Enable car identification

Enriching the consumer’s customer experience by letting AutoChat know which car he or she is currently viewing is very important.

At AutoChat we spend a great deal of our time building integrations with VMS (vehicle management system) systems. We do this so we can receive the current stock of a dealership. When we receive the stock we can enrich the experience for the consumer in the following ways:

• We are able to answer questions about the car the consumer is viewing (single car).

• We can help the consumer find the car he is looking for (stock wide).

• We can let the sales person know exactly which car the consumer is interested in.

• We can show the consumer the proper availability to choose from during the appointment creation because the car is linked to a specific location.

In case we don’t get the car identifier from the website or we, for whatever reason, did not receive the car in our database we often fall back to what we call a fall back version of a certain flow. This is a simplified version of the specific flow and often results in a less than optimal consumer experience.

There are multiple ways you can inform us about which car the consumer is interested in:

• Add the identifier in the AutoChat Config

• Add a HTML tag on the website

• Add the identifier in the CTA button

Adding the identifier via AutoChat Config

You can send us the identifier via the AutoChat config in which you also send us the specific credentials for the assistant that is being installed on the website like this:

<script>
    (function(){
        var autochatConfig = {
            assistantId: "INSERT ASSISTANTID",
            accessToken: "INSERT ACCESSTOKEN",          
            locale: "NL", // or EN/FR
            
            // To set up a link between the website and the car a consumer is looking at use one of these identification methods:
            currentCarVin: "PLACE CAR VIN NUMBER HERE",
            // - OR -
            licensePlate: "PLACE CAR LICENSE PLATE NUMBER HERE",
            // - OR -
            stockNumber: "PLACE CAR STOCK NUMBER HERE"
        };
        var s=document.createElement("script");s.src="https://static.chatclient.autochat.ai/release/autochat.js?ver=1",s.async=!0,s.defer=!0,s.addEventListener("load",function(){autochat.init(autochatConfig)}),document.body.appendChild(s);
    })()
</script>

It is important to note that you can only use one identification method at a time. If we find multiple cars we will always send back an empty result which means the assistant doesn’t know which car it is about.

stockNumer often represents an internal number coming from the Vehicle Management System.

Add the identifier via a HTML tag

Alternatively you can also send us the car identifier by adding this HTML tag anywhere on the vehicle detail page:

<div id="autochat-car-id" data-car-id="abc"></div>

The information in the tag doesn’t have to be visible on the page.

Add the identifier in the CTA button

In some scenario’s, for example when you want to install a CTA per car on a stock overview page, it can be helpful to implement a car identifier per CTA button. This is an example of a test drive button that has the car identifier inside:

<button onclick="autochat.askQuestion('I want a testdrive appointment for this car', { vdp: true, currentCarVin: 'ZFA3120000JB11486' });">I want to testdrive this car</button>

If you want to test if the integration is created successfully between the website and AutoChat you can do the following. Open up a vehicle detail page and start a chat by click on “ask a question” in the chat bubble. If you see a car pop up on the right side of the chat interface you know the integration is set up successfully.