An Automated Reply System for a Car Dealership in Iraq

The questions a dealership actually gets

A car dealership in Erbil or Baghdad does not receive “enquiries”. It receives the same short list of questions, over and over, at every hour of the day, in Iraqi Arabic, in Kurdish Sorani, sometimes in English, and very often as a voice note recorded while the person is standing in somebody else’s showroom.

Here is the list, in roughly the order it arrives.

Read the third column twice. Only some of these should ever be answered by a machine, and the value of the system is in knowing the difference.

“Is this car still available?”

This is the message dealerships report receiving most often, and the least rewarding one to answer by hand. A car you listed three weeks ago and sold last Thursday keeps collecting messages for months. Every one of those messages sits in the inbox looking identical to a message about a car you still have.

An automated reply answers this in seconds, at 02:00, on a Friday, in the language the person wrote in. If the unit is sold, it says so and offers the two closest matches you still hold. If it is available, it confirms and moves to the next useful question, which is almost always the price or the visit.

The connection that makes this work is a stock list you keep updated. If your stock lives in a notebook, the system cannot read it. Getting the stock into one sheet is usually the first week of work, and it is worth doing even if you never automate anything else.

“What is the final price?”

Every dealership handles this differently, so the system has to be told which way you want it handled. There are three workable rules:

1. Publish the asking price and say the final figure is agreed at the showroom.
2. Publish the asking price and a floor, and let the system confirm anything at or above the floor.
3. Publish nothing and collect the person’s number for a callback.

Option three asks the buyer to wait for you. Option two lets the conversation carry on without you. The system never negotiates below the floor you set, and it never invents a discount to keep a conversation alive.

This is also the thing a general-purpose assistant cannot do for you. Meta Business Agent became globally available on WhatsApp Business and Instagram DMs on 3 June 2026 and answers general questions at no cost. It does not know your floor price, your stock, or which unit cleared customs last week. That gap is the reason a built system exists, and it is the same gap covered on our Instagram DM and Messenger automation page.

“Is it customs cleared?”

In Iraq this question tends to carry more weight than mileage. A buyer who asks it is usually guarding against a problem they have seen before, or heard about from someone who lived it.

The system should answer it per unit, from a field you maintain, in plain words: cleared, or not cleared, plus what the buyer would be responsible for. It should never guess, and it should never soften a “not cleared” into something vague. If the field is empty for that car, the correct behaviour is to say the status is being checked and pass the conversation to you, not to produce a confident sentence.

Mileage and accident history

Mileage is straightforward: state the number and state where it came from, for example the reading at intake or the figure on the inspection sheet.

Accident history is not straightforward, and it is where an automated setup can do real damage. The system should state only what is written in your own record for that unit. Anything beyond that, including the phrase “no accidents”, is a claim you are making about a car. That claim belongs to a person, not to software. We build the accident question as a mandatory handover: the system gives the recorded facts and tells the buyer that a member of the team will confirm the rest.

Trade-in

A trade-in question is a strong signal and a weak conversation. Nobody can value a car from three sentences at midnight.

What the system does well is collect the inputs before you wake up: make, model, year, mileage, colour, gearbox, whether it is customs cleared, and three photos. By the time you open the inbox you have a file instead of a question. The valuation stays with you.

Financing

Say only what is true for your dealership. If you offer instalments through a specific arrangement, the system explains the terms you have approved in writing and nothing else. If you do not offer financing, it says so directly and offers to note the buyer’s budget instead of leaving them to guess.

Financing questions are the ones you most want to reach a human quickly, which brings us to the part that matters most.

Lead scoring: a finance question at 23:00 is not a mileage question

Two messages arrive twenty minutes apart. One asks the mileage on a 2019 saloon. One asks whether you do instalments on the same car and how much per month. Treated identically, they both sit in a queue. Treated correctly, the second one lights up a phone.

Lead scoring is the rule that decides which conversations are allowed to interrupt you. Here is a starting set for a dealership. The exact weights get tuned to your stock and your closing pattern over the first month.

Score on its own is not the point. Routing is. A high score outside working hours produces a notification to the salesperson on duty and a message to the buyer saying a named person will reply in the morning, with the time stated. A low score gets a complete, useful answer and interrupts nobody. The mechanics of that routing are set out in the score and route leads automatically entry.

One honest caveat. We have not found a published study of after-hours message volume for Iraqi car dealerships, so any percentage you are quoted for that is unverified. What is documented: Instagram’s potential advertising reach in Iraq was 21.5 million people, 45.4 percent of the population, according to DataReportal Digital 2026 Iraq, data snapshot October 2025. The audience is on the platform. Whether your own night messages are worth catching is something a thirty-day log of your inbox will tell you better than any statistic.

What the system will not do

• It will not remove the AI disclosure. Every conversation opens by telling the customer they are speaking with an automated assistant. Clients ask for this to be taken out. The answer is always no.
• It will not confirm accident history it cannot source.
• It will not go below the price floor you set.
• It will not replace a salesperson. It is built to carry the opening messages, so your team joins the conversation once the buyer has named a car and a question.

What it costs

These are the published prices. There is no separate dealership rate.

Growth is the right tier for most dealerships, because a dealership needs the stock connection and the lead scoring, not only a set of prepared replies. Starter suits a small lot with under thirty units and a simple price rule. Pro is for multiple branches, or for stock that has to be read live. What each tier includes is listed on the published rate card.

Where to start

Start on Instagram DM and Messenger. Neither carries a Meta per-message fee, and neither requires paperwork before you can switch it on. WhatsApp needs business verification with registration documents, so it is the second step rather than the first, and that process is set out on the WhatsApp automation page.

Before anything is built, three things need to exist on your side: one stock list with a status field per unit, one written price rule, and one named person who receives the high-score leads. A dealership that brings those three to the first meeting starts inside the build times on the rate card above. A dealership that does not adds weeks before the build can begin, and the delay is not the software.