Dealership chatbot rollout checklist: Pricing levers, ops alignment & go‑live readiness

This dealership chatbot rollout checklist is a bottom‑funnel, action‑focused guide for procurement teams, sales‑ops leaders, and BDC managers planning a go‑live. Use it to align pricing levers, secure CRM data contracts, enable sales ops and BDC teams, and set day‑one guardrails so launch day runs smoothly.

1. Quick-start executive summary

Provide decision-makers with a one‑paragraph snapshot that lists the absolute must‑do items: pricing approval, signed data contracts, BDC training scheduled, QA signoffs, and the day‑1 dashboard owner. This short brief should call out go‑live readiness risks and the single person responsible for the final sign‑off so leaders can greenlight a launch or pause quickly.

2. Procurement: pricing levers & contract essentials

Negotiate pricing with clarity: define seat vs. event pricing, caps on monthly charges, and performance‑based credits for SLA misses. Use the dealership chatbot go‑live checklist mindset when building term sheets — include acceptance criteria, a pilot period, and termination clauses. For guidance on negotiation and documentation, reference how to set pricing levers during a dealership chatbot rollout (procurement checklist) so teams capture seat counts, surge pricing rules, and overage guardrails.

3. Stakeholder mapping & approvals

Map approvers across sales ops, BDC leadership, IT, legal, and finance. Create an approval workflow with sign‑off gates tied to procurement milestones and data contract completion. Explicitly assign who will approve CRM integration details so stakeholders understand responsibilities and the path to final acceptance.

4. Timeline & milestones (procurement → launch)

Build a week‑by‑week timeline that includes procurement milestones, integration sprints, and training blocks. Use a car dealer chatbot implementation checklist approach: define go/no‑go gates, contingency buffers for an extra compatibility sprint, and decision checkpoints for vendor readiness and internal resources. Call out critical-path dependencies — for example, CRM schema freezes and BDC staffing availability — so the schedule is realistic.

5. Data contracts & CRM integration checklist

Agree on a data contract that specifies event lists, required fields, PII handling, sync cadence, and error handling. The CRM integration & data contract section should include a data mapping matrix, test records for validation, and a rollback plan for failed syncs. Use the dealership chatbot data & CRM contract checklist + sGTM event QA for post‑launch monitoring to ensure your analytics and advertising events are covered and that the operations team knows who fixes mapping errors.

6. sGTM (server‑side GTM) & event QA

Define event naming conventions and tag governance before launch. Validate that sGTM events fire for lead capture, appointment booking, and escalations. Use the day‑1 go‑live readiness checklist for dealership chatbots — BDC training, dashboards, QA to align event QA with BDC readiness and dashboard monitoring so analytics and ads platforms receive accurate conversion data on launch day.

7. QA scripts & test matrices

Create canonical QA scripts that cover lead capture flows, scheduling, escalation to agents, and negative test cases. Build a test matrix with clear pass/fail criteria and regression checks to run before every deployment. Store test results, signoffs, and unresolved defects in a single tracker for transparency; include a regression checklist tied to each release so nothing is missed during follow‑up sprints.

8. Sales ops alignment & SLA definitions

Document routing rules, lead ownership timelines, and SLA metrics such as initial response time and number of contact attempts. The sales ops alignment section should outline reporting cadence for handoffs and include a lead routing SLA that vendors and BDC teams agree to ahead of launch. Be explicit about ownership: who owns an inbound lead after a bot handoff at 9:00 p.m. on a Saturday?

9. BDC training, scripts & day‑0 role plays

Prepare BDC training scripts and playbooks that include sample BDC scripts, escalation phrases, and objection responses. Run role‑play sessions for day‑0 readiness and confirm BDC staff can handle handoffs from the bot and flag issues. Short, focused role plays that simulate high‑volume windows or messy user input will shorten ramp time and reduce early‑stage dropoff.

10. Day‑1 dashboard setup & monitoring

Set up a monitoring dashboard that tracks leads, handoffs, bot containment rate, and failed escalations. Assign owners for each dashboard tile and configure alerting thresholds for unusually high failure rates. A go‑live QA/test matrix and monitoring dashboard gives teams immediate visibility to act on launch day anomalies and prevents small issues from becoming site‑wide problems.

11. Post‑launch guardrails & escalation paths (dealership chatbot rollout checklist)

Define short‑term rollback criteria, a tiered issue triage flow, and vendor support SLAs. Schedule 30‑, 60‑, and 90‑day reviews to evaluate performance against KPIs and pricing expectations. Refer back to this dealership chatbot rollout checklist when defining escalation templates and ensure rapid remediation channels are in place for critical defects.

12. Appendix: templates, test checklists & quick resources

Include copy/paste templates for a pricing term sheet, a CRM data contract checklist, a QA matrix, BDC script snippets, and a launch day runbook. Reference car dealer chatbot implementation checklist and auto dealership chatbot launch checklist examples to standardize future rollouts and speed procurement decisions. Keep these templates versioned in a shared folder so every rollout learns from the last one.