Numa, an auto retail software company, today (Sept. 22) unveiled Operator, a tool that directs inbound calls to the correct dealership department with 95% accuracy, according to the company’s official release.
Behind the idea: The phone, as Co-founder and CEO Tasso Roumeliotis described to CDG News, is “the front door of the dealership.” Even so, he said call technology has only “added friction in the form of menus, transfers, voicemail, and callbacks.”
Roumeliotis said this is because most AI offerings currently focus on making sure calls don’t go unanswered.
And that those same systems usually fail to improve the routing experience.
“The AI surge went after answering, but nobody went after routing, because routing is the hard part,” he said, given that it “requires knowing who the customer is, what they need, and who should own that moment.”
What to expect: The tool, which runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, prioritizes one outcome: getting every caller “to a human, quickly, with context.”
To make this happen, Operator “questions and queries” each caller.
From there, it routes the caller to the right person within the dealership.
Whoever ends up taking the call gets that context (who's calling, what vehicle they're asking about, and why) before they even pick up.
This, Roumeliotis said, also prevents customers from having to repeat themselves.
As for the tech stack: Operator can run on whichever system the dealership has in place. Roumeliotis used CDK, Tekion, Reynolds and Reynolds, Dealertrack, and Xtime as examples.
“With 90% of the DMS market covered, there is no rip and replace,” he said. “That extends to the phones, because dealers keep their number and their phone system.”
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For current Numa users: The tool plugs into the existing system and already knows the customer base, since it can draw on what Numa has on the shop's customers.
Either way, dealerships can use Numa’s Operator tool without having any prior Numa integrations.
“We built it so the first experience a dealership has with Numa can be the phones, with the rest of the operating system ready when they are,” Roumeliotis said.
Looking ahead: Roumeliotis shared three beliefs shaping where Numa goes next.
First, the last era of AI and software focused on systems built to flag problems. The current era, however, involves software meant to run operations.
Second, AI’s job (in this case) is to get customers to the right person "with full context, faster than anything you could staff."
And third, Roumeliotis predicts that within a year, callers will expect to reach the right person on the first try, with little patience for dealerships that make it difficult.
“Every dealership once had a person who knew the store: who fixed what, who sold what, who to grab when a customer was upset,” per the official Numa release. “The phone tree replaced that person and never replaced the job.”
For those at Digital Dealer: Numa will demonstrate Operator and Precision Routing live at the Digital Dealer Conference & Expo. Attendees can visit the Numa team at booth #503.
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