AI, Data, and the Missed Call That Costs You the Sale with Ben Chodor, CEO of CallRevu

Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:01.197) Welcome back to the winner's circle, everybody. I am here today with Ben from Call Review. He is in a space that I love a lot in the communication space and that voice layer. And Ben is a new big Innovation Award winner. So Ben, congratulations and welcome to the winner's circle. Yeah. Give us a little bit of background on Call Review. We started and we got talking real quick because I'm a nerd out on this stuff pretty quickly because it was in my sweet spot for a long time. Ben Chodor (00:14.286) Thank you, Russ. Thank you. Ben Chodor (00:24.014) I'll give you I'll give you the thousand foot view. So Call Review has the privilege of Representing over 6,000 dealers in North America So if you just look at car dealerships as you drive down any highway wherever you live in America There's a car dealership. There's about 17,000 dealerships in America that basically say like Mercedes or Audi or GM or Ford on it There's like another 30 or 40,000 that are independent. They're like used car dealerships, know, service stations that might sell cars in front. They don't, they're not really our focus. Ours are enterprise dealerships. So we have, you know, about just under 40%, 35 % of the dealers in North America use our technology. Ended a day, we helped them sell more cars and we helped them, they call them ROs, but set more appointments in the service side. And just so you understand in general, one of the two biggest purchases that an American makes or anyone makes is a house and a car. Those are the two biggest purchases you make. So if you're a dealership and let's pretend you normally sell a hundred cars a month, if using our analytics and insights, which I'll tell you about in a second, if it can help you sell 10 % more cars a month, 10 more cars a month, let's say just a hundred more cars a year. And if an average car is $25,000 to $50,000, If you do the math and go a hundred times 50,000, how much does that help that dealership? And if you own multiple dealerships, it's a force multiplier. Plus all the OEMs, the manufacturers, allocate cars by how many cars you sell, allocate cars by how many service appointments you do. And then if you take the other side of our business, tied into it is we do the same thing on the service side. If we can help you set a few more oil changes, or when people schedule oil change, also get their tires rotated. What does that do? So in a dealership, some dealerships make more money off service and they want to fill their bays. And so how we do it, and it's a hundred percent AI based. We listen to every call that goes in and out of the dealership on the sales and service side. We analyze those calls in real time. We let the dealerships know if some one of their sales people are saying the wrong thing and they could actually engage instantly. Ben Chodor (02:49.262) Let them know that, 35 % of their calls are going to voicemail. And guess what? If you don't answer back in the next five minutes, they're probably going to another dealership. Same thing on the service side. And so we always started as this call analytics company. And two years ago, it was a hundred percent human BPO. And what I mean by that is we would record them, send them overseas. Someone types in an hour later, you get it back with AI. Three things happen. One. They instantly get the recordings and the sentiment and information back to it's more accurate. And three, it's constantly getting smarter because it's analyzing every data. And then the next thing we did, because we were a hundred percent AI, we went out and we bought a telco, a company that sells phones, you know, like zoom and ring central and go to connect. We bought a company called total CX that built a phone system on that sapien. That's a hundred percent. Auto specific. So now we get to give the dealers using the same AI, 100 % of their calls. So a billion data point or two billion data points a year, three, 400 million calls going through our dealerships every single year that's giving them these incredible insights. So we did that, bought that, expanded our knowledge for the customers. And then the next thing we said is every dealer kept on going, coming back to us going, Hey, you're helping us sell more cars. You're showing us our blind spots. You're giving us this incredible data. Can you train us to be better? And we said, we don't want to get into the human training side. So we built a product called Test Track, which I kind of call the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hour rule. You can randomly have a two way conversation with our AI who will be in a million different scenarios that happen in the dealership. So you can practice. instead of me, you know, Practicing with Russ my manager which I feel stupid or with my wife or a spouse when I get home or in the mirror in the bathroom I get to try all different scenarios like angry customer, you know CSI anything they want to do selling a used car lease expiration and get practice practice practice till I get better so a dealership can say Hey before I let you go talk to someone who might go spend 25 or 50 thousand dollars on a car Ben Chodor (05:09.998) We're going to make sure you're good in every scenario. And so we keep on using AI and technology to take this data that we get and make our dealers and their employees smarter. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (05:20.621) Yeah, and people think, you know, like, as you said, these are two of our biggest purchases or one of our biggest purchases, one of two, right, our house and cars. And the way I see it, I see a lot of people in apartments that have nice cars and you're like, I think that's upside down. But whatever, whatever. Yeah. Ben Chodor (05:33.708) Yes. Yep. Just drive around LA, right? Just drive around LA and you'll see like, you know, people paying $1,500 a month for the lease and they have three roommates, right? Russ Fordyce 🏆 (05:43.949) Well, New York, you're a New Yorker, you pay more for parking than you do your car. So, yeah, it's super interesting because these are not high margin businesses, generally speaking. They're not grocery level. They're not grocery store level, but they're not high margin businesses. They look high margin, right? We're selling a very expensive car. We've got a big flashy piece of real estate on the main road. Ben Chodor (05:46.818) Yep. Yep. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (06:05.327) We have lots of people who are dressed sharply, clean dealer, all that type of stuff leads you to believe that this is a very successful business, right? It's well lit, all this stuff, but it's not. not, a, you know, I think it's an under 10 % margin. You can tell us the number and you're right. You're one more car sale. One more car sale improves your margin, you know, by 50 % for the month or, you know, five more. Ben Chodor (06:26.582) I mean Russ take it to the next level you sell a cart. I sell a car to Russ It's time for you to get an oil change and if you don't have a good experience in the service bay or at the service department How likely you're gonna buy your next car and I spent all this money advertising to get you into the dealership to pick up the phone make that phone call to come in and now I lost you because All you wanted to know was the status check on your oil change. When can I pick it up? And you didn't get it and you wasted a whole day. Giving you that information is the difference of the next sale. Because if you have to get a new customer every say three years, five years, and people are holding cars longer. So you're now going to have to make more money on the service side. If you don't do it right and you don't see your blind spots, you're not going to succeed. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (07:18.989) Yeah. Now you've worked in a lot of high tech companies. What led you into this automotive sector that really drove you in? Ben Chodor (07:27.448) So you look, I started my career. built a streaming media company while Netflix was still sending CD-ROMs and WebEx was just audio and there was no zoom and Blockbuster. You were still picking up videos at the store and all about innovation. I'm video this big, know, size of postage stamp. Now to the point that everything is video. We're doing this via video was not capable when I started a business in 2004. And then I moved into IR and PR and it was all about how do we keep on automating press releases and engagements and earnings calls and they were being streamed. So it was all about that. And I was sitting on, about to sit on a board of one of the portfolio companies of the PE firm that was running that owned Call Review at the time. And Over a conversation, with one of the matching partners, goes, Hey, we have this great portfolio company. That just needs a little innovation needs a CEO can get it to the next level. Do you want to operate again? And I understand cars. bought cars and sold cars. I that's best part about the technology. Nobody is naive to the situation of what happens to always been about innovative technology. So adding AI and data and intelligence is really, really important. I'm also someone who likes to. drink from the fire hose and learn and learn new technologies. And it's a great business and it's something that's needed and you could actually see when a dealership uses the technology, you can see them sell more cars. You can see them having a better customer journey. You can actually see how they get better. And it just led me to this and we actually started to build the company, grow the company, did a couple acquisitions. We sold in October to another private equity firm, Astera Capital. with the whole goal of continuing to do &A, continuing to, hence this award to business intelligence. think about this, how do we keep on double downing on our technology and our business to get better insights, better opportunities for our customer? So in the long winded answer, kind of fell into the auto space, but I understood it. And that's like one of the things like, can you want, you don't have to be from the space to understand it. And the other thing that I learned, Ben Chodor (09:50.414) Is in my back of my mind, I thought everyone in auto was the guys like we used to see on television, like the used car salesman, right? You know, they started out with like a service center and then they got like a Toyota dealer and they grew, but there were still, you know, a car salesman. But what's changed is we're now into third generations of families owning the cars. Their third generation are Harvard MBAs. They are graduates of college. and they live on the data. They don't live on the fancy commercial to get you in and the hot dogs and the cotton candy. actually, everything they do is more calculated. Data is more important. These guys live in the spreadsheet as opposed to they're thinking how do they better engage with their customers and nothing does it better than the call data that we give them back. Now they get to know where their blind spots are and double down on. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (10:45.903) Well, you mentioned a couple of cool things from my world of sales and marketing and a lot of the same kind of customers. The AI is a huge training aspect, that kind of real awkward role playing we need to do to get that confidence. That was a great example. And it is this human balance. We've got to kind of have this balance between automation and accountability and everything else. Ben Chodor (10:59.736) Yep. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (11:15.905) especially in performance management. And I imagine your tool is really giving your managers really great insights on kind of just kind of where to pinpoint, you know, with each person almost. Ben Chodor (11:27.224) Right, look, dealers are not looking at what we're doing as AI as a replacement for their employees. They're looking at giving their employees better information, better data, like real-time data when I'm talking to you on the phone, real-time data when I have you in the dealership. That's what's empowering. AI is not an extinction for software or businesses. It is you have to look at how is it going to enhance my business? How is it going to make me stronger? How is it going to allow me to do things that we can't do? And what I mean by that is one of the areas that we're innovating on is we'll call it digital assistance. So right now, your dealership's open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. But if you want to schedule an oil change at 11 p.m., you really can't do it, or you go online, you try to do one of those forms and it's too complicated, and everyone knows 40 % of people go to online forms drop out. What have you called? And an AI answers. And it says, Hey, I'm your AI assistant to stores closed, but Russ, I know you have a Ford Bronco and are you calling about that? you go, yeah, I'm calling about that. I want to get an oil change. if it can schedule for you, it fills the bays. So it fills open slots again, job retention for the, you know, the mechanics and everyone else in the dealership. And the same thing on the sales side, if you're calling and your sales person is not there you go, Hey, I just want to come in for a test ride or drive or He was supposed to send me pictures of the RAV4. Can he send it to me? How is AI going to get you more swings at the bat, not take the place of people? Russ Fordyce 🏆 (13:04.281) How did, so it's, I see a lot of the time in situations like these in tools, and I think AI is turning the curve where it's almost data paralysis, right? It's like, my God, and I was in a similar business as yours, especially with call reporting and the holy mackerel that just, if you're running a call center, it's like, how do you even sift through all the data, right? So how did, Ben Chodor (13:14.584) Yep. Ben Chodor (13:22.862) Yep. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (13:30.521) How do you feel your teams are kind of intellectualizing this new AI versus seeing these dashboards? Ben Chodor (13:36.545) So if what's changed is I used to call it it was all pull technology even though we did alerts you go to a dashboard and you're gonna run reports where it's going now is You're gonna look at what you normally look at but the technology is gonna say Russ here are some things like Beyond the numbers here are some things you should know that you could optimize Russ Fordyce 🏆 (13:43.31) Yeah. Ben Chodor (13:59.788) that is going to help with CSI warnings or unhappy customers. Something went wrong. CSI warning recalls. Dealerships make lots of money on recalls, right? So do you see the trends in the data? People calling about breaks and there's a recall because the manufacturers will pay for that recall profit center for the dealership. So what we're doing now is instead of just giving you your great dashboards, what's you know, anyone who uses like salesforce.com great data. It's there. You still have to sift and find it. Maybe you create your own little reports, but it's still what you created. I want the technology to say, Ben, you're not even looking at this. This is what you should be looking at. And that will help me sell more cars. It'll help me build better relationships with customers, make my team smarter, allow them to better service our customers. And that's really what we're doing. Taking it to the next level and going from a reactive with some notification to In your face to the users going here's what you have to know in order just your customers play Basically asking you this but you're not hearing it and my analogy is where it's going in health care When you go to your doctor for your physical he spends the whole time in his EMR looking at you, but he's typing He's going you know what Russ? That's great. you have a little cough. Maybe it's this this if the AI is listening the AI and the EMR now could actually sit there and he could spend more time focusing on you going, hey, have you asked for us, has he been smoking? Have you asked for us, has he been doing this? Giving me things that I might not be thinking about at the moment. And so you could just rule the process of elimination in healthcare or the process of seeing something you didn't. Same thing in business. You can't see everything and no two salespeople are created equal. So you might be able to send something from a customer that another salesperson can't. And now it kind of puts everyone on an even playing field. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (15:55.055) Well, and you're getting at something really important. The doctor example was a good one, which is if we can get beyond the data, now you're talking about root cause analysis. You're talking about what's going on with that human being. And the health care example is good. Oh, maybe he's smoking. But hey, maybe your salesperson had a crappy morning. All right, well, that's fine. That happens. Let's take him in the back for a minute and give him a cup of coffee. Ben Chodor (16:02.072) Mm-hmm. Ben Chodor (16:10.104) Yep. Ben Chodor (16:16.364) Yeah. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (16:23.727) tell them a funny story and let's turn their day around, you know? Ben Chodor (16:26.318) But now we get to do it in real time in front of them. Yeah. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (16:29.391) Well, it's proactive. Yeah, you're doing it because you're doing root cause analysis. You're not putting out fires anymore. You're being alerted that before the fire breaks out. Ben Chodor (16:36.492) Right. And then. Ben Chodor (16:40.876) And then also for us after the call now, because we have the call data and we call our training platform test track. It will go, Hey, Russ, based on your 10 phone calls that you had today, we're noticing you keep on falling into this. Maybe it's you're not asking people their first name. You're not there's whatever it is. Here's like two test tracks that we customize for you. Go practice these and tomorrow you're going to crush it. So it's not just giving you the information and saying, okay, now you can react. It's like. All right, how do we double down? How do we kind of make this second nature to you? Russ Fordyce 🏆 (17:14.083) Yeah. Now you've got these 6,000 dealerships all over the US. You guys are driving this innovation into these organizations. And I know like you do, they're generally, they're really receptive to technology. what is that innovation engine look inside of Call Review? Ben Chodor (17:31.448) So we do, there's three things that we do kind of on a weekly basis. I do with the executive leadership team. One thing is we go, all right, always every day, build, buy, partner, right? So are we looking at acquisitions? Are we looking at what do need to build? Buy. We look at our own data. What are we seeing in trends in the industry that is needed? We built a training platform because everyone kept on asking us, how do you get better? Not because we said, We want to be in the AI training business. We were like, oh my gosh, this is, they're basically telling us what our next innovation is going to be. And then part of it also is we do internally our own hackathons, you know, like all the time and not just hackathons for a dev team. Since our, our account managers and our salespeople are constantly talking to customers or onboarders are talking to customers. A lot of probably 60, 70 % of our staff. came somewhere from the auto industry or auto adjacent industry and what is needed out there. So the other theory we have in the company, the only bad idea is the idea of not sharing. What's the worst thing we're ever gonna say to you? Hey Russ, it's a good idea, but we're not gonna do it for this reason, but we don't know where the next great idea is gonna come from. So share them and let us skunk work them, create little teams that can come up. One of the best parts about AI now in general is you can... Spin things up fast doesn't mean it's scalable but you can spin things up fast to see does this work? And getting to an alpha so someone can try something So much faster than ever. I mean again might not scale might not be perfect But being able to say as opposed to saying here's some slides what we think it can do or an animation No, no, this is what it can do How do we make it better? How do we integrate it? So our time to launch has gone from you know, so many cycles to like a quarter of the time to get something from an idea. It used to be you have an idea and go, okay, it is February now, March now. Maybe we'll have this by September of 26, right? End of the year. Now you can sit there and go, hey, it's March now. I could have something by April that we can look at. And if we don't like it, eliminate it from the plan. And we didn't spend a year of other things we're not developing. Because that's the other thing every company Ben Chodor (19:53.152) Not every company is as huge as like a Google that you can just have unlimited teams. We sit there every time we put a team off to build something, there's something that falls off our roadmap. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (20:05.847) Yeah. How do you keep grounded with your customers? You're pushing all these innovations down, and obviously you've got these alphas going well. How do you make sure you're not kind of missing something on the landscape? Ben Chodor (20:19.31) We talk to the customers every single day. mean, look, we do in our organizations, we do the health of the customer. Every week we do. We look through all of our customers for the most part. We go, who's under utilizing the technology, who's over using it. So we actually could get kind of a heartbeat of our customers and we talk to our customers. They want to talk. Look, end of the day, if you own a dealership, you want to sell more cars. You want to do more service appointments. You want to build better customer journey. also 35 % in most dealerships, there's a retent, like 35 % of employees turn over every year. It's a hard job. you know, it's a commission job. It's hard to sell cars. It's a lot of weekends and nights, right? So it's not like the easiest job to do, even though you could do great in it. So how can we constantly make it better to make all the employees more successful so they stay? Because in any business, churn of our customer is deadly to me. I don't want to see churn from our customers. I don't want to see churn of our employees. Every business is the same. you know, they go, there's an old saying going, you know, why do you spend so much money training people if they're eventually going to leave? And the real answer is imagine if you didn't train them and they stayed. Like, so we constantly have to be doing that. And that's kind of how we live our business. But we talk to our customers and let them tell us here's Here's our weakness. Actually, we're actually working on a new product right now that came from two very large dealer groups going like, here's something no one's been able to help us with. And we're like, first we look at it, can we do it? Do we have the right to do it? Do we have the right to sell it? Like we're not a bespoke company where we're going to build something for one customer and never be able to use it. Will it work? And then we'll kind of network it around our advisors and see if it works. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (22:09.399) Yeah, that customer co-creation model is so, so important, especially in situations like these where the market's evolving so quickly. Where do you think, you know, if you had to tell every car dealer out there, kind of, they had one blind spot, where do you think most of them still have a blind spot? Ben Chodor (22:13.262) Okay. Ben Chodor (22:25.57) that they don't really look at their data. You know, they don't really look, it's plain. Here's the one thing we know about phones. And since you worked in the telephony space is everyone goes, it's all about text, it's all about email. Here's the difference. Five years ago, you used to call a dealer on a phone to say, hey, what are your hours? Do you have any blue Hondas available? Today, when you call, You're not asking what their hours because it's right on their website. It's right on your phone. You're not calling if they have any blue Hondas because you've been online and you know, they have a Honda Accord available for at least $499. And you also know the total Camry dealership down the street has their Camry, which is an equivalent car for 189. So when you're calling the dealership now, you're calling to do business. Just like if you're calling a dealership to call the service department, you're not calling to say, hey, do do oil changes? You're calling for interactions. So end of the day things could move to text the gold sale Seal is is phone calls and if you ask a dealer a phone calls were ten times more any than any email text because I'm not committed to anything if I send you an email or text But if I'm gonna waste my time and pick up the phone Then I'm basically saying It's your chance to win me over and so that's why Every interaction is more important than ever before because there's so much optionality. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (23:56.803) Yeah, it's interesting the conversations we're having are changing. They're constantly evolving because of. you're not calling to you know does it have you know an automatic you already know you know they have the car inventories done pricing is almost done but it's yeah it's you're forming a personal relationship and there's no better place to do that on the phone and super interesting and congratulations again on the win we can't wait to see what you guys drive next into the automotive industry but really thank you for joining us Ben Chodor (24:07.421) Yeah, yeah, yep, yep. Ben Chodor (24:18.664) Thank you. Ben Chodor (24:27.19) Look, and if we don't win again next year, then was it even worth winning the first time, right? Russ Fordyce 🏆 (24:31.501) I'm in favor of repeat winners, so. Thanks, Ben. Ben Chodor (24:35.18) Yeah, Russ, I appreciate that this was great.