Share It!
Online virtual assistants are the next big thing that will help dealers connect with consumers and deliver a great service experience, according to Digital Air Strike, a social media marketing and reputation management company.
“Last year we talked about artificial intelligence,” said Alexi Venneri, Co-founder and CEO, Digital Air Strike, at the NADA Show in San Francisco. “We’ve been able to really grow and expand on that. People initially thought it was chat and chatbots, but now it’s really about online virtual assistants that are able to help dealers transact and provide an excellent consumer experience.”
The company is often thought of as a social media technology business, but Venneri said they do much more than that. Monitoring reviews and social networks are just part of the consumer journey in terms of how they engage with a dealership.
“We’ve also been able to map out the whole consumer journey and add pieces to that, where we can influence consumer behavior — first of all, to get them better information in a timely fashion, but also to drive them to our dealers and give them an unfair online advantage.”
Digital Air Strike recently acquired a company called Target Media Partners Interactive (TMPi), which is an ad tech lead generation business. As a result, they are able to help manage dealer inventory in a more automated way and provide more targeted advertising.
“It’s really almost omnichannel. We are able to put it (the inventory) across tons of automotive networks to drive leads, and you can integrate it into Facebook,” said Venneri. “We’re also now a partner with Facebook, which is a new category that just came up within the last couple months. We can do so many more things, which including (Facebook) Marketplace.”
