The expectation gap between RV shopper and dealer
So you're RV shopping on a dealer's website. Then you come across the perfect RV. You look carefully through the listing and the photos and have a couple questions, so you send them a message.
Moments later, you get an email from an automated system that tries to get you to schedule a visit.
Ten minutes later you get another email (this time presumably from a human, though still automated) asking if you want to schedule an appointment or if you're looking for more information about the unit, along with a link to the dealer's credit pre-approval form.
A day later, a follow-up comes in from the automated "AI agent", then a day after that another automated email from the Internet Director with their phone number.
Meanwhile, no one has yet to answer your questions from your original inquiry.
This isn't a hypothetical – this is a real-life scenario that happens hundreds of times a day where the RV shopper asks for one thing and the dealer fails to meet the customer where they're at.
I know this because these types of conversations pass through the RV Envy Deal Portal that facilitates communication between RV shoppers and dealers – and this happens all the time.
There are a couple ways to look at this.
From the dealer's perspective: "If the shopper was serious, they'd stop by the lot, schedule an appointment, or pick up the phone and call."
From the shopper's perspective: "I asked a couple simple questions about the listing. If the dealer can't be bothered to read my message and give me the courtesy of a reply, I'll keep shopping around until I find a dealer who treats me like a human."
The reality is that this is a broken system. The dealer doesn't meet the shopper's expectation, which leads the dealer to be pessimistic about the quality of leads submitted online, and the shopper likely doesn't realize the volume of non-responses the dealership deals with on a daily basis.
If you've ever sold something on Facebook Marketplace, you've likely received many messages with the default text of, "Is this still available?" Then you reply and of course get no response. It's frustrating!
Now imagine being an RV dealer and getting these types of vague messages and no follow-up responses on a much larger scale.
To help with this, RV dealers have employed different tactics like hiring Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) whose sole job is to qualify the shopper. If they get enough positive signals, the SDR passes the lead on to a sales rep.
More recently, dealers have been using AI tools who act like automated SDRs. They even give them human names. In some cases it's made clear it's an AI bot, in other cases the dealer tries to disguise it as a real-life human.
In both scenarios, the use of automation leads to the shopper receiving a flood of emails, text messages, and sometimes phone calls. And no one on this front line – whether SDR or AI tool – are in a position to answer specific questions shoppers have about individual units.
You're unlikely to get a $14/hr SDR to physically walk out to a unit to get an answer to a shopper's question – and if the shopper doesn't feel like they're valued, they're likely never going to reach the qualified stage where they'll be passed along to a human who will actually help.
Classic chicken vs. egg problem. The two parties are talking past each other, and there's no winner in this situation.
What we're doing about this
RV Envy's mission is to build a better experience for the RV shopper. Sometimes this means taking a stand against certain dealer tactics that have become industry-standard. But RV Envy wins when both sides have a successful outcome – and the two aren't mutually-exclusive.
How we help RV shoppers
The RV Envy Deal Portal already filters out automatic, unpersonalized responses from dealers. This massively cuts down on the noise of low-value follow-up messages.
The Deal Portal also lets RV shoppers manage conversations with different dealers all in one place. It's the most organized way to manage different conversations about different units. No more questions like, "Remind me which dealer you're with?" or "Which unit of yours was I looking at?" All the information is right there, attached to the entire conversation history.
But RV shoppers often don't realize they're in the position to make it easier for the dealer to take them seriously. The reason dealers employ SDRs and AI tools is because they need to understand the shopper's individual scenario to determine where to route them – things like if they have a trade-in, what their down payment might look like, their credit tier, and the time frame in which they're looking to make a purchase.
So that's why RV Envy helps shoppers create a buyer's profile that can easily be shared with dealers when shoppers have questions.
All of this information isn't typically something an RV shopper thinks about sharing up front – and a dealer doesn't ask these questions up front because they just want to get the shopper's contact info so they can follow up. But this context is exactly the information dealers need to determine how to handle the customer.
How we help RV dealers
When a shopper sends a message to a dealer through RV Envy, we're able to supply the dealer with all of this relevant context. The customer fills it out once, RV Envy supplies it to any dealer where the customer expresses interest in a unit.
When shoppers arrive by way of RV Envy, there's little need to extract a shopper's info by way of SDRs, AI tools, and automated marketing sequences. The context is already there.
By qualifying the customer on the dealer's behalf, RV Envy eliminates a ton of the friction that tends to gate-keep the relevant dealer staff from the customer.
This means qualified leads can bypass the front lines of the dealer and go straight to a sales rep – if not a sales manager who can determine the best person for the shopper to speak with based off the provided signals.
How we got here
Lead qualification is an age-old problem – this isn't specific to the RV industry. Any sales org who gets some level of interest from a customer follows a similar playbook. We have an entire ecosystem of tools dedicated to replacing human interaction so it can operate at scale. Can't fault anyone for that.
But the communication gap between RV shoppers and dealers is exacerbated by a lack of effort on both sides. Existing tools are only band-aids. They treat the symptom, not the root cause.
It's time to rip off the band-aid.
The reality is that no one has taken a step back and re-thought how to 10x the RV buying process. And that's what RV Envy is all about.
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