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Lance, Gage, and Bo reviewed Virtual Contact Assistant performance, pause behavior, dashboard access, and follow-up options for virtual deals. The immediate conclusion was not to create a new process yet. The stores can use timed pauses while Gage seeks a definitive answer on how VCA resumes after a customer changes processes.
VCA pause behavior remains under review
Gage asked whether a customer on the VCA pause list would resume AI follow-up after entering an unsold showroom-visit process. He had raised the question with developers during virtual contact assistant office hours and contacted a senior product manager. He did not yet have a definitive answer.
A test lead could show whether a paused customer re-engages after a showroom visit is opened and closed. Gage noted that this would not settle the larger question: whether the pause list stops everything or whether statuses and processes can return a customer to VCA engagement.
Lance later found that the pause control lets users choose how long to pause an agent. He said the sales team had treated the feature as if they lacked control, though the duration appears directly in the dropdown.
For a customer whose deal is being worked, Lance’s current approach is to pause VCA for seven days. If the vehicle is not sold, follow-up resumes after seven days. If the deal closes, VCA stops contacting the customer.
Dashboard access and performance tracking
The relevant Insights report is the Virtual Assistant Dashboard. It covers all three stores. Managers who already have reporting access should be able to view it because it is a default system dashboard.
Gage recommended that general managers monitor:
- Text conversations: Review unique conversations and anything unanswered.
- Negative sentiment: Treat it as a screening tool, not proof of a bad interaction. The system may flag comments such as “I bought a car already” or “not interested” as negative.
- Missed appointments: Managers can identify appointments VCA set but customers missed, then try to re-engage those customers directly.
At Audi last month, the assistant set four appointments. It also appeared in 39 showroom visits and 13 sales totaling nearly $60,000 in gross. Gage stressed that the dashboard does not claim the assistant generated that revenue. It shows that it touched those sales in some way.
BMW’s assistant had already set six appointments this month. It set 10 last month and was projected to set 26 this month. Gage viewed that as evidence that the assistant improves as it learns and follows guardrails.
Gage said text should remain the main focus because email engagement is weak. Lance agreed that email performance has been a long-standing problem. He said AMP’s all-text approach can remove task creation, while FullPath is beginning to integrate with the CRM more effectively.
Dealer instructions and pricing rules
Lance completed and installed custom dealer instructions for all three stores. Porsche had been the only store with saved instructions before the update.
He built the instructions by collecting every prior Podium thumbs-up and thumbs-down correction. He also copied the “instant answers” into his agent, then had it draft store-specific instruction sets. The result is a detailed baseline that can be expanded as managers find responses they dislike.
Gage called the Porsche instruction set unusually detailed. He said this level of setup is what dealers need if they want AI to behave as expected. He described the product as evolving and said ongoing refinements will remain necessary as AI changes.
Pricing disclosure is enabled for Audi and Porsche. Lance said Porsche and BMW cannot negotiate new-vehicle prices. The assistant may discuss used-vehicle pricing. The option to include vehicle price in the first contact message remains off because Lance considers it unnecessary.
Virtual desk deals do not justify a new process yet
Lance asked whether the CRM already has a process for customers whose deals were desked remotely but who did not buy. He initially considered opening a showroom visit even when the customer had not entered the store.
Gage cautioned against using the showroom-visit process for virtual deals. Its follow-up language includes messages such as “thank you for stopping in” and “thank you for visiting the store.” That could send inaccurate messages after a remotely desked deal.
Gage outlined an alternative: a custom process for unclosed virtual desk deals, with VCA included. Staff would have to place customers into it manually because merely desking a deal would not trigger it automatically. This would avoid false showroom messaging, but it would require disciplined manual handling so no customer falls through the cracks.
They agreed no new process was needed at this point. Lance said the issue is mainly one of setting expectations with his team. A custom process can be reconsidered store by store if virtual phone and internet deals become frequent.
Muse and personal AI agents
Bo described Muse as a free AI assistant that runs in a separate server and browser. He said it can perform tasks such as booking, buying, shipping, negotiating, and working through Facebook and Instagram. He said dealers are using it to digest inventory, identify matching service customers, and make automated offers.
Lance said he uses Grok for some tasks but considers his Hermes agent much stronger than other agents he has tried. He was interested in whether Hermes could connect to Muse through an MCP or use Meta AI as a provider. Lance said Ada was being asked to see whether Muse could be connected.
Bo said Muse searched dealership listings, Cars.com, CarGurus, and AutoTrader for used vehicles within $3,000 of JD Power retail and within 50 miles of his ZIP code. He said it captured VINs, valued vehicles, and returned matches. He also said it processed more than 2,500 complex documents in a minute or two.
Bo said he created four businesses’ Facebook advertising setups over the weekend. For a lumberyard with kitchen and bath design, he said the tool pulled material from the company website, built and launched a form-filled Facebook campaign, and generated three new-home-build leads within about an hour after he put $100 behind it.
The group speculated that Muse’s free access may be intended to build adoption and collect data. Lance noted that Grok costs $17 a month. Bo said OpenAI had moved some capabilities to a $180-a-month premium tier.
Action Items
@Gage
- [ ] Continue seeking an answer on VCA pause behavior and best practices, then bring the information back to Lance.
0:03
You know, a little bit of this,
0:06
A little bit of that. What you snacking on? All the old vending machine voodoo chips.
0:14
Yeah, Zaps, which uh, in some cases got kind of fucked up whenever Utz bought them. Yeah, Zaps is from Louisiana. Okay. Um, like at least we had to drive by the factory. And Utz's, which is a giant company out of Pennsylvania, bought them a few years ago. When some of the flavors didn't change at all, but like there's a jalapeno that they've had for years, and I swear you used to eat the jalapeno ones, and you couldn't eat the whole bag. So fucking spicy, and they've kind of dumbed them down a little bit. So,
0:48
But anyway, yeah. Now you can eat the whole bag.
0:51
Haven't had lunch yet,
0:52
So fair. Um. So we'll just start with what we talked about yesterday. Yep. I don't have a definitive answer yet on, and I'll I'll phrase to you kind of how I was wording the question, in like our open hours for virtual contact assistant with all of like the developers and everything in it. Yep. And then I also reached out to, and he's a super busy guy. He's one of our 16 year PMs, but he's kind of the head on the PM side for this virtual contact assistant. Okay.
1:26
So basically, one of the questions that I proposed, based on what you and I talked about, was if a customer is on the pause list, comes into the store, goes into the showroom visit, unsold, they're now in the unsold follow follow up process. Will VCA kick back in now that the customer is now in a different process? If not, what are the best practices if they've been on the pause list to get them back engaged?
1:51
Got it. Yeah. So, I guess you know in thinking about it. If they're part of a new process and there's the verify V the you know notify VA indicator in there, I would imagine it overrides the pause.
2:05
But I would imagine so too, because once they go from an internet lead to a showroom visit follow up, right? They've triggered into the only thing that I can do, the only thing that I can think of, Lance, is to like myself or something put in a test lead.
2:26
Go in, start a visit on it real quick, close the visit, or pause, pause VA before we start the visit. On that lead, pause her. Go in, start a showroom visit, close the visit, and then see if she re - engages with me or if I stay on the pause list.
2:48
But even if if it doesn't work, then it still doesn't answer your question or give either one of us an answer on. Okay, so how do we like? Is is the pause list the ultimate? Just pause everything, or is there a way, with processes and statuses, to get her back off the pause list?
3:05
Exactly. Because I get fully where you're coming from. Like I went and looked at some of the dashboards. Like she's doing pretty well so far for being very new. Yeah. Responses, you know, engagements that have gone towards visits and sold and generated revenue and things like that, but, You know, as we get into some of these fine - tweaking things, these are the things we need to iron out.
3:26
Yeah, where inside of Insights is there a what's the name of that form? Is it just called? I mean, that not it's the name of that report.
3:37
Virtual assistant dashboard.
3:40
Virtual. There it is.
3:51
Cool. And so, when you're in, you can access all three stores from the same one too.
3:56
And then, if I want to give this to my my GMs and and sales managers so they can kind of see it, they all have it already. It should be visible to them.
4:05
If they have access to reporting, they will have it because it's a system dashboard, just like the customer or the sales rep. And or, good lord, I cannot speak today. Just like the coaching dashboard or any other dashboards, they're defaulted in the system.
4:23
All right, because I want to put them in this. This is probably the best spot to look and go. Okay, how is how are all these conversations going? You know what I mean?
4:32
Right, text. You know, unique conversations. If we've got anything unanswered, some of the spot like that I would probably check as a GM. Right, is just double checking every once in a while the sentiment side of it. Negative sentiment doesn't necessarily mean that a bad thing happened. It could just be the customer said stop or no longer interested. They mark that as negative. But if this number, see each one. Yeah, if you click the number there, it takes you into it. Yeah. I'll show you. Like wasn't looking for a rogue.
5:06
So it's just anytime they said something with a negative kind of so. I bought a car.
5:10
Correct. So it's just a good thing to sift through. Like, did we actually have? If we have one or two really negative things, all right, let's get it addressed. But it's also going to pick up on like, I bought a car already. I'm not interested. Type of thing. Like, that's not really negative, but it just decodes it that way.
5:26
Got it. Hey, Gage, it's got the pricing thing on it too, doesn't it? What do you mean, Bo? Pricing the pricing conversations. So anytime a customer brings up price.
5:39
He only has that. I think we have that different at each store, if I remember correctly. Or did we turn it on for all the stores.
5:45
Uh, I don't know. Let me.
5:48
Yeah, we have it. We have it. At least an Audi. It's on to disclose internet price. I think Porsche was maybe the one that we were still talking about, or maybe slightly hesitant on.
6:02
Yeah, allow VA to disclose. That's on. So that's Audi.
6:09
Let me check them all real fast.
6:10
It it it is on for Porsche too, but I think you have something in the guardrails with Porsche on pricing.
6:18
Yeah, we have. Well, with Porsche themselves, Porsche and BMW, we can't. There's no negotiating new stuff, so we're going to be discussing prices on used stuff, and I don't think that's ever going to be a problem. Right. Yeah, they're all turned on. It just is the only thing that's unchecked is that include vehicle price in the first contact message because I think that's kind of goofy anyway. Right. Right.
6:42
Well, so sifting through this a little bit too, just some other tidbits. When you talk to the GMs and stuff, like down at the appointments part of her dashboard, you can see any missed appointments that she set. So a good spot for a manager to probably jump back in and like try to recapture. You know, VCA had set this appointment. You know, may not have actually had a phone call on it type of scenario that we could jump back in as humans and maybe still reengage those customers.
7:09
Let me see. Let me pull it back up. Cool appointments to set at Audi.
7:19
Yeah, and this is for just the first five days here, four and a half days, wherever we're at.
7:25
Yeah. Because I was looking at like last month when I popped in here earlier, and so like last month, just at Audi.
7:41
So it says that she herself only set four appointments, but she had her hand in thirty - nine showroom visits and thirteen sales for almost sixty grand worth of gross.
7:51
And who? What was that? That was this.
7:54
This was Audi with virtual assistant. Okay. Now it's not saying that she like generated that revenue, but she had her hand in thirteen sales in some facet or another.
8:07
I get it. So to your point, just kind of a good thing for them to peek at and like see, you know. I would keep focusing heavily on text. We Royce and I had a conversation with another one of our dealers today. Emails are just not getting read these days. They're not getting responded to. Yeah,
8:25
And that's, you know, that's one of the big struggles I used to have with AMP. And I know that with with FullPath, some of the switches are different for that, but yeah. You know, one of the the tradeoffs if you switch AMP over to all text, you don't get tasks created. Um. So anyway, I'll have to get back into that with AMP, but any but with FullPath. But anyway, yeah, emails are just dogshit, man. These days,
8:51
Nobody looks at them. They are, and even, yeah, I I'm the slowly rolling with the FullPath stuff here and stores that have switched over and stuff like that. The. Just the way that it works differently than AMP, and and how it's starting to integrate with the CRM is getting is getting really good.
9:10
So, yeah, I think it'll be good. So, yeah, I mean, look, I'm looking at BMW, and already AI has set six appointments.
9:21
Yeah. So. I mean, that's last month. It did ten, so it's on pace. It says it's on pace to do twenty six this month versus ten last month. So. That just shows what you and I've been talking about, right? Like as it grows and learns, and and starts following some of these guardrails harder and harder, you know, doubling the amount of almost 125% more appointments projected in the month two versus month one.
9:48
Yeah, and I had some stuff. So you know, the little section, the little custom description or custom explanation that you can give your AI. Yep. Um, I hadn't finished saving all of those, so I went and double checked all of those and re. Like basically rewrote them and then uploaded them yesterday. Porsche was the only one that was actually saved in there, so they now all three had those like custom dealer instructions installed.
10:14
The one that you have here for Porsche, I was looking at it earlier, just peeking in, I was like, " This is insane!" Like, but this is what it what it takes to your point of what we've talked about, and like, but it's it's.
10:26
That was my way. So I went into all of the, you know, the thumb up, thumb down corrections that we've ever done in Podium. They're all in one spot. So I literally copied and copied every single one of those, and then I went and copied all of the. Oh shit! They have a term for them. They're called like instant answers. Okay. Copied all the instant answers, pasted those into my agent, and had them write that custom, that those custom set of instructions for each store. So that's yeah. I mean, why that's like that? It's like crazy detailed.
10:58
That's good though. I mean, this is what I try to encourage my dealers to do, and and nobody's doing it at the level that you are, and then they they complain to an extent when it doesn't want to work the way they want it to work. And I'm like, you have to. This is why I told you to fill these things out.
11:12
Yeah. Yeah, it's hard to sit there and just come up like. It's hard to go into that little custom instructions thing and just freehand all that shit. Like, there's no way to remember all those little fucking. Nuance, right? So, and then it's like we said, all those are things that can only get better as you experience it and see the things that are wrong and correct it over and over. And so, at some point, I'm sure I'll have some manager come to me and say, " Hey, man, I don't like the way they responded here," and I guess that's where I'll put that in, right? Yeah, that that'll be an addition to that. Like,
11:50
Do yeah. To to an extent, in addition to that, basically is the the best practice right now.
12:00
And and we're growing with it too. So I mean, as things change and evolve with this and things like that, like these are conversations we can continue to have. But like, when we the difference versus the old Vanessa versus like this, like this was a big piece of that. Like we never had this before. Yeah. And so, you know, having this on day one when this went live for dealers was a huge deal. So again, it's still an evolving, evolving piece of it too. Of how do we continue to help, given areas that you guys can continue to make it better? Because as we all know, AI is changing every day. Let alone what's in our CRM AI. Like just AI in general is evolving every day.
12:41
Yep. Lance, have you messed with Muse yet.
12:47
No, I don't. I have. I don't.
12:49
He's got his own little Hermes agent.
12:51
Yeah. No, I know. Playing Facebook at all. My only other AI experience, like with different people, like people's actual other little agents, is I use Grok a little bit for some things. But man, once you have a Hermes agent that's built the way mine is, like everything else is just is is weak.
13:11
So Muse is free. Yeah. Number one. Yep. Two, separate server, separate browser. Yep. And then it will Shopify greenlighted it to purchase. Amazon's in the works. You can hook up your credit card, and it does just everything. Yeah. It'll go out there. It'll book, buy, ship. It'll auto negotiate. Cardi's on Facebook. It will, dude. It will do everything.
13:46
Yeah, I mean, what it is is it's a weapon for like personal use.
13:51
Yeah, you know, yeah, yeah. Like it flies through everything. Yeah,
13:54
Just an individual, you get to build something that does what a lot of like enterprises have been doing. You know, like previously you needed a more serious setup, but apparently this thing is going to be badass.
14:05
Oh yeah. I got dealers using it right now to digest inventory, so it's digesting inventory, reaching out to all of its service customers that match that inventory, and then doing automated offers. I mean, this this is a wild time. Yeah, so they're just used for that.
14:26
How I wonder. I guess I need to do a little bit of digging, and I wonder how it's uniquely advantaged to reaching out to customers. Was it doing it through Facebook?
14:35
Well, yeah. Facebook, Instagram,
14:38
Anything Meta. That's fucking creepy. I gotta go see. Yeah. There's a damn MCP for my Hermes agent to plug into Muse because, if so, man, that's that's gonna be fucking killer.
14:50
Dude, I had it doing so much shit for me this weekend. I had it doing the dumb, the dumbest things. I had it. I mean, obviously, I I used it for like normal stuff, but finding Cardi's, finding you know information. All kinds of stuff, and just kills it.
15:12
Unbelievable. Yeah, I'm asking Ada if she can plug in the muse right now, because man, I have it. So I have I have AI plugged into all my Google ads, and it can do all my Facebook ads, and the amount of like how quickly it can iterate on that, and like deploy vehicle ads, and all that shit is kind of ridiculous. Oh yeah. No,
15:36
Same same concept. It'll it'll design them, pop them out, put everything in there.
15:41
Yeah. So if there's um, yeah. So interesting. So it seems like a lot of those things I can actually just plug in with Meta dash. Let's see, Hermes has a Meta AI provider consumer. So I have okay. I'll have to do this. I can set up Meta AI as a model that my Hermes agent can use to go and do all of those things.
16:07
Oh hell yeah, yeah! Because it's it's separate everything. The coolest part is watching it work, like because you get a you get to look at its browser as it goes. Oh yeah. So I had I had mine. I was like, hey, find me a used car, three thousand dollars back at JD Power retail, within fifty miles of my zip. So I watched it fly through every dealership, Cars dot com. Car Gurus, Auto Trader, and it would rip the VIN off the website, book it out, hold up JD Power, booked it out, yeah, and then just ran through all of them, and then came back. It was like here, here's one, two,
16:40
And three. How fast was it? So it was doing that like in the browser.
16:44
Yeah, it does everything.
16:46
Was it operating the browser pretty quick.
16:49
Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was flying. I mean, it digested. I mean, I used it for some. Some personal stuff. It digested like over 2, 500 pretty complex docs in a minute or two. That's awesome. Yeah, and it's freaking free.
17:13
Yeah, I wonder if it's free. I don't know if it's gonna be free for what I want it to do. We're about to find out. But hell yeah, dude!
17:21
It'll book a vacation for you. It'll do. Yeah, it'll do it all.
17:26
I love it. He's just like we're about to find out.
17:29
Yeah, yeah, yeah, dude. Like it's, it was the main differentiator is, free. Yeah, and separate server, separate browser. Like so crazy. It is a true assistant bot.
17:43
Yeah, because right now I believe, like Grok is amazing, but its barrier of entry is seventeen bucks a month. Yeah, which is not which is really not crazy,
17:56
But no, no, no, yeah. But I think they got free. They had five, yeah, they had five million downloads, four million active users the first week.
18:07
Free is retarded. Like they're just wanting people to use free is.
18:13
People to literally more data. What you're doing is just giving them more data. Oh, we're just feeding it, bro. Yeah, yeah. So.
18:21
Yeah, they'll support it for free as long as they can to just influx all the data coming in.
18:25
Yep. Oh yeah, totally right. Yeah, and then at one point, you know, they they might tier it right. Like if you're just doing some casual usage, you're not going to get charged. Right. Which will start getting tiered.
18:44
Yeah, because OpenAI just did that. They just moved it up to like what. Got to go premium for their stuff now, so it's 180 bucks a month. Yeah, I mean they're starting to move stuff up because, brother, I blew through so many tokens this weekend. I was just making everything,
19:02
Just burning. That's funny. It's easy to do it, though. It's easy to do it.
19:10
I made I made four businesses this weekend. What'd you do? I mean, I did. Basically, just all form-filled Facebook ads. Yeah. So, I made one for basically my four best friends. Yep. So one guy owns a lumberyard with kitchen and bath design. So I was like, hey, make this, throw it on Facebook, whatever. Yep. It went to his website, ripped all his information, pictures, photos, IBIs, form-filled, set it up, launched it. Was like, hey, how much money you want to put behind it?
19:47
I threw 100 bucks on it, and then within like an hour, had three leads, and I sent it to him. Like, hey, here you go. There's three new home builds. He's like, what the hell? That's wild. Just crazy. Yeah. That is. And I mean, I know I don't know code, right? Like,
20:05
You don't need to, man. You should see the shit that I built. You know, it's like I have a, I built, I basically have a mastermind replacement that I built in the last three weeks.
20:18
Yeah, and it's crazy how fast you can do it. Like, yeah, insane.
20:24
Yep, completely ridiculous.
20:27
Well, cool. We won't keep you. Bye bye. I know it's Tuesday afternoon. I'll keep pushing on this to try to get us an answer and how we best tackle this pause feature going forward, and I'll I'll bring you some info on that.
20:40
So I guess I think what I'm seeing too is like some of the answers, some of the the question has been answered with. I'm sitting here talking to these goofuses, and and they're not even telling me, hey, when I pause, it gives me a drop down choice, right? You know, when you pause an agent, when you pause your agent, it gives you a little drop down multiple choice. How long do you want to pause them for? And they were they were acting like they had no choice or or control over that. And now that I'm looking at and experiencing it in person, and like doing a few myself, I'm like, you guys are just just complete knuckleheads. Like what?
21:12
It says right there how long you pause it. Like it's not a guess. Right. Like right.
21:17
It's like it's not random. Random roulette.
21:20
So, so there's that. But then also, man, I'm, I don't know that. So we already have, just really quickly, we already have processes for showroom visits, right? Closed showroom visits. Do we have a process for, like a deal that got desked, let's say, and then they didn't buy? Is there is that something that's in the system now that I just don't realize it's in there, or you're.
21:48
Saying the only way that we could work around that? I get what you're asking.
21:56
Yeah, we work so and like that should that would be I guess that would be hey if I'm going to work a car deal for you, you need to make sure you open a showroom visit even if they're not here. So I guess that process would handle that, right?
22:09
There's a downfall to that because Royce and I have battled this with stores before too. Because then we would have to rework your showroom visit follow - up process, because part of the showroom visit follow - up process is using word tracks like " thank you for stopping in," " thank you for visiting the store," things like that. So if we work a deal virtually and we start a visit, we could be sending out the wrong messaging in the follow - up.
22:34
So my working with us instead of.
22:36
Right. So my other thought process is creating a custom process. Yeah. And we now it would take some work. It would take manual doing, obviously not automated. But if we desk a deal virtually and we don't close it, putting them into this custom process that we've built that has VA built into it. Okay. That's like a you know we name it like desk deal virtually or whatever we want to name it.
23:06
We could create a custom process. The only downfall to that is we have to manually put them into that process. It wouldn't be automated just because we desk a deal.
23:17
But that is, we could do that one of two ways. The only downfall with the showroom visit thing is just the follow up portion of it could get weird. Yeah. Especially if you're dealing with AI, even though you give it guardrails and parameters, it could still obviously just the showroom visit follow up and say. Thank you for stopping in, or something like that. Right. The the workaround requires more manual work, not letting things fall through the crack. But we could create a custom process for like a virtually desk deal.
23:48
I see what you're saying.
23:51
Yeah. So that's something maybe chew on that and kind of you know.
23:59
Run that through your brain a couple times, or run that past the guys, and just kind of see, or make we can make a decision, but we don't have to make it right now. But those are probably the the two ways that we could tackle what you're saying.
24:10
Yeah. The other question the guys had for me, and I think I already have the answers to all these, was one of them said, " Well, what if what if we work a deal with them and then they don't buy? We want them to keep getting follow up. I mean, that's in the pause button, right? Like if I'm working a deal with you, I'm just going to go hit pause for seven days." Yeah, and then if and then it'll naturally just start back up if I haven't closed the car deal,
24:35
Correct. After the seven days,
24:37
If I close the car deal, then then it goes away and it's not contacting them anymore. Okay, I think we. I don't know that we needed create any new processes or do anything new today, right? I think we kind of have it worked out just mentally where it's kind of more about managing expectations of my.
24:54
I would agree a little bit with that, and then I would agree with you. You know, if if we do find, and it could just be store by store basis, right? Yeah. But if we find we're working an influx of phone deals and internet deals, virtually, you know, we can address that at a store by store basis. Maybe not the whole group.
25:12
That makes sense to me. Cool. I'll keep chasing down the answer on the pause thing, and if there's any best practices, I'll reach out to a couple more people and put some heat on. I didn't know if I'd get an answer in the 24 hours that I had, but I'll keep pushing on it.
25:25
It's all good. Thank you, man. I appreciate y'all.
25:28
You're welcome, brother. We'll talk soon.
25:29
I'm good. Bye - bye.