Case Study: America’s Car‑Mart achieves centralized customer communications and faster lead conversion with Podium

How America’s Car-Mart got five departments working as one

America’s Car-Mart, a 150-location buy-here-pay-here dealer serving many customers who’ve experienced financial distress, was losing prospects to outdated, fragmented communication — customers had to call or visit, short-code texts were non-replyable, and many felt uncomfortable discussing sensitive finances in person. After evaluating Podium, they adopted its messaging platform (two-way texting, webchat, shared inbox and text payments) to give customers an anonymous, convenient way to start conversations.

With Podium, America’s Car-Mart centralized lead intake into a new Customer Experience department that fields and routes inquiries from car-mart.com, Google, Facebook and other channels, enabling consistent two-way texting, payments-by-text, and faster follow-up. The change generated 63k total messaging conversations, 21k inbound webchat leads and 1k reviews collected, cut response times to minutes/hours, helped collections recover delinquency levels in about 2.5 weeks, and aligned Marketing, Sales, IT, Collections and CX into one coordinated workflow.

America’s Car-Mart

Brad Tomlin

Director of IT