Carvana builds efficient, seamless customer experience with agent on Azure

Leading online automotive retailer Carvana is known for changing the way people buy and sell cars. Carvana completely reimagined the car buying and selling process with the customer in mind. Its vertically integrated operations and purpose-built technology let customers browse, finance, purchase, and even trade in a car entirely online, putting the customer in control of a process that is fast, fun, and fair.

“Our goal has always been to make the car buying process the smoothest, easiest, and most transparent experience possible,” explains Alex Devkar, SVP of Engineering and Analytics at Carvana. “We put the customer in the driver’s seat,” he says. 

Prioritizing the customer experience

Carvana’s unique approach was designed to create fundamentally better customer experiences in automotive retail. The company uses technology to bring convenience and transparency to every step of the process, and has a strong culture of continuous improvement, always raising the bar and removing customer frictions.

In recent years, Carvana delivered high-quality customer support with Sebastian, an AI agent. Sebastian has deep insight and action-taking capabilities to help guide customers through every step of the buying and selling journey. To make both Sebastian and Carvana’s Customer Advocate team even more efficient and effective in working with customers, Carvana created CARE (Conversation Analysis Review Engine). This AI-powered platform pulls insight from every customer touchpoint to keep getting better.

Analyzing conversations with AI

CARE, Carvana’s quality review platform, works alongside Sebastian to analyze millions of customer conversations each month to ensure consistency in quality and identify opportunities for improvement. These insights allow Carvana to find and solve problems, provide high-quality feedback for its tools and teams, and refine its approach to customer support over time.

When it came to developing CARE, building with Microsoft was an easy choice, according to Michael Graf, Associate Director of Engineering at Carvana. “Microsoft was the obvious answer,” Graf says. “Pretty much all of our systems run on Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to scale and reliably provide all our services and for simplified management. We have a single place for all our stuff in the ecosystem that we could very easily scaffold up in a matter of minutes with just the click of a button. Having our infrastructure and AI foundation on Microsoft is a competitive advantage to Carvana. It puts us in a position to run fast, adapt to the market, and innovate with less complexity.” 

Efficient development for faster deployment

The development team at Carvana works with GitHub Copilot to automate repetitive tasks and enable faster, more efficient code writing. With GitHub Copilot handling routine coding tasks, engineers can focus on more complex and creative problems. Interoperability with the Microsoft ecosystem makes workflows seamless.

CARE uses Azure AI Speech within Azure AI Foundry for quick and accurate transcription. CARE data is stored in Azure Cosmos DB for scalability, security, and uptime. “We use Azure Cosmos DB for every step of our process with CARE,” Graf explains.

With the flexibility of Azure Cosmos DB, the Carvana team can move quickly and adapt to change on the fly. “My team is running really fast on complex projects, and we don’t know all the answers until we bump into them. So having flexibility with schema changes, with automatically scaling throughput and storage with Azure Cosmos DB, is key,” Graf says. Taken together, these benefits mean the development team can get product to market faster.

Ensuring a secure, compliant environment

Azure architecture delivers enterprise-grade reliability, security, speed, and scalability. This is critical to meet the demand for real-time answers in a live, high-pressure environment. Given that customer conversations may include sensitive information, security and compliance are nonnegotiable for Carvana. “Microsoft has been a great resource for making sure all of the data that Sebastian and CARE have access to is handled in a compliant, secure way,” Devkar says. 

Attaining 100% visibility

By moving from sampling a smaller number of customer interactions to 100% visibility into customer interactions, CARE enables continuous improvement across the board. Graf emphasizes, “The data has validated that our training efforts are paying off, and our advocates are all on the same page in how we’re servicing customers.”

AI-powered solutions at Carvana drive both customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. “As Sebastian gets better at supporting customers, driven by refinement through CARE, average calls per sale have decreased 45% over the past two years,” says Tacarra Brown, Associate Director of Customer Service at Carvana. This decrease in calls allows Carvana Customer Advocates to dedicate more time to personalized service and complex problem-solving. Brown notes, “Sebastian handles more standard scenarios, leaving more time and space for our Advocates to handle complex situations where it matters most.”

Maintaining the cutting edge

Building on the success of Sebastian and CARE, Carvana is road-testing Azure AI Foundry Agent Service to manage multiple agents with just a few lines of code. This forward-looking approach helps ensure that Carvana remains at the cutting edge of technology, continuously improving the customer experience and operational efficiency. 

“Microsoft has been a great collaborator, making sure we have access to the latest workflows, security, and models in Azure AI Foundry so we can provide enterprise-grade solutions for our customers,” Devkar says. As Carvana retools the automotive industry, it’s shifting into a higher gear to set new standards for convenience and efficiency in car buying and selling. 

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