APPLICATIONS AND TOOLS

Feel the Car tool

It provides an immersive online experience to users, including a 360-degree interior and exterior view with the sound of the car and videos explaining its features.

Chatbots and virtual assistants

These tools aim to help dealers and OEMs address consumer queries.

Connecto

It is a device-agnostic tool that helps create user profiles by tracking consumer behaviour in real-time.

Apps for OEMs and dealers

These include apps for managing leads, cloud services for tracking sales performance, call tracker solutions, digital marketing support, and virtual showroom.

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The adoption of AI and ML tools has been a game changer, enabling us to provide a personalised experience to consumers Anurag Jain, COO and Co-founder, CarDekho Group.

“Our AI algorithms have made the buy-sell experience seamless and enabled decision-making by combining the most important transaction events in one place. From one-click price to sell a car to one-click loan disbursal online, the CarDekho group is bringing experience to consumer’s fingertips. Our collaborative platform connected with banks, insurance companies, and original equipment manufacturers, has bought it all together for a great consumer experience,” feels Anurag.

Big data analytics also helps CarDekho in lead generation. Search criteria like price, mileage, technical features, and servicing requirements used during browsing are captured in the platform’s Dealer Management System which enables the AI to understand customer behaviour.

The information helps the platform strategize product positioning and marketing communication, thereby strengthening the lead-generation and transaction facilitation services to used car dealers selling cars to end users on its platform. It also enables the company to provide advertising and digital marketing solutions to OEMs and car dealers. Overall, the company generated nearly nine million leads during FY22.

To consume and process extensive data at a web-scale with reliability, CarDekho is further enhancing its scalability using the modern technology stack than the traditional linear approach by transitioning to a messaging and event-based architecture using Kafka, an event streaming platform that enables scalability in realtime messaging, storage, processing, and integration with no downtime or data loss.

It is also focusing on continuously refining its product strategy to create a full-stake ecosystem for the auto industry and create better value for the end consumer.

Connecto-driven personalisation

In April 2016 CarDekho acquired Connecto, a software-as-a-service start-up that had built device-agnostic tools to help product managers communicate efficiently with the target audience. The SaaS platform offered services such as a notification engine, A/B testing, custom integrations, and automatic user profiles creator to product managers and marketers, to improve the user interface or UI on websites and apps. The acquisition helped CarDekho leverage Connecto’s tools to improve user experience across all its websites and apps.

Explaining the rationale behind the purchase Amit Jain, CEO and Co-founder of CarDekho said in a statement: “Being a tech-intensive company, we are always on the lookout for more hi-tech start-ups to augment our tech expertise. Connecto will help us create user profiles by tracking user behaviour in real-time These user

Being a tech-intensive company, we are always on the look-out for more hi-tech start-ups to augment our tech expertise segments can then be interacted with in a personalised manner via web notifications, specific emails, in-app notifications, and chrome notifications.”

Amit Jain, CEO and Co-founder, CarDekho Group.

Based on the customer’s behaviour on the platform, using machine learning, the platform also recommends the cars that the customer would love to buy from the list of cars on the website.

Sharing details of other technology platforms, solutions, and frameworks used by the group in improving service delivery, Anurag says that the adoption of AI and ML tools for handling big data projects has been a game changer. “We have been able to provide a personalised experience to consumers and offer the right product and services at the apt time. Cloud computing has helped us to go to market with highly stable products with agility,” he added.

Smart inventory and pricing

While understanding user needs and offering the best option is the key to CarDekho’s business, inventory management across the dealer network, especially in the used-car segment and a transparent pricing mechanism are other critical factors that can impact online car sales business. This is another area where AI- and ML-powered tools have been of