Meet The Secret Agent Running This Dealer's Operations

In this episode of the Car Dealership Guy Industry Spotlight, host Sam D'Arc talks with John Keohane, VP of Operations and Partner at Temecula Valley Buick GMC, and Liam Golightley, SVP of Customer Success at Podium, about how AI operator agents are giving dealership leaders a way to run their entire operation without being in every conversation themselves. John built his own agent on Podium, which he nicknamed Emily, to mine telematics data, run weekly revival campaigns on stale leads, coach his sales team, and flag problems in his service department before he'd ever find them in a report.

For a single-point dealer competing against much larger groups, John says the technology has become a genuine equalizer. Emily replaced his old bulk-texting tool, helped him uncover a customer-pay revenue drop in six seconds instead of weeks, and has helped push his service department's customer-pay repair orders up 12 to 13 percent this year.

Key takeaways

• John's AI agent, Emily, runs a weekly revival campaign that reviews his last 45 days of sales opportunities and warmly re-engages leads that haven't closed with a new incentive or trade offer.

• When John's customer-pay repair orders unexpectedly dropped, his operator agent identified the cause, a departing fleet account, in six seconds, instead of days of manual digging.

• Since putting operator to work on outbound service marketing, John's dealership has seen customer-pay repair orders climb 12 to 13 percent this year.