CarGurus Dials In Customer Success With Twilio Click-to-Call

CarGurus Dials In Customer Success With Twilio Click-to-Call

Searching for a new car can be a daunting process. CarGurus is making automotive shopping easier by connecting prospective buyers with the best car deals and the best car dealers. Now the 6th largest and fastest automotive shopping website in the nation, they’re using Twilio to track phone leads and allow their customers to call dealers directly from their browser. Since launching their secure-click-to-call and SMS platform earlier this year, CarGurus users have made over 244,576 calls and sent over 462,000 texts with no signs of slowing down.

Earlier this year they noticed a new way to make the buying process easier both for customers and dealerships — direct dialing from the browser.

Using Twilio, CarGurus built a secure click-to-call feature that allows them to easily track user success and lead generation. Now CarGurus can measure exactly how many prospective customers they’re sending to dealerships. Their Twilio integration lets users call dealerships from their browser, securely and immediately. The feature also incorporates a call “whisper” from CarGurus for the dealership, which identifies the car they customer is calling about.

“Twilio made it a snap to implement Click-to-Call,” says CarGurus developer Jasper Rosenberg, who built the feature. It took Jasper just a few days to build the prototype using Twilio’s REST API. The first version of the product allowed users to call a dealer via a Twilio hosted phone number. Once the dealer picked up, users received a call on their phone from Twilio, connecting them to the dealer. But the product wasn’t finished. CarGurus wanted to be sure customer phone numbers were safe, so Jasper added phone verification to the app. The final version of the product prompts users to authorize their phone number before they can make outbound calls.

After the quick build process, CarGurus used their spare time to record their own custom voice prompts. “We found it was quite amusing to make other developers’ phones ring as we tested the different dealer/customer handoffs and error conditions. You can also hear the voices of several CarGurus employees on the various phone prompts,” said Jasper.

Since implementing Click-to-Call, the CarGurus team has built other Twilio-powered features such as Send-to-Phone, which enables users to send car listing URLs directly to their phone via SMS. They’ve sent over 462,000 texts to date. In addition, CarGurus is now using a Twilio-powered tool to create custom inbound sales numbers that are targeted by region. This lets the sales team see critical stats on which dealerships are responding to marketing campaigns.

CarGurus now helps more than 7 million unique visitors a month shop for cars. They continue to work with Twilio to add more dealerships to their database and to develop exciting new features.

Learn more about CarGurus here