Cars24 Turns Test Drive Chatter Into a 35% Sales Lift

A test drive at Cars24 lasts about an hour. Buyers raise loan worries, point out problems with the car and ask questions the salesperson may not answer well. Much of it used to go unnoticed.

The Indian used-car retailer now records those conversations and uses voice AI from ElevenLabs to turn them into sales data. Cars24 has analyzed more than 22,000 hours of audio across more than 300 retail hubs, according to a case study ElevenLabs published in December. Sales conversions rose 35%, customer satisfaction improved 20% and hub operating costs fell 10%, the case study said.

Test Drives Become Sales Data

Cars24 runs thousands of test drives a week. Problems with the car, loan objections and missed steps in the sales process often went undetected, ElevenLabs said. That made the buying experience uneven from hub to hub.

The setup is simple. Tablets with open microphones record each conversation. ElevenLabs software turns the speech into text and separates who said what. A large language model then tags each conversation by customer, salesperson, car and hub.

Managers now see what used to stay in the car. The system flags mechanical problems buyers notice mid-drive, sorts the reasons they hesitate and catches steps salespeople skip. Managers can compare patterns by car model, region or hub.

Each sale carries weight. About 70% of Cars24 buyers are purchasing their first car, ElevenLabs said. The conversations also shift with the car and the local language.

Many of those sales are decided later, on the phone. Cars24 employs more than 1,300 contact center agents, and nearly half of its sales involve an assisted call, the case study said. The retailer is handing part of that work to AI voice agents. Its goal is for AI to handle 30% of all calls, ElevenLabs said.

Those agents have handled more than 3 million minutes of customer calls. Calling costs fell 50%, according to the case study. The agents answer buying questions and respond to objections, then move buyers to the next step. Cars24 chose which calls to automate first and which to keep with people, ElevenLabs said.

Other retailers are putting voice agents on the phone too. Home Depot’s agents understood why a customer was calling within 10 seconds and got callers to a solution four times faster than a phone menu, PYMNTS reported. The home improvement retailer piloted the system in 50 stores and said in April it planned to expand it to all U.S. stores over the coming year.

Retailers Look Past Cost Cutting

Cars24’s numbers point at revenue as well as savings. The conversation data shows where a sale stalls, whether over financing, a defect in the car or a salesperson’s pitch.

Japanese appliance chain Yamada Denki found a similar opening. Its voice agent asks shoppers follow-up questions the way a store associate would, PYMNTS reported. About 30,000 people used it during a two-week online campaign, and 92% of survey responses afterward were positive. Shoppers spoke candidly about budgets and doubts without feeling sales pressure. “Customers do not want a chatbot. They want intelligence,” Akira Fukabori, CEO of avatarin, the company that built the agent, said.

Shoppers are warming to AI in the buying process. Among consumers, 45% would be comfortable letting an AI agent complete a purchase for them, PYMNTS Intelligence found in “Agents of Change: How Agentic AI Is Redefining Commerce,” a collaboration with Worldpay. That share rises to 54% among Gen Z. Of retailers surveyed, 43% are piloting AI shopping agents that can act on their own, and 81% trust AI to operate autonomously once guardrails are in place, the report found.

Next, Cars24 plans to extend voice AI into car inspections, financing and service after the sale, according to ElevenLabs.

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