Dealership after hours lead response means a real answer at 10 p.m., not an autoresponder promising a call tomorrow. Cloodot's AI agent replies on your website chat, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and email the moment a shopper writes, collects what sales needs, and has the lead waiting, labeled and prioritized, when the store opens.
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01The problem
People shop for cars after work. The question about a white hybrid comes in through the website chat at 10:12 p.m., a Messenger message about lease terms lands on Sunday afternoon, and an Instagram DM asks about a trade-in during the late game. Your BDC opens at 9 a.m., and an autoresponder that says "we'll get back to you" is the kind of reply shoppers learn to ignore.
Overnight leads also arrive with nothing attached. In the morning the team works a pile of "is this available?" messages with no names, no timelines and no phone numbers, and spends the first hour of the day asking questions the shopper would happily have answered last night.
The shoppers did not stop shopping while you were closed. They messaged the next store too, and whoever answered properly first is now the one they plan to visit.
02How it works
Set your business hours and time zone in Cloodot, and the AI agent knows when your team is in. It replies to every new message on every connected channel at any hour, and sets honest expectations: the sales team is back at 9 a.m., and in the meantime it can answer questions and note a time that suits for a visit. Alicia gets the answer about the white hybrid and a suggested morning appointment, not a promise of a callback.
A procedure tells the agent what to collect before the night is over: the vehicle she wants, a trade-in, whether she is financing, when she can come in, and a phone number. Custom fields capture those answers, and labels such as Hot lead or Trade-in are applied automatically. If she goes quiet, the agent can follow up after a delay you choose.
Anything that needs a person gets one in the morning, in order. Every handover carries a priority from No priority to Urgent, so the BDC can sort the inbox and start with the shopper ready to visit today. With auto-assignment set to skip teammates who are Away, overnight handovers wait in the queue instead of landing on someone asleep, and route as soon as reps set themselves Available.
For the rare message that cannot wait, such as a customer locked out of a car they bought yesterday, a workflow can send the on-call manager a push notification.
03What it does
Your weekly schedule and time zone, which the agent uses to tell shoppers when a person will be back and to set expectations honestly.
Website chat, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and email arrive in one queue, answered by the same agent with the same rules.
Explore Unified inboxEvery handover is rated from No priority to Urgent with the reason recorded, so the morning queue sorts itself.
Explore AI agentRound robin that can skip anyone Away or Busy and cap open conversations per rep, so overnight leads are shared out fairly at opening.
An in-app and push alert to a named manager for the few messages your rules say cannot wait until morning.
04Setup
5 steps
In Settings, open Organization, then Business Hours, pick your time zone and set each day's opening and closing times.
Add your website chat widget, Facebook Page, Instagram account and, if you use them, WhatsApp and a forwarded sales email.
Write a procedure for vehicle inquiries that asks for the vehicle, trade-in, financing, visit time and phone number, and add the matching custom fields and labels.
Write handover rules, then a workflow on the Label Added trigger that notifies the on-call manager only when a Manager now label is applied.
Turn on auto-assignment with Only teammates who are Available, so overnight handovers route as reps sign in.
05Who it’s for
US franchise and independent dealerships whose online leads arrive after the BDC has gone home, whether that is a single store in Columbus or a group around Portland, Oregon.
It is meant for internet sales managers and BDC leads who want the morning to start with qualified conversations instead of a stack of unanswered questions.
06Results
Enquiries that came in after closing used to wait for the next working day. Since Cloodot took the first reply, Indus Motors reports a 100% first-response rate including nights and weekends, and 3.2× more test-drive bookings from WhatsApp.
07FAQ
Most use an autoresponder, an answering service, or nothing until morning. An AI agent goes further: it answers the actual question, captures the details sales needs and books a time to visit, then hands a qualified lead to the team at opening. Cloodot's agent does this across web chat, social messaging, WhatsApp and email.
You decide how the agent introduces itself through its name, greeting and instructions. Many stores have it say plainly that it is the dealership's assistant and that the sales team is back at opening. Being clear about that tends to build trust rather than lose leads.
Write that into the handover rules. The agent can explain that a manager will confirm pricing in the morning, capture the shopper's details and pass the conversation over with a priority, rather than inventing a number. Questions it could not answer also collect under FAQs for you to fill in.
Yes. The same agent can answer service questions after hours from your service information, such as opening times, what a maintenance visit includes or how to book one. Those conversations can be labeled and routed to the service team's own inbox instead of sales, so the service advisors find them waiting at opening.
Cloodot plans include a monthly allowance of AI replies, counted as one message credit each time the agent answers a customer; messages your team answers draw nothing. Meta bills its own WhatsApp charges directly. See the pricing page for current plans and the free trial.
Test drive requests that end in a booked slot, not a missed chat.
Instagram DMs that turn into leads your sales team can call.
Every ad click answered with the model the buyer tapped on.
Service bookings that arrive with the car, the kilometres and the complaint.
Service reminders that name the car and book the reply.
EMI questions answered from your terms, then passed to finance.
Start free. Train a Cloodot agent on your own docs, your own tone, your own tools, and you'll walk away with a working deployment in your inbox the same afternoon.