How Alpha Drive uses Bland to make dealerships more money

For more than ten years, Alpha Drive has answered the phones for automotive dealerships selling brands like BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Toyota, so their staff can focus on helping in-store customers. Today it adds around 30 new dealerships every month.

When voice AI arrived, Alpha Drive saw a way to take on more calls than its human agents ever could. If AI handled the routine calls, its team could focus on the complex cases, and dealership staff could keep handling the customers in front of them.

About two years ago, Alpha Drive built an AI solution with another vendor. The issues showed up quickly. Every dealership ended up with its own custom agent, so 300 dealerships were running 300 different AI agents. Callers ran into latency and awkward delays, and the agents didn't sound conversational.

Alpha Drive couldn't afford for these calls to go wrong. If an agent gives a caller the wrong hours and they show up to a closed dealership, the dealer could lose a customer worth up to $60,000 in lifetime value. And as Alpha Drive expands into recall outreach, a single wrong statement could put them on the hook with the federal government.

"We knew that the solution we were on wasn't realistically scalable," said Derek Alfonso, VP of AI Engineering at Alpha Drive. "I had to find a different solution."

Alpha Drive didn't need just another vendor. They needed the best voice AI platform: one that could scale across hundreds of dealerships without sacrificing accuracy.

Alpha Drive evaluated other voice AI platforms like Brainbase, Vapi, and Retell. Bland brought the best technology, the strongest security, and a true partnership.

"Bland is the only platform that can give us one truly conversational voice across every channel: calls, texts, email, inbound, and outbound," Derek said. "That's not something a Retell or a Vapi is going to do."

As a call center serving hundreds of dealerships, Alpha Drive needed one agent it could manage centrally but customize for each store. On Bland, a single agent covers the entire dealer base, loading each dealership's hours, transfer rules, and scheduling system at the start of every call. Callers identify themselves and their vehicle, talk through the problem, pick a time, and arrange transportation. When a call needs a person, the agent routes it to the right service advisor or BDC based on that dealership's rules.

This approach gives Alpha Drive the flexibility it needs. Adding or updating a dealership no longer means building or rebuilding a bot. It means changing a configuration, and every improvement to the agent reaches every dealership at once.

"I have not found a test call where we are not answering things that are in the dealer config correctly," Derek explained. "Not one."

Powering these calls is technology Bland owns end to end. Unlike platforms that stitch together multiple vendors, Bland is the only voice AI platform that self-hosts its entire stack, which gives Alpha Drive predictable performance on every call. For Alpha Drive, that level of control was a deciding factor, and Bland's FedRAMP certification gives its customers confidence too.

"Our customers light up when we tell them we're built on the only FedRAMP-certified voice AI platform," he said. "It shows we take their security as seriously as they do."

The final piece was the people. When Alpha Drive needed to switch solutions quickly, Bland's delivery team worked alongside its engineers to move their customers onto Bland overnight.

"Bland doesn't just have the best technology, they have the best implementation team," Derek said. "We couldn't have migrated overnight without this team."

With Bland, Alpha Drive now answers more than 12,000 calls in a day. In the last 30 days alone, its agents booked more than 44,000 service appointments for its dealerships. Its dealers now earn 18% more per repair order on average: customer-pay orders rose from $494 to $582.92, and warranty orders from $551 to $650.18.

"For our customers, missed calls are how they can lose tens of thousands of dollars of revenue every single day," Derek said. "Now they're not losing that revenue, and Bland is making that possible."

Alpha Drive also has full visibility into each call. Through Bland's API, MCP server, and real-time call data, the team can track every booking from first ring to confirmed reservation and get under the hood of any single call.

That visibility has changed how Alpha Drive supports its dealerships. The team can see exactly where callers drop off, trace issues to their cause, and ship a fix ASAP.

It has also changed how Alpha Drive proves its impact. With Bland's API, Alpha Drive can build analytics to show each dealer how many appointments their agent booked and the revenue those bookings brought in. The agent handles the high-volume, routine calls, and service advisors stay focused on the customers in front of them.

Alpha Drive needed a voice AI partner it could stake its business on, and chose Bland. Now Alpha Drive answers every call for its customers, proves its value in revenue, and scales seamlessly as it adds dealerships.

"We deliver better results to our customers than we ever could before," said Vince Lamartina, Managing Partner at Alpha Drive. "If you want to make your customers happy, build on Bland."