I go?

Okay. Okay. So as a chatbot agency owner, I would love to answer this question, and I will. So there are a couple of options here. Let's say that if you are, as a dealership owner, you're not quite sure about this, you want to try it out, you what I would recommend you do is you go to manychat, you open up an account over here, you can actually see in my over here on the left, down here there's a button called Templates. So when you click on it, you can actually go over and download a template for. What is this? Yeah, the Automotive General template. You can get a free version or you can get a pro version. You spring the 10 bucks to a pro version, you can get it installed now. Now, this template is one that you can have going and it's free. This template is free. It's ready to go out of the box. It's extremely limited and it was built a year ago, which means that it's a year outdated. But it'll get the ball rolling for you. So if you're checking it out, you go log into manychat, you get an account going with your Facebook account. In fact, you need a Facebook account in order to do it and you also need a Facebook page. So you connect it up to your Facebook page and you can just go and grab the templates and grab the automotive one, get it going and you plug it in and it's all set to go. It won't do too much, it's not going to be amazing, it's not going to be spectacular, but it'll get the job done. If you want to test it and you're not really willing to spend too much money while you get convinced, another one of the options is that on the Manychat website there's actually a 10 hour course which is also for free. It's about two years old, so that one's also outdated, but it gives you enough information to actually get going, get a good understanding and good feel for how it works. So that's the option, the two Kickstart options I would recommend anybody who is getting started, who doesn't want to invest in hiring a bot Builder, because bot builders can actually come out to a couple thousand dollars a month. One thing that we're doing in our agency is instead of building specific bots and charging a bunch, what we'll do is we'll set up a template and then license that out to our clients, which is a cheaper option. But those are the three different ways of handling this. You can either get it for free or for 10 bucks. When you pay the pro account, you can go ahead and hire somebody who's building them for other dealerships, in which case you will definitely get an updated, much more powerful account coin. And the third one is you can go ahead and learn how to do it yourself and over time, go building a chatbot that at the end of the day, it might not be too easy, it might get a bit overwhelming, but at the end of day, it's yours 100% and you know the ins and outs of it by the end of it.

Well, that's. Rob, that's awesome, man. I think a lot of people are going to see the need of this and get on it. So I appreciate, appreciate you going into detail with us today.

Yeah, Rob, appreciate your time. And real quick, if people want to get more information from you, they want to maybe explore some of the bots you have as templates that they can license. How do they get ahold of you?

We're actually going to be dropping you a link that you can put out in your page and stuff together with this video. The other option is just look us up on Facebook. Alchemical bot, just like written up here. A L C H E M I C A L Space bot. Just opt in straight there, send us a message and you can either. Right now we're translating a lot, so our menu is in English and Spanish. But by the end of this week, you'll be able to even try out the demo for the automotive template, the car dealership template. But yeah, I mean, we're reachable there and we live in chatbots. So if you at any point you say you type in the word human or you say you type in the word question, and it'll actually just kill the chatbot function and connect you straight to any of us.

Awesome, Rob, thank you so much. We appreciate your time. I mean, wealth of knowledge, it's so much. We're definitely gonna have to have a follow up and do like, maybe a small tutorial on how to get started with your first bot. I mean, I think that'd be so awesome for everybody. So thank you again.

My pleasure. Thanks, Rob.

Sa.