Chad Bockius

Automotive dealers have relied on market information to make appraisal and pricing decisions for years. Unfortunately, the leading solutions on the market all rely on simple averages, providing the same data to every dealer. CarStory’ Inventory Intelligence Solution changed the game by introducing dealer-specific predictions. For the first time, dealers can know what a car will sell for and how long it will take. Armed with this insight, dealers can make more profitable decisions in a market facing significant margin compression.

This application is a combination of iOS and Android mobile apps, as well as a responsive web interface. One of the significant challenges was giving dealers an easy way to assess their inventory across hundreds of vehicles. Our solution was a patent-pending interface that delivers every key data point in a skimmable UI.

Leveraging the latest machine learning techniques, the predictive models get smarter every day as the system processes more details across the dealer customers.

Around 2008, the ratings and reviews were starting to go mainstream. Unfortunately, most products didn’t have any reviews and for those that did, the volume was quite low. The research clearly showed that the more reviews a product had, the better it sold. To combat this problem, I created and spearheaded the development of a product called BrandVoice. The solution syndicated reviews and product answers from the manufacturers of products out to retailers.

The impact on a manufacturer’s and retailer’s business was fast and very significant:
• Retailers saw a more than 20% increase in conversion on products with syndicated reviews.
• Products that had a critical mass of answers saw an 80% drop in support calls.
• Products that had multiple answers saw a more than 200% increase in conversion.

Beyond helping consumers make buying decisions, this platform created a massive point of differentiation for the business. This differentiation helped increase close rates of new manufacturers, retailers and keep churn low for existing customers.

In 2009, as social networks were gaining steam, more and more businesses uses were being identified. Unfortunately, due to compliance issues, regulated financial services companies closed off access to prevent government fines.

The first product we created—Socialware Compass—solved the compliance problem by managing access controls for thousands of regulated employees and ensuring all the necessary content was archived.

After becoming the category leader in this space, we tackled the next opportunity, making our end users, such as financial advisors and insurance agents, more effective with social media. The combined platform helped us sign Morgan Stanley which is still the largest deployment in the industry with over 150,000 users.

Beyond creating numerous patented innovations, this solution required deep collaboration with our partners, like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Symantec. It also called for significant education of the key regulators in the industry to help them understand the opportunities and dangers of using social media for financial services.

Automotive marketplaces are nothing new. Our goal with this project was to innovate in multiple areas to drive a more usable, intuitive, and faster shopping experience. Unlike traditional marketplaces, CarStory is a mobile-first platform that connects buyers and sellers throughout the entire purchase experience.

The project resulted in a number of inventory firsts:
• A patented discovery experience to quickly find a great match.
• Shopping by proprietary vehicle and market insights.
• An integrated, chatbot platform to quickly connect consumers to dealers

The increases in traffic, conversion, and speed highlighted above were all measured from the existing platform deployed used across multiple enterprise clients.

This application is a combination of iOS and Android mobile apps as well as a responsive web interface. The project included a massive data science investment to drive the vehicle and market analytics, the recommendation engine and conversation optimization. The design and approach were informed through months of user research and testing to ensure the innovations were well understood and valuable for the shopping process.