8:55 am, June 3, 2025
The days of car dealers spending hours on the phone to customers could be over thanks to cutting edge new AI technology.
That is according to leading expert Arran Duffy, whose business AI Retain is working with the motor trade to create bespoke packages for dealers of all sizes.
The firm uses AI to make calls to dealers’ customers, freeing up retailers to do what they do best – sell cars.
The clever software is able to engage with customers over the phone in order to book in services and MOTs and gather customer satisfaction feedback.
It is also able to generate sales leads over the phone, without the need of any human involvement.
However, when a more personal touch is needed, the platform works alongside sister company –Infiniti Auto Marketing – which has been operating a more traditional call centre for the motor trade for the past 15 years.
Duffy appeared as a guest on a recent episode of the Car Dealer Podcast, where he explained the ethos of his ultra-modern company.
He said: ‘We brand ourselves as an extension to our client’s business. When a client comes to us, they have their own unique issue, it should be safe.
‘We offer customer satisfaction survey calls, we offer sales lead generation calls, service and MOT follow-up calls, and obviously we book the appointments in.
‘Where we’re at at this moment in time is that our agents are cross-trained across all of the CRM and DMS systems across the UK dealer group.
‘We basically would log in to our client’s network via a secure system – VPN, things like that – to contact their customers. Not only do we contact their customers, but we make the appointment, we book the loan cars, we do a follow-up call.
‘We brand ourselves as a natural extension to their business and that is where our business is – we work at the core of the motor industry.’
Explaining how the AI side of the business evolved, Duffy told hosts James Baggott and Jon Reay that the initial idea was just to use artificial intelligence to provide customers with a reminder about appointments.
But as the technology developed, the company grew into something far bigger, to the point it is now able to contact a whopping 600 customers a day.
‘When we started out with the AI, the original plan was to just do a reminder call so that off the back of a booking, we would then contact the customer to make sure they were aware of their appointment,’ Duffy explained.
‘From that, we realised how very clever this technology is, and today we’re sitting on a system that can not only contact the customer, it can make the booking, it can make the date in the diary and the time in the diary, it can send an e-mail, it can inform the customer of how much it is going to be in terms of price and what’s involved in the service and the lengths and things like that.
‘We have grown this very, very quickly over the course of 12 months.’
He added: ‘Every day we’re improving the system and we’re going to continue to do that because across the world AI is evolving.
‘It’s been around for a little while now, but it’s still relatively new. We can contact 600 customers an hour – you can’t do that with a natural human being.
‘It gives the ability to not only contact the customers, but at a really good time for dealers so that these customers are not falling into the lapsed pot.
‘We have a range of different services, from customer satisfaction calls via AI, service and MOT calls via AI, sales lead generations where we can not only contact the customer, but we can then put them through to a human, if they prefer to book a test drive, or they want to know a little bit more about the car.
‘It’s very clever.’
The Car Dealer Podcast, sponsored by Carwow, sees an industry guest join our hosts to discuss the motor trade’s biggest headlines of every week.
You can listen to all episodes on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
