As an online car auction house, quality-assuring the new and used cars listed on their site is central to maintaining Carwow’s reputation. It’s also essential to keep customers returning to use their service and generate revenue.
With thousands of cars being uploaded onto the site by members of the public every day, it was a challenge for Carwow’s team to keep on top of these tasks. Equipped with the CX tool, Direct Affinity agents stepped in to help.
What did Carwow need?
Carwow acquired an online car buying-and-selling competitor in 2021. This helped them expand the capabilities of their comparison tool to offer customers multiple vehicle deals from each search instead of just one. It also meant they could reach out to dealer partners directly with used car offers.
These changes led to a huge growth in the amount of listings made via their ‘Sell Your Car’ feature. As a result, reviewing all of these listings to make sure the vehicles have an accurate condition description and valuation became a huge challenge. To streamline this process and get extra support, Carwow turned to the Direct Affinity team.
How did our team help them?
To help Carwow maintain the quality and fair pricing of their car listings, the team used a combination of highly-trained agents and integrated technologies.
Working closely with the internal team, our CX agents gained a thorough understanding of their pre-qualification process. Using this knowledge, Direct Affinity developed a new integrated solution alongside Carwow’s technology team to leverage the data from their platform.
This gave our agents access to all the listing information they needed and meant they could quickly identify the elements that needed verifying before a vehicle was approved for auction. If a listing was flagged as needing extra verification, our agents would look at the information and make an outbound call to the seller to make the relevant checks.
This process ran seven days a week and meant thousands of car listings could be quality-checked and approved for auction more easily.
The new technology solution also helped achieve more accurate pricing on car listings. By reviewing historical sales data, it could generate a suggested reserve price that would make dealers and buyers most likely to bid.
With the holistic combination of agent support and the CX tool, the Direct Affinity team helped Carwow maintain the quality of listings at a high volume. This made the selling process easier for customers and made the car deals more attractive to dealers.
What were the results?
This project began in October 2021 and the first calls were made in December 2021. Between January and December 2023, our agents made more than half a million calls and approved nearly 130,000 vehicles for auction. This had the equivalent value of £1.6bn. Across 2023, this translated to a 68% increase in used vehicle sales via the platform.
As Operations Director for Carwow Joana Fernandes said, “Direct Affinity CX has worked with us from the introduction of our car-selling service. They’ve been a great partner, using their experience and holistic approach to help us shape our consumer journey, making it easy and enjoyable to use.”
