Tutorial · 6 min read
Car Dealers: The Actual Build Sheet for Your First Week
The case for why a dealership automation must never send a price, an availability, or an EMI figure is made in full in the dealership post. This one assumes you agree and gets on with building it.
Three automations. Roughly an hour. Then two weeks of reading before you touch anything again.
Before you open the builder, write two lists
Do this on paper. Everything else in this post is data entry.
List one: the fixed facts. Sentences that are true regardless of who is asking and which car they mean. Showroom hours. Workshop hours, which are usually different. The actual location, described the way a person would give directions, not the way the map pin says. Brands and segments you carry. Whether you are an authorised service centre. What documents an exchange needs. Whether test drives happen at the showroom or at home.
List two: the words that must stop a reply. Start from your own inbox rather than from a template. Search it for the last hundred messages and write down what people actually typed.
Automation one: the walkaround reel
This is the highest-volume post type a dealership makes and it is where the first automation belongs.
- Trigger. Pick the specific reel, not the whole account. Set the match to any-of and give it the model name plus the shortenings your customers use — the full name, the nickname, the variant letters, and
details,info,specs,mileage,booking. - Negative keywords. Paste list two. At minimum:
price,on road,onroad,daam,kitne ka,discount,offer,available,stock,EMI,finance,loan,interest,down payment,exchange,valuation,CIBIL. Anything matching these gets no automated reply and waits for a salesperson. - Public reply. Four to six words, and never a number. "Sent you the details in DM." Its job is to be seen by the other two hundred people reading the comments, not to inform the one person who asked.
- Private reply. Variant list, what is standard on each, fuel and transmission options, and one line saying that on-road pricing and current offers are confirmed by the sales team, with the number and the hours somebody answers. Self-sufficient. No promise that anyone will write again.
- Capture to Leads. On. You want to know which model people ask about and when, because that is the only reporting you are going to get.
- Advanced. Leave first-time senders only switched off — a repeat customer asking about a second car is your best lead and you do not want them filtered. Set quiet hours in your customers' timezone, not the tool's.
Automation two: used stock
Same shape, one important difference. Do not build it per car.
A used unit sells and the automation attached to its post keeps running. Build one automation across your pre-owned posts that answers the things true of every unit: that all pre-owned cars are inspected, what the inspection covers, what warranty if any comes with them, what documents transfer, whether you handle the RC transfer, whether finance is available on used stock as a fact rather than as an offer.
The specific car's year, kilometres and condition should live in the caption, where a human wrote them and a human can edit them. The automation points at the caption. It does not restate it.
Automation three: the service post
The one dealerships forget, and the one that quietly generates the most repeat revenue.
Service enquiries arrive on the sales account constantly and get lost behind the new-model traffic. A separate automation on your service posts — intervals, whether pickup and drop exists, what a general check includes, workshop hours, whether you need an appointment — pulls that pile out of the way and answers it for nothing.
Keep one refusal in it: anything describing a fault. noise, smoke, overheating, brake, warning light, not starting, accident. A generated reply diagnosing a car it cannot hear is not a service booking, it is a guess about a vehicle somebody is going to drive.
Test on yourself before you go live. Every time.
Test the failure cases, not the happy one. Comment your own model name and check the reply. Then comment "price kya hai" and confirm that nothing goes out. Then comment the model name and the word price in the same sentence, because that is what real customers do, and confirm the negative keyword wins. If it does not, your list is not doing what you think it is.
Then Go live.
The fortnight of reading, which is the real work
A blocked reply is recorded in Activity with the reason it was stopped. Two weeks of that log will teach you more about your inbox than any planning session did.
You are looking for three things. Words customers use that are not on either list — every dealership finds a few. Messages that were blocked and should not have been, which usually means a negative keyword is too broad. And the category you did not plan for, which is almost always somebody asking about a car you sold them two years ago.
Adjust once, at the end of the fortnight. Not daily. You cannot tell whether a change helped if you make four of them a week.
The costs and the hard edges
Templated replies are free and unlimited; a credit is spent only when the AI writes a new reply. All three automations above are template work, so most dealerships run them on the free tier of 100 credits with no card for a long time. Packs start at ₹499.
There is no DMS or inventory access, so nothing confirms stock. There is no calendar integration, so nothing books a test drive or a service slot — the automation hands over a number and the hours it is answered. No payments, no tokens, no CRM sync, no WhatsApp, and no messaging anybody who has not messaged you first. Leads leave as a CSV.
Takeover means the moment a salesperson replies by hand, automation is out of that thread for good. Comments stay answerable for seven days, DM threads for twenty-four hours, and that DM clock restarts only when the customer writes again.
If this is your first automation of any kind, the first-week guide covers the general setup order that this post assumes.
