How AI Can Help Dealers Speak Customers’ Language

Carfluent offers dealers a way to reach Spanish-speaking consumers by creating a bilingual search option using artificial intelligence.

Those consumers have significant purchasing power. Latinos account for 19.5% of the U.S. population and, according to the 2024 LDC U.S. Latino GDP Report issued by Arizona State University’s Latino Donor Collaborative group, the U.S. Latino gross domestic product was $3.6 trillion in 2022, the most recent year available, up 13% on 2021.

According to the National Automobile Dealers Assn.n, Latinos account for 18% of U.S. new-vehicle purchases.

Carfluent in November hired auto industry veteran Aaron Schinke as its chief growth officer to help guide its expansion. He previously worked at DealerSocket and DealerFire, among other firms.

Schinke spoke with WardsAuto about the importance to a dealership’s business of offering Spanish-language information and the strengths he brings to his new job. An edited version of the conversation follows.

WardsAuto: How does Carfluent help a dealership market to Spanish-speaking customers?

Schinke: The most essential way is offering customers a bilingual dealership experience, particularly inventory searching and browsing. Most dealerships don’t have this, or they use Google Translate to create it.

WardsAuto: Isn’t having a bilingual search page just one part of the buying experience? Don’t dealers need to offer a smooth online to offline bilingual experience?

Schinke: Absolutely. A bilingual site is the leading edge. What’s next is ensuring the rest of the process can go smoothly. Every dealership should be hiring Spanish-speaking staff to provide a one-to-one experience. It is similar to the digital retail paradigm shift, when we could use digital to do part of the deal, and customers would show up at the dealership, and the dealers would have no idea who they were.

All of our dealerships we have today, with Customer Relationship Management technology, we can try to route these leads to a Spanish speaker.

WardsAuto: I wrote about Carfluent about a year ago, focusing on its use at the Cavender Auto Group in San Antonio. How has Carfluent evolved since then?

Schinke: We’ve evolved on two paths. One is the language learning model itself. We feed it data and the more dealerships and interactions with customers’ data we give it, the better it gets.

We are also working with our website designer to optimize the experience itself, to convey important aspects to the buyer in a way that makes sense to them. From a dealer perspective, we are also trying to optimize it for output and conversion.

WardsAuto: Do you worry about the AI translation being wrong, offensive or inappropriate?

Schinke: We think about it. But (the information) is automotive specific, contextually specific. We do have Spanish-speaking people who read through it (as well). It is not a huge worry, but it is something we want to prevent and protect from. It is still finding the happy medium regarding specific turns of phrase with different country and area dialects.

Wards Auto: How important is bilingual marketing to a dealership’s overall business growth?

Schinke: For their status quo, not too important, but for growth – we are all just trading customers. (Dealerships without a bilingual search function) don’t have access to this market because they literally don’t speak their language. It is a first-mover advantage.

WardsAuto: In the press release, Carfluent CEO Chance Mayfield says his company is poised for significant growth. Why is it poised for significant growth?

Schinke: The market itself is showing signs of being ready and willing. The automotive market spend is reaching a point of diminishing returns. It is time to become more efficient in the use of those funds to reach a different part of the market. There are more pages being put out there, the demand is there. It just requires more education on why it is important to go one step further.

WardsAuto: What skill set do you bring that makes you the right person for this job?

Schinke:  My background is educationally and experientially between product and marketing, but my work experience is mostly in the automotive sector. Finding a new medium and a way to communicate in it is my background. Taking that lens and applying it to Carfluent makes perfect sense.  

WardsAuto: What other languages is Carfluent working in, and where do you see growth?

Schinke: It is still just Spanish. We have talked about expanding, but right now, in the U.S., the Spanish-speaking segment is the biggest by far and the most important in increasing the scope of the experience. We will probably go deeper with Spanish before we spread out to other languages.

Schinke is chief growth officer at Carfluent.