Triumph Cleveland, Ohio's flagship Triumph dealer, was answering every after-hours inquiry with a single static message that tried to cover seven questions at once. GM Scott Janca deployed Ekho's AI Sales Agent, named Mick, across the store's website chat and SMS. Across the last 90 days the agent handled 75% of conversations with no human handoff and converted 37% into an identified lead. Since the site-wide rollout that is worth about 240 hours of staff time in six weeks, an annualized $54,000 of coverage the store never has to buy, or just over one full-time BDC head.
The Results
Triumph Cleveland runs an AI Sales Agent called Mick across the store’s website chat and SMS. Across the last 90 days, 75% of the conversations arriving on those two channels were handled by the agent with no human handoff at all, and 37% converted into an identified lead, meaning Mick gathered the rider’s name and contact information and handed the team a real person to work rather than an anonymous session that bounced at midnight. In a recent 30-day window alone, more than 900 conversations came through.
What that is worth in staff hours
Since the rollout went site-wide, more than 1,000 conversations have come through the agent. Mick closed out about 785 of them on his own. The remaining 260 or so reached a person, but they arrived with the question already identified, the context already gathered and the contact already captured, which Scott estimates resolves them about three times faster than starting cold the next morning.
That comes to about 240 hours of staff time in six weeks1, and at the current run rate roughly $54,000 a year of coverage the store never has to buy: just over one full-time BDC head2. It is the coverage nobody wants to staff: nights, weekends, and the 2 AM parts question from three states away.
Triumph Cleveland went from contract signing to production deployment in under two weeks, and Scott rated both the sales and onboarding experience a 10 out of 10. The momentum keeps building: “With the continuous shipping of improvements from the Ekho team, I can’t even fathom where we will be a year from now.”
“We used to limit website chat in our busiest areas just to keep response times under control. Now we run an AI Sales Agent that greets every visitor, qualifies them, and moves the conversation forward on its own. The difference wasn’t incremental. It’s redefining how our team interacts with inbound.”
About Triumph Cleveland
Triumph Cleveland is Ohio’s flagship Triumph dealer, established in 2018 and based in Cleveland. The store sells new and used Triumph motorcycles, runs factory service, and ships parts and gear to riders across the country. That last part is where the story starts: a showroom keeps hours, but an ecommerce business never closes.
Scott Janca, the dealership’s General Manager, built the store’s ecommerce initiative before he stepped into the GM chair. He is one of the sharpest operators in powersports and genuinely out ahead of the industry on AI, actively exploring how it can reshape the dealership experience from the ground up. That mix of deep operational knowledge and a real appetite for what’s next made Triumph Cleveland one of the earliest dealers to go all in on an AI-powered sales agent.
The Challenge: one message answering seven questions
A dealership has hours. An ecommerce business does not. Orders, shipping questions, returns, part fitment: the messages arrive at all hours, often from riders on their phones late at night, because that is when they finally sit down.
With tens of thousands of monthly visitors, many of them browsing after hours and a large share shopping from out of state, Triumph Cleveland was generating real demand it could not fully answer once the store closed. Its chat and SMS platform had exactly one tool for the night shift: a single static after-hours message.
One message had to do everything. Greet the customer, explain they had reached the store outside business hours, then cover six or seven possible directions at once, because there was no way to know which one this particular rider needed.
“Our old after-hours reply was one long, generic message you had to scroll through five or six times to get past. Let’s be honest, nobody ever actually read it.”
This is the part most dealers recognize immediately. It was not a coverage failure. Something was responding. It just was not responding to anything in particular, and a message aimed at seven questions answers none of them.
The Solution: Ekho’s AI Sales Agent
Scott first heard about Ekho on a Garage Composites podcast episode. “After listening to what they were building, and where they planned to head within our industry, I had to reach out.” Triumph Cleveland has now been running Ekho’s AI Sales Agent for about six months, across the store’s website chat and SMS, with no new headcount. They named it Mick.
An always-on night shift
The Sales Agent lives on the store’s website and SMS as an embedded chat experience, available 24/7 and responding instantly. When a rider lands on a vehicle page at 2 AM with a question about fitment, pricing, or shipping, Mick answers in the moment: no waiting for business hours, no form dropped into a void. When a conversation warrants follow-up, the agent hands off to SMS so the buyer gets a text they can answer on their own time.
Smart Replies
The real unlock was not simply that something answered after hours. Something already did. The unlock was Smart Replies: customized responses triggered by what the rider actually asked about. Now a late-night fitment question does not get the seven-part wall of text. It gets a warm greeting from Mick and a tailored answer, the information the rider needed, a relevant link, or a specific request for the one detail the team will need to help when they are back in the shop in the morning.
“Smart Replies was a simple change, but a huge unlock. It has been a game changer, not just for us, but for our customers.”
Two things happen as a result, and dealers underestimate the second. First, a meaningful share of riders get their answer immediately and never need a person at all. Scott estimates roughly 20% of customer needs are now resolved on the spot. Second, for everything Mick cannot close out, the team walks in to a conversation that is already half done: the question identified, the context gathered, the contact captured. Scott estimates those get resolved about three times faster than they used to, because nobody has to start over from “hi, how can I help you?” the next morning.
Trained on the store’s own knowledge
Plenty of platforms will sell a dealer a chatbot. Triumph Cleveland wanted something that sounded like Triumph Cleveland. Through Ekho’s knowledge hub, the team uploads the documents that define how the store actually operates: brand guidelines, product information, shipping and service processes. Scott is precise about what that does and does not mean.
“We’re not training the AI model ourselves. Through Ekho’s knowledge hub, we give it our own reference material, so it answers with our information instead of something generic.”
The store is not building an AI. It is giving one the store’s real answers, its shipping policy, its service process, its fitment knowledge, so the response a rider gets at midnight is the store’s answer, not a generic one.
Built to sound like the team
The personality came from the same place. The avatar decision took about a second: the store named its agent Mick, a nod to the King of Cool, Steve McQueen. “We gave guidance on the tone and personality,” Scott says, “but really it was just telling him all about the King of Cool and letting Mick take it from there. We take a rider-first approach, and so does he.” Around the store, Mick gets talked about like staff. “He’s getting better every day. A great addition, and one of the team.”
Working with a team that ships
Here is the part Scott brings up unprompted, and it is the part that separates this from a software purchase. Both of the features doing the most work in this story, the knowledge hub and Smart Replies, are features Triumph Cleveland asked for. The knowledge hub was his ask from day one and shipped within a couple of months. Keyword-triggered custom messages were an early request too; they became Smart Replies and landed shortly after.
“They ask, they listen, and they act on our feedback. It’s refreshing to work with a partner that actually ships and keeps making the product better, instead of going quiet once you’ve signed.”
Six months in, Scott says the product has “come miles from where we started, in both function and design, and they show no signs of slowing down.” For a dealer principal, that is the difference between a platform you grow into and one you replace in eighteen months.
From Here
Triumph Cleveland is now expanding what Mick does, sharpening him on the two conversations that matter most in the store: helping a rider choose the right bike, and getting them the right parts and accessories. Scott is also looking ahead to Ekho’s Transaction Engine alongside the Sales Agent, so a buyer researching a Triumph at midnight can chat with Mick, get qualified, and move straight into a full online checkout, financing and paperwork included, without waiting for the store to open.
“The point isn’t to hide that it’s an AI agent. It’s to make it part of your team, a tool that serves your riders when they need it, on their time, not yours.”
How the numbers were calculated
Volumes and rates are Triumph Cleveland’s own, from the store’s Ekho dashboard. The handled and lead-conversion rates are 90-day figures; the conversation counts cover the six weeks since the site-wide rollout. Handling time and labor rate are industry norms applied to them. Both figures below are estimates.
- About 240 hours of staff time, six weeks. Handling time of 15 minutes per conversation end to end, counting follow-ups and context switching. 785 conversations closed by the agent, 196 hours. 262 escalated at a third of that, the question, context and contact already captured before anyone opened the thread, 44 hours. Total 240.
- About $54,000 a year. 240 hours across six weeks is a run rate of 2,080 hours a year. A full-time BDC seat costs about $50,000 fully loaded and returns about 1,920 productive hours, so $26 an hour. 2,080 hours at $26 is about $54,000, or 1.08 full-time heads. Volume is still climbing, so this is a floor.
Frequently asked questions
Ekho's Sales Agent is an AI-powered chat assistant that lives on a dealer's website and SMS and engages visitors 24/7 with context-aware responses. It answers questions about inventory, pricing, shipping, and financing, qualifies leads by gathering the rider's needs and contact details, and hands the team identified, context-rich conversations instead of anonymous sessions.
Smart Replies are customized responses triggered by what a customer actually asks about. Instead of one static after-hours message trying to cover every possible question, each rider gets a tailored answer relevant to their specific question, plus a request for whatever detail the team needs to follow up. At Triumph Cleveland, Smart Replies replaced a single catch-all message and became the feature doing the most work on the night shift.
No. At Triumph Cleveland, the agent covers the hours the store was never staffed for, nights, weekends, and the 2 AM ecommerce question, and hands the team identified, context-rich conversations in the morning. The staff spends more time helping riders who are ready to buy and less time reconstructing what someone wanted twelve hours ago.
Yes. Through Ekho's knowledge hub, dealers upload their own documents, brand guidelines, product information, shipping and service processes, which the agent references when answering. The customer gets your store's answer, not a generic one. The AI is also trained on the dealer's full inventory, pricing, and fees.
Yes. Ekho's AI Sales Agent runs across website chat, SMS, and email. At Triumph Cleveland it covers website chat and SMS, the channels their riders actually use after hours, and can hand a conversation off to text so a buyer can respond on their own time.
Dealers can go from contract signing to full production deployment in under two weeks, with a phased rollout option to test on a sandbox environment before going live across the full website. Triumph Cleveland has now been running the Sales Agent for about six months.
