Auto Dealer Monthly has recognized Hare Auto’s Chevrolet website as the #1 auto dealer website. The full press release can be found here.
Congratulations to Bryan and the entire Hare team on this honor. For all other auto dealers - check out the site and get some ideas.
Today’s press release made official the availability of both a chat rollover feature and a managed chat answering service. Auto dealers using ContactAtOnce! should find the announcement very interesting.
From the press release:
“Sales people in the dealership are very effective answering a shopper’s questions and setting appointments, so we strongly prefer that they handle our chat leads,” said Drew Fitchett, Owner of North Penn Imports VW Mazda in Colmar, PA. “That said, there are times during the business day and certainly after-hours, when our sales people are not able to answer, yet we still want our prospects to be able to connect with someone immediately. The ContactAtOnce! rollover feature intelligently forwards leads during those times, and ContactAtOnce! managed live chat personnel have demonstrated excellence in handling rollover leads exactly how our dealership wants them handled.”
The chat rollover feature is a software feature that can be used to intelligently and automatically route chat requests to any chat answering service (e.g. outsourced BDC provider or call center). This feature is not specific to automotive and could be very useful for any business regardless of industry.
The managed chat answering service is the ContactAtOnce!-provided answering service for those auto dealer customers that don’t have an existing outsourced BDC provider. At this time the managed chat service is very specific to auto retail as the personnel are specifically trained to handle inbound chat leads from car shoppers.
So we launched a chat forwarding feature a while back and some have noticed and some have not so I am writing this post to spread the word and to also inform everyone of the uses for it. It’s the 1st week of May and we just had a great month. Thank you to all who spent the time to research us and thank you to all of our existing dealers.
OK chat forwarding…..Dealers are loving this because they can forward a chat to the appropriate sales person. The chat feature allows multiple people in the chat at once. This is great for many reasons…
1) you can give a warm T.O. and
2) people appreciate being able to get the person they need by chat
“[10:00:49 AM]<Customer>Wow. I can IM my Mazda guy. This is nuts.”
I thought that was funny.
Another great part of the chat forwarding feature is that the agent receiving the request will get a link to review the conversation up to the forward so you don’t have to ask all the same questions over again.
We are also able to forward chats back to the dealership when they miss them if you are on our rollover service (look for a press release about the rollvoer feature tomorrow!). This is nice because we know no one can handle your leads better than you!
Just a heads up….everyone has the same theme - last October was the worst month in the business and things have increased every month since. Keep trucking along…things are looking up.
Conversion Killing Copy
A recent post on a blog called, appropriately, CopyBlogger, talks of a hideous troll hiding under the bridge that scares interested shoppers away. The post talks of online shopping cart conversions but there’s some solid lessons to be learned that apply directly to the car business too.
To summarize the post, the conversion killing troll is “prospect fear” which can be broken down into three types of fear; fear of wasting money, fear of mockery, and fear of feeling stupid. The way to kill the troll and convert more shoppers into leads and, ultimately, sales is
So how does all that relate to chat? Simple - pictures! Uploading pictures of your sales people so that they show up on every dropin business card and within every chat session does wonders for establishing trust and authority. It also helps when the shoppers comes into the store looking for you, ready to buy.