We have the privilege of working with Yago Paramo and his team at Paramo Group (PGI). PGI serves over 200 auto dealer customers in the state of Washington, providing a variety of ecommerce-related offerings that help the dealers sell more vehicles over the internet. In addition to being the DiamondLot franchise for Washington, PGI also has a number of video and lead generation offerings.

The company’s success is based on their dealer relationships whose foundation is a just-show-me-the-numbers approach to selecting, recommending, and implementing solutions that truly help sell more vehicles.

Approximately 20 of Yago’s dealers are currently using ContactAtOnce!, and in his December e-newsletter he was kind enough to mention ContactAtOnce! in the context of trends that matter for 2008. The relevant article is excerpted below.

Chat makes a big bang for little money

“I had some pretty good discussions with dealers about chat this year and the final say is that regardless of all the arguments that anyone can present and with a final verdict based purely on dealer’s feedback is that:

Chat works.

We have chosen ContactAtOnce.com to be our chat provider and we have integrated their system with our inventory. Their support is among the best I have seen in the industry (BTY- Thank you John) and I really liked their “positioning” approach where they take the chat to the customer as he/she is looking at a vehicle.

Chat opens another channel of communication between your sales force and your clients. It allows for people in certain situations (at work, no phone available, public computer with no email) to contact you instantly and also it just, grabs people that like to chat!

The most common objections that I have heard are:

‘We don’t want people chatting, we want people calling’. Well, I would actually rather have people coming with cash in their pocket but reality is that we must accommodate our business to customer likes and not the other way around. Dealers that make the car buying experience fun and easy, win.

‘We do not have people to man the chat’. Hey!, you have people to man the phones. Put the chat in all computers at the dealer, as customers “ring” in the chat salespeople interested in selling cars will make sure they take the lead.

Our chat system also offers click-to-call service where customers type their cell number and the system puts them in contact with the dealer. Every written conversation in the chat is also emailed to the dealer so it can be put in the CRM system as a lead for future reference.

I think it is interesting that chat has been around for years and the dealers didn’t use it, suddenly we start introducing it and now more than 25 dealers in the Puget Sound area take advantage of it.

Chat is here to stay and I will be surprised if by the end of ‘08, every dealer doing anything on the web doesn’t have chat on their inventory. It is just another way to get in touch with our customers and, by the way, it is very convenient since the customer does not have to call (if they do not have a phone available or are in the office) and it doesn’t have to check their email constantly to get an answer. Chat activelly makes your web site create leads from customers shopping online right now. “