Key Issues

Dream Drive is South Africa's first skill-based competition platform, giving users a chance to win cars by playing "Spot the Ball" — a game judged by a panel of professionals including Sean Bartlett, Bernard Parker, Matthew Booth, and analysts associated with Bafana Bafana and Mamelodi Sundowns. With ticket prices ranging from R11 for a Renault Kwid up to R100 for a BMW M340 valued at R1.3 million, the platform attracted 500,000 unique monthly visitors and over 2 million sessions per month.

This rapid growth created two major operational challenges:

• Scaling support: Educating a large, fast-growing user base about a novel competition format generated huge volumes of customer queries across multiple channels.

• Retention costs: With 800,000 signups and 300,000 active players, Dream Drive needed an automated omnichannel retention strategy, but their international email provider's WhatsApp pricing was prohibitive.

Solution

Dream Drive integrated the Cue platform to power omnichannel support and retention across WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and email:

• AI-powered support: Cue's AI agents automated answers to 99% of incoming customer queries, allowing Dream Drive to scale support without significantly growing headcount.

• Custom Omnisend integration: The team built a custom integration between their email provider Omnisend and Cue, enabling fully automated lifecycle flows on local WhatsApp messaging rates instead of expensive international pricing.

• Waterfall communication flows: A welcome flow combining email and WhatsApp engages new users, followed by ongoing touch points throughout the customer lifecycle — including winner validation, gameplay tips, and skill-ranking updates that tell players when they place in the top 5%, 10% or 20%.

• Skill-based engagement: The retention strategy adapts to each customer's play frequency and skill level, building confidence until players are ready to purchase tickets.

Results

Four months after launching the retention flows, Dream Drive has measured significant impact using a conservative last-touch attribution model that only counts purchases from a specific link click in a message:

• 99% of queries automated: Cue's AI agents now resolve the vast majority of customer queries across WhatsApp, Messenger and email without human intervention.

• 50% margin on WhatsApp retention: WhatsApp retention flows deliver a 50% profit margin under strict last-touch attribution.

• Operations scaled without scaling headcount: Dream Drive supports 500,000 unique monthly visitors and 2 million sessions a month with a lean human support team.

• Local empowerment: By automating routine queries and using local messaging infrastructure, Dream Drive has built a sustainable, profitable model that supports continued investment in the South African team.