CARSOME, Southeast Asia's largest integrated car e-commerce platform, simplifies selling and buying high-quality used cars. They offer a complete experience, encompassing online retail, in-person showrooms, and value-added services like financing, insurance, and after-sales support.

However, buying used cars involves more than just browsing through online listings. At CARSOME, only cars that have gone through and passed a stringent 175-point inspection will be sent to their CARSOME Certified Lab for another round of inspection for no major accidents, flood and fire damage or mileage tampering. 

CARSOME prioritizes giving customers an enjoyable car buying experience  and engages extensively with every customer across various channels. This includes discussing car details and pricing, scheduling test drives, and customer support. They do this by leveraging technology, AI, data, and enhanced customer engagement strategies.

"Our core mission is to provide a hassle-free car transaction experience," says Fei Song, Vice President of Products at CARSOME. "We strive to offer the best price and superior quality compared to traditional used-car sellers, whether our customers are buying or selling."

The problem: Navigating a complex customer journey

The journey a CARSOME customer takes from initial interest to final sale involves numerous steps and touchpoints, making it more complex than the typical e-commerce click-to-buy model. At each stage, communication between agents and end-users plays a pivotal role in driving the sales cycle forward. The sales process also involves “off-line” touchpoints — for example, test drives and in-person visits to the garage — that are essential but challenging to integrate into digital communication flows.

All these communications were siloed from each other, and CARSOME handled some replies manually while others were automated, making the process unorganized and difficult to manage. Plus, they relied mostly on traditional SMS messages, which did not convert very well. 

CARSOME also trialed WhatsApp as a potential option for automating customer communications, such as notifications and marketing messages. It helped that many in their customer base already preferred using WhatsApp to keep in touch with businesses. Still, different customers preferred different channels, so CARSOME needed a way to consolidate all of their communication channels into one platform.

The solution: Staying in constant touch with customers

After evaluating several vendors, Bird emerged as the most powerful solution for CARSOME. It supported WhatsApp, crucially, with the potential to handle a diverse range of future communication channels. Bird also offered ways to automate CARSOME’s communications, transforming their manual, disjointed processes into a streamlined, customer-friendly journey with centralized visibility.

“Our goal was to consolidate communications into a single, integrated platform that offered flexibility, and met customers' preferences,” said Fei Song. “Our partnership with Bird was a strategic move to leverage WhatsApp more effectively, aiming to enhance customer engagement and explore more of Bird’s capabilities in the future.”

Integrating Bird into CARSOME’s operations has overhauled how they communicate with their customers. The main difference is that CARSOME is now in constant communication with users throughout their complex customer journeys.

Automated updates

CARSOME can now easily send automated updates to customers via WhatsApp about the status of their bookings, upcoming events, or changes to their service requests. These straightforward flows keep customers in the loop and relieve staff from having to manually send and track messages. 

Bird has also helped CARSOME send out one-way communications, like one-time-password messages and appointment reminders. 

Personalized messages

CARSOME can send highly targeted messages via WhatsApp that resonate well with specific customer needs and preferences. For example, when there’s a price drop, CARSOME can send personalized messages to customers who showed previous interest in that car.

Whether it's informing customers about new deals, promotions, or events tailored to their interests, Bird helps ensure that every CARSOME message is relevant and engaging.

Self-service chats

With Flows, CARSOME revamped its self-service chat options. Customers can now easily navigate through various services and find the information they need by choosing from automated chat responses.

When customers do need to escalate an issue or speak to someone, Bird seamlessly connects them to the right person, maintaining a smooth and efficient communication flow.

“Flowbuilder has proven a powerful tool to capture customer engagement and to create the right path for customers to use self-service and take work off the agents,” said Fei Song.

The result: Happier customers and more sales

CARSOME set out to boost sales with Bird, and that’s exactly what happened. More than 10% of orders are converted during the pre-screen process through WhatsApp. Once a customer engages with the customer service team via WhatsApp, they’re more likely to place an order directly now. 

Faster lead response times

Using Bird’s Inbox, CARSOME tracks response times to customer inquiries. These insights help them shorten latency and pick up leads faster. By minimizing the time it takes to respond to a lead, CARSOME ensures that potential customers receive timely attention, greatly increasing the likelihood of converting inquiries into sales.

Greater visibility into customer communications

One of the key benefits CARSOME experiences with Bird is enhanced visibility into how effective their communications are. They can now easily track which messages hit the mark and which do not, allowing them to continually refine their communication strategies to keep messaging on target with customer preferences. As a result, their customers are engaging more meaningfully with the brand and reporting higher customer satisfaction rates.

Personalization at scale

Bird’s Flows has provided great value to CARSOME’s team, especially in multicultural societies like Malaysia, where there are many different cultural celebrations. The ability to easily duplicate and reuse communication flows allows CARSOME to swiftly update processes and tailor communications for specific events and customer segments. This adaptability saves time and makes messages far more relevant, further improving engagement and satisfaction.

With Flowbuilder, CARSOME handles every customer journey with precision, from that first inquiry to post-sale follow-up.

What’s next: Advanced automation for even greater efficiency

Looking towards the future, CARSOME wants to explore even more of Flows’ functionality to capture more user activities that could open up new sales opportunities. By integrating Bird more deeply into their systems, they aim to trigger more automated messages. 

For example, if a lead’s status changes in their CRM, Bird could send out an automated message tailored to that phase of the customer journey. By doing so, CARSOME hopes to reduce the workload of its small customer service team and accelerate its lead management process, gaining greater control over the sales funnel.

They also intend to leverage customer engagement data to understand customer preferences and behaviour more closely. 

“Understanding better what messages to send and what kind of customers to approach will allow us to start segmenting users more deeply and send recurring marketing messages to generate more opportunities,” said Fei Song. 

About CARSOME

CARSOME is Southeast Asia’s largest integrated car e-commerce platform. With presence across Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore, we aim to digitalize the region’s used car industry by reshaping and elevating the car buying and selling experience.

CARSOME provides end-to-end solutions to consumers and used car dealers, from car inspection to ownership transfer to financing, promising a service that is trusted, convenient and efficient.

About Bird

Bird’s mission is to create a world where communicating with a business is as easy as talking with a friend. We power communication between businesses and their customers — across any channel, always with the right context, and on every corner of the planet. If you’ve ever ordered takeaway, returned a package, contacted customer service, or requested a login code, it’s almost guaranteed your interactions have been powered by Bird’s technology.

Our platform, our applications and our APIs help businesses streamline conversations through their customers’ preferred channels — like WhatsApp, Email, SMS, Voice, WeChat, Messenger, Instagram - and build powerful and engaging experiences. Bird's out of the box functionality and omnichannel expertise tips the scales for knowledge workers and helps them be productive right away, with tools to build great marketing campaigns, customer service experiences, or automated business processes.

Headquartered in Amsterdam, Bird processes over 5 trillion+ messages, calls, and emails for over 29k+ customers such as; Google, Facebook and Uber across channels like WhatApp, Email, SMS, and many more. Founded in 2011, we have grown to a powerhouse team of 800+ employees who represent more than 55 nationalities, and we’re proud to be a “Remote Friendly” company.