How Grupo Garden scaled WhatsApp commerce with Customer.io and Hyppo 

Grupo Garden is the largest vehicle retailer in Paraguay, moving more than 10,000 vehicles a year—roughly 40% of the country's new-vehicle market—as the exclusive distributor of KIA and nine other brands including Nissan, Chevrolet, BMW, and Volvo. Financing accounts for 80% of new-vehicle sales, and at that scale one channel dominates lead generation: WhatsApp.

Until late 2025, that channel ran on a legacy bot the group could barely see into. It processed massive lead volume across every brand, but produced almost no data anyone could act on. Leads entered and effectively disappeared, hot buyers and casual browsers moved through the same flow, and conversations that went quiet got no follow-up. Every brand operated as its own island, so any improvement built for Nissan had to be rebuilt from scratch for KIA, then again for the next eight.

To fix it, Garden brought in Hyppo, a Buenos Aires-based Data & Growth agency, to audit the WhatsApp channel end-to-end and design its replacement.

Hyppo built the new architecture with Customer.io as the customer data and engagement engine at its core—the system of record for every lead, the source of truth for segmentation, and the trigger layer for every automated touchpoint in the funnel. Around it, each tool was assigned a single job. GoChat runs the conversational layer through an AI agent with seven skills and nine AI tasks, from lead classification to follow-up message generation. Microsoft Dynamics 365 holds the credit files that finance most sales. SAP handles invoicing and after-sales. Looker Studio on BigQuery delivers unified reporting across the whole stack.

The division of labor is what makes it work. GoChat talks to the customer, and Customer.io does everything else: identifying the user, storing attributes, tracking events, segmenting in real time, firing journeys, and orchestrating the two-way flow with Dynamics and SAP.

Every interaction in GoChat emits an event to Customer.io, and every event can trigger a workflow that writes back to send a WhatsApp message, alert a salesperson, or create a task in Dynamics. The most consequential of those workflows is lead classification. Once the conversation has produced enough signal, an AI task scores the lead as Hot (buying intent within 60 days), Warm (intent beyond 60 days), or Cold (general inquiry) and writes the result to the Customer.io profile.

That single attribute drives the entire downstream experience. Hot leads enter an aggressive cadence inside the 24-hour WhatsApp messaging window, with pushes every few hours until they respond. Warm leads move into a slower seven-day nurture. Cold leads route to the call center for human reactivation. The same architecture produces three different journeys, decided automatically by data the bot generated itself.

The same logic runs across the funnel. When a customer books a test drive, Customer.io fires two journeys in parallel: confirmation and reminders to the customer, and an immediate alert with full lead context to the assigned salesperson, who walks in already knowing the model, the financing scenario, and the customer's history. When the AI detects a future commitment in a conversation, like "call me after I get paid," it extracts the date, stores it on the profile, and fires the right message on the right day. And whether a lead arrives through a web form, a TikTok lead form, a QR code at an auto show, or a showroom walk-in, Customer.io resolves it to a single profile, so a buyer who scanned a code on Saturday and visited a KIA showroom on Tuesday is recognized as one person.

Garden and Hyppo went live with Nissan in November 2025. Seven months later, in May 2026, every brand in the group was running on the same Customer.io architecture. Each new brand inherits the same workflow library, event schema, and dashboard template, which turned onboarding from a development project into a configuration exercise. Hyppo can now stand up a new brand workspace in days rather than months.

The payoff shows up in the numbers. Every new lead now has end-to-end traceability from the first WhatsApp message to the SAP invoice, and every one is answered in seconds, 24/7. Test-drive show-up climbed 41% after the reminder workflows went live, the team delivers 3.2× more follow-ups per lead than the legacy bot managed with no additional headcount, and 94% of leads are classified Hot, Warm, or Cold automatically.

The same Customer.io foundation is now extending beyond new-vehicle sales. A single entry-point bot will classify every incoming WhatsApp lead and route it to the right brand using the customer's existing profile. The same event schema and workflow library are being applied to the group's used-vehicle marketplace, and Customer.io is set to drive the lifecycle for Garden's car subscription and rental products. On top of the conversations themselves, an AI supervisor layer will audit sales chats for tone, completeness, and missed opportunities, with first-party enrichment via BunkerDB.

What began as a question about a broken WhatsApp bot became a unified commerce engine, one that lets a national retail leader finally see, segment, and act on every lead, across every brand and every channel, from the first message to the signed contract.

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