CARSOME

CARSOME is Southeast Asia's largest integrated car e-commerce platform, simplifying selling and buying high-quality used cars across online retail, in-person showrooms, and value-added services like financing, insurance, and after-sales support. The journey a customer takes from initial interest to final sale involves numerous steps and touchpoints — far 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 process also involves "off-line" touchpoints — 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, with some replies handled manually and others automated, making the process unorganized and difficult to manage. CARSOME relied mostly on traditional SMS messages, which did not convert very well.

CARSOME trialed WhatsApp for automating customer communications such as notifications and marketing messages — and 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.

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, and 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. 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.”

Fei Song, Vice President of Products, CARSOME

“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.”

Fei Song, Vice President of Products, CARSOME

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. Using Bird's Inbox, CARSOME tracks response times to customer inquiries, helping them shorten latency and pick up leads faster, and greatly increasing the likelihood of converting inquiries into sales.

CARSOME also gained greater visibility into how effective their communications are — tracking which messages hit the mark and which do not, and continually refining their strategy. As a result, customers are engaging more meaningfully with the brand and reporting higher satisfaction. Bird's Flows has been especially valuable in a multicultural society like Malaysia: the ability to duplicate and reuse flows lets CARSOME tailor communications for specific events and customer segments at scale.

Looking ahead, CARSOME wants to explore more of Flows' functionality to capture 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, when a lead's status changes in their CRM, Bird could send an automated message tailored to that phase of the customer journey, reducing the workload of their small customer service team and accelerating lead management.

“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.”

Fei Song, Vice President of Products, CARSOME