The situation: 61% of inquiries were going dark.
Before Swiftex, the OEM’s funnel looked healthy on paper. Paid media generated ~48,000 inquiries a month across Meta, Google and their OEM website. Every one of them was routed to the nearest of 180 dealerships through the OEM’s LMS. And that’s where the trouble began.
Response time from lead-received to first human touch averaged 47 minutes during business hours — and 14 hours overnight. 38% of leads arrived between 8pm and 9am when dealer showrooms were closed. By morning, the buyer had already shortlisted a competitor, booked a test drive with them, or simply moved on.
Dealer response quality varied wildly. The top-decile dealers picked up 82% of leads within 10 minutes. The bottom-decile never picked up at all. The OEM’s CMO knew the topline number — $41 per qualified lead — but couldn’t attribute drop-off to a specific dealer, channel or time-of-day.
“We were spending $3.4M a quarter on performance marketing. Sales told me half the leads were junk. Nobody could show me what actually happened to each one — so every QBR turned into a negotiation.”CMO · Auto OEM · Before Swiftex
The approach: AI-first response, dealer-aligned hand-off.
The OEM rolled out Swiftex in three phases across nine months:
Phase 1 · Unified capture (Month 1–2)
- Swiftex ingested inquiries from Meta Lead Ads, Google Lead Forms, the OEM website and five dealer group microsites into one pipeline
- Identity resolution stitched duplicate leads across channels using phone + email
- Every lead got a UTM-level + dealer-level + time-of-day stamp for downstream analytics
Phase 2 · AI first-touch (Month 2–4)
- Swiftex voice agents engaged every inquiry within 60 seconds, in English, Spanish, Hindi and Mandarin
- Conversational qualification replaced the old 4-question LMS form: variant interest, financing need, timeline, preferred dealer
- WhatsApp follow-ups handled the 43% who didn’t pick up the first call — including out-of-hours auto-nurture
Phase 3 · Intelligent hand-off (Month 5–9)
- Only qualified buyers — scored by Swiftex as “ready to test-drive” — routed to dealers
- Dealers received a pre-filled briefing: customer name, variant interest, financing status, best call-back window
- Revenue Intelligence dashboards surfaced dealer-level funnel health to the OEM CRM team weekly
The results, by the numbers.
| Metric | Before Swiftex | After 9 months | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Avg. response time | 47 min (business hrs) | 58 sec | -98% |
| Inquiries → qualified | 23% | 48% | +25pp |
| Test-drive show-ups / mo | 4,120 | 9,870 | 2.4× |
| Cost per booked test-drive | $118 | $78 | -34% |
| Dealer satisfaction (NPS) | +14 | +52 | +38 |
The biggest surprise was the after-hours channel. 42% of Swiftex-booked test drives now originate from the 8pm–9am window — traffic the OEM was previously paying for and silently losing. That alone accounted for roughly $2.1M of the modelled incremental revenue.
“My regional managers stopped blaming the leads. For the first time in my career we’re in QBRs talking about conversion, not lead quality.”Head of Dealer Performance · Auto OEM · 9 months post-deployment
What the dealers actually experienced.
The internal win wasn’t just at the OEM. Dealer sales teams got their workday back. Before Swiftex, a typical senior sales consultant spent 3.5 hours a day on “first-call qualification” — re-introducing themselves, collecting the same details the ad form already captured, and chasing no-shows.
After Swiftex, 73% of their calendar was with qualified in-market buyers. Average closed-deal value went up 11% because consultants had time to upsell financing, accessories and extended warranties — the margin-rich line items dealers had been skipping because they couldn’t afford the extra 12 minutes per customer.
What other OEMs can take from this.
- Response time is the #1 lever. Not creative, not targeting, not offer. Get to 60 seconds and the rest compounds.
- After-hours is where the rupees hide. If 30–40% of your inquiries land outside business hours, that’s not a staffing problem to solve. It’s a capability problem to replace.
- Hand off qualified leads, not all leads. Dealers will cooperate if you respect their time. Send them a briefing, not a form-dump.
- Measure dealer performance visibly. Once the OEM could quantify leakage per dealer, the bottom-decile self-corrected within two quarters.
What’s next.
The OEM is now expanding Swiftex into post-sale — renewal reminders, service booking, extended-warranty upsell — a $48M-revenue opportunity across the installed base. Deployment across the wider dealer network (an additional 90 rooftops) is scheduled for Q3.