Outsell announced two major updates to its Virtual Customer Engagement platform. The new features are Sales Defector Detection and Dealer Assignment Rules.

The new AI-driven Sales Defector Detection content offers another way for dealerships to recapture revenue. This feature targets prior customers who’ve likely defected and bought elsewhere.

“Dealers should not give up on trying to engage defectors. They bought from the dealer once and can easily buy there again when the time is right if the connection to the dealer is strengthened,” said Valerie Vallancourt, vice president of marketing at Outsell. “Outsell’s AI brain gives dealerships a way to keep connected to the customer long-term and regain their business in the future.”

Outsell regularly augments the VINs of a dealership’s sales and service customers with change of ownership. When a change of ownership is detected, and there wasn’t a purchase from your dealership around that same time, it’s likely that they purchased a vehicle elsewhere to replace that vehicle. Outsell AI does not delete these customers, rather it changes the message to become more relevant and maintain the dealers’ connection. When Outsell AI determines that these likely defectors are back in market, automated content from Outsell tries to win them back for the dealership. Pilot data suggests that this strategy drives incremental sales.

Dealer Assignment Rules enable groups to coordinate and streamline messages among multiple stores. These rules grow revenues, increase message relevance and can save dealers money by removing conflicting and duplicate messages from the customer journey. The feature creates a Global Customer ID for customers that exist in multiple databases to provide a single view across all stores. It also matches and merges customer behavior and activity records that are part of the same household.