Gubagoo uses Amazon Translate to build translated live chat for automotive dealers

Gubagoo is the leading provider of advanced communication solutions for automotive dealers. Gubagoo understands that automotive customers want a personalized experience and helpful information whenever they purchase a car or book a service appointment. In addition, customers want to be communicated with in their native language. However, dealerships in the US have a difficult time crafting these communications since their staff typically speaks English only. To address this problem, Gubagoo offers a live chat solution called ChatSmart. A dealership can integrate ChatSmart with its website to manage initial customer conversations in multiple languages in real-time. To accomplish this ChatSmart uses Amazon Translate, a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, and affordable language translations.

The ChatSmart solution looks like this:

As more dealerships adopted ChatSmart, Gubagoo realized that more than 10 percent of conversations were in a language other than English. “By giving car shoppers the ability to communicate in their language of choice, we are able to reach more consumers and generate more leads for dealers,” said Ilia Alshanetsky, CTO of Gubagoo. “We realized that the most efficient way to do so is by seamlessly integrating our solution to a neural machine translation services provider.” Gubagoo tested a few different machine translation services and chose Amazon Translate because it consistently provided translation two times faster at 25 percent less cost than other solutions.

“With Amazon Translate, we can now successfully serve dealerships that sell to non-English speaking consumers,” continued Alshanetsky. “For example, we serve our dealership clients in Puerto Rico by managing any conversations initiated by Spanish speaking customers using Amazon Translate, of which 48 percent have converted into leads. The translation is so natural that it is difficult for consumers to tell that they are chatting with a non-Spanish speaker.”

When a customer initiates a conversation using the live chat, the Amazon Comprehend Language Detection API recognizes the language used by the customer. When texts are in English, no translations are required. If these texts are in a language other than English, the Amazon Translate API will translate the texts into English and deliver them to the chat specialist. When the chat specialist types back in English, the Translate API will translate these responses and provide the texts in customer’s preferred language.

Here is an illustration of this workflow:

Example: ChatSmart and Amazon Translate work together

For example, here is how the family-owned-and-operated Mississauga Toyota dealership is using ChatSmart integrated with Amazon Translate. As soon as I enter their online site, I’m greeted by Sophia. See the bottom-right corner of the following screenshot.

I decided to ask, “I want to buy a used car” in French. Within a few seconds, I got two replies back in French from Shane! See Shane’s responses in the bottom-right corner of the following screenshot.

• “Salut, je m’appelle Shane. C’est génial de vous avoir avec nous!”, which means “Hi, my name is Shane. It’s great to have you with us!” in English.
• “Je serais heureux de vous aider. Avez-vous un modèle spécifique à l’esprit?”, which means, “I would be happy to help you. Do you have a specific model in mind?” in English.

“To us the ROI is clear. The amount we spend on Amazon Translate is recouped many times over in terms of the revenue and flexibility we can offer to our customers,” stated Alshanetsky. “This is also just the beginning. Amazon Translate is opening the door to new business opportunities both locally and abroad allowing us to connect with a wider range of customers, which are in some cases underserved.”

About the Author

Woo Kim is a Product Marketing Manager for AWS machine learning services. He spent his childhood in South Korea and now lives in Seattle, WA. In his spare time, he enjoys playing volleyball and tennis.