Discover the potential of Azure OpenAI Service in car selling – A CarMax success story
Retail companies are already implementing generative AI solutions to improve their business. CarMax offers a good example of how to successfully integrate this technology to deliver a better service to customers.
The organization
Founded in 1993, CarMax is now the largest used car retailer in the United States, and has sold more than 11 million vehicles. Now, they have more than 45,000 cars available at any time.
The CarMax business model focuses on customers’ needs and innovation. It combines online, offline, and blended retail business lines. Their goal is to make the process of buying a car hassle-free and enjoyable.
The challenge
The company’s sales greatly depend on reaching leads via engine search results. To ensure a good position in searches, the website requires much information, such as inventory details, sales tools, summaries, and reviews. Content developers and marketing professionals need to invest much time writing and publishing these materials.
Car reviews play an increasingly important role when buying a car, because leads want to read the opinion of real buyers. However, the popularity of reviews is paradoxically becoming a hindrance. There are now so many reviews that reading them for useful information is overwhelming.
To solve this problem, they decided to summarize customers’ reviews. They resolved to try this approach in 5,000 car pages. At their usual pace, the process would take 11 years. CarMax needed to automate the process to improve productivity.
The solution
CarMax realized that generative AI could solve their problems with content development. They developed a solution built on Azure OpenAI Service, which uses state-of-the-art ChatGPT models.
The first initiative focused on summarizing customer reviews. Furthermore, they’re also using Azure OpenAI Service to generate web content including relevant keywords to boost their search engine rankings.
CarMax relied on Azure OpenAI Service because of the robustness of the Microsoft Azure ecosystem. Given the vast number of car pages they already had, it was crucial that the platform was easily scalable. CarMax also valued the security, protection, and adherence to responsible AI practices that Azure entails.
The results
Incorporating Azure OpenAI Service into the company’s processes has boosted efficiency. While the traditional approach meant 11 years of work to summarize customer reviews, the new process summarized customer reviews in just a few months. After some fine tuning, the quality obtained was also satisfactory, as the resulting materials had an 80 percent editorial approval rate. This increase in productivity frees editorial staff to focus on strategic, longer-form pieces.
In parallel, their search engine rankings are peaking thanks to incorporating generative AI into their marketing strategy. As a result, more traffic is driven to CarMax’s website.
To learn more, read CarMax puts customers first with car research tools powered by Azure OpenAI Service.
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