Add A Photo
It’s a bit ironic that the first key to better chat conversations is a picture and not something to do with words, but first impressions count and building rapport is the number one key to effective chat conversations. ContactAtOnce! enables you to upload a professional looking photo that will appear in the consumer-facing chat window, and in the drop in business card. This photo should be a headshot of you smiling and looking relaxed, taken at your desk or in your work environment. Consider yourself ugly or unattractive? Even better! Our experience has been that website visitors are more likely to trust pictures of “normal looking people” than they are pictures of beautiful, curvy models off the pages of magazines. Adding a photo personalizes the live chat experience for the customer, humanizes your website, and allows you to establish the rapport required for a productive conversation. And don’t forget, if your conversation with a site visitor is successful they’ll soon be walking through the door of your business so you’ll want them to instantly recognize you.

Introduce Yourself
Answer inbound chat requests with “Hello, my name is ___. How may I help you?” or a similar greeting. This will often prompt the customer to give you their name and tell you what they are looking for.

Keep Messages Short and To The Point
Keep messages simple, concise and give people time to respond. Follow these guidelines:

• Ask only one question per message sent.
• Provide one answer per message sent.
• Don’t use the “machine gun” technique of sending lots of messages in quick succession – it will only confuse and irritate the visitor
• Do give the visitor ample time to reply after each message you send (hint: ContactAtOnce! shows you when the visitor is typing so you can get a good sense of what they are doing…)
• Acknowledge every message you receive, even when an answer is not required. For example, visitor say “I really like green” and you respond “ok”.

Humor - Be Cautious
As with email communications, be very careful about the use of humor within chat conversations. In fact, in initial business conversations steer clear of humor and jokes unless the other party initiates them, and even then be careful as to how far you push it. There are cultural and personal differences among the population, so what seems funny to you may be considered weak or even offensive to others.

Jargon, Slang and Abbreviations
Jargon, abbreviations and slang used in live chat and instant messaging conversations can help reduce keystrokes, but may come across as being unprofessional to the person you are communicating with. Worse still, if the other person isn’t familiar with the lingo, it may totally confuse them. Until you get to know the person better, or you see them using the same lingo, it is best to steer clear of it. That said, with the incredible popularity of text-based communication of all sorts, you will encounter an increasing number of visitors that will use slang to communicate with you. Make sure you know the basics so you can understand what they are saying to you and/or asking you. For your reference, a chat slang guide was included in another post on this blog

Don’t “SHOUT”
TYPING YOUR MESSAGES IN UPPERCASE is extremely rude - it’s considered shouting and very aggressive. Use lowercase letters.

Relax, Fat Fingers…
Chat is less formal than email so proper punctuation, capitalization, spelling and grammar should be considered a bonus but not a requirement when chatting.

To be continued in the second post in this series…

ATLANTA, Ga. and CENTREVILLE, Va. – February 10, 2010 – Contact At Once!, LLC, the leading provider of car dealership chat software and other internet marketing tools that move online lookers into live conversations with car dealerships, and Carfax have partnered to help dealers sell cars faster.

Contact At Once! and Carfax will integrate their products, giving consumers free access to dealer-purchased Carfax Reports during chat sessions. In addition, online shoppers viewing Carfax Reports will have an easy way to initiate contact with the selling dealer.

“We provide car dealership chat software that helps sell more cars,” said Marc Hayes, Executive Vice President and founder of Contact At Once!, “Sales people using our car dealership chat software are particularly effective when the right information is at their fingertips, including valuable vehicle history information from Carfax.”

Recent studies show that providing a Carfax Report up front in the shopping process helps dealers sell cars faster and for more money. Dealers who use the Contact At Once! car dealership chat software will be able to quickly determine if a specific vehicle has a Carfax Report available and utilize vital information from the report, such as the Carfax 1-Owner designation, with a single click of the mouse. A link for customers to access the Carfax Report for free can be shared during the chat session.

“Carfax and Contact At Once! are working together to help dealers enhance their customers’ shopping experience,” said Larry Gamache, communications director at Carfax. “When you give buyers what they want, you sell cars faster and make more money.”

About Car Dealership Chat Software Provider Contact At Once!, LLC
Contact At Once!, LLC is the leading provider of car dealership chat software and internet marketing tools for automotive sales, apartment leasing, and other industries where consumers conduct research online before visiting a dealership or office. The ContactAtOnce! service typically moves at least 25% more website visitors into live conversations with sales people by utilizing a suite of technologies such as presence, IM/chat, VoIP telephony, video chat and text messaging, resulting in increased revenue and a better return on marketing expenditures. ContactAtOnce! is the only solution with features specifically for vertical search websites and over 35 such sites, along with thousands of merchant businesses, are using it today. Find out more at www.contactatonce.com.

About Carfax (www.carfax.com)
Millions of used car buyers and sellers each year rely on Carfax, the most trusted provider of vehicle history information. Using the unique 17-character vehicle identification number (VIN) found on vehicle dashboards and title documents, Carfax instantly generates a detailed Vehicle History Report on any used car or light truck. Carfax Vehicle History Reports™ provide valuable information that help used car buyers and sellers make better decisions. For more information or to become a Carfax-subscribing dealer, call 800-444-0145 or visit www.carfaxonline.com.

This dealership is part of the Sonic Automotive Group and ranks in the top four nationwide for certified pre-owned sales, which is the main topic of the article. This dealership has also been named a BMW Center of Excellence store six consecutive years. We have been featuring them in a customer testimonial on our website for the past year or so.

The AutoRemarketing Magazine  article is recommended reading for anyone looking to improve their dealership’s pre-owned sales and marketing.

ATLANTA, GA – January 20, 2010 – Contact At Once!, LLC, the leading provider of live chat and other internet marketing tools that move online lookers into live conversations with car dealers, announced today the hiring of Skip Dowd as Vice President, Business Development.  In this role, Dowd will be responsible for building and managing relationships with the company’s strategic partners.

Dowd began his career in 1991 as an advertising sales person with Trader Publishing, calling on auto dealers in Northeast Ohio.  He rose to Vice President of Electronic Media, assembling and leading the team that launched AutoMart.com and AutoMercado.com.  After AutoTrader.com, a division of Cox Enterprises, acquired AutoMart.com in October of 2006, Dowd managed the corporate transition before leaving to pursue independent consulting engagements within the automotive industry.

“Skip knows the automotive landscape extremely well including the many different types of websites and tools that help connect in-market car shoppers and car dealers,” said John Hanger, President and CEO.  “We are excited to have him join our growing team.  Skip is a smart business builder whose contributions will benefit our customers and partners.”

“The executive team’s integrity and the company culture always impressed me, so it is very exciting to now be a part of it,” Dowd said.   “Contact At Once! was one of my vendors at Automart.com so I’ve seen first-hand how effective their live chat for car dealers solutions are at connecting online lookers with car dealers.  The company is a market leader because their vision extends far beyond just adding chat to a dealership’s website.”

“Consumers increasingly prefer text-based communication but the automotive industry has been unable to capitalize on this trend for lack of a scalable, standard’s based approach to connecting dealers with all of the websites that bring them leads,” Dowd continued.  “Contact At Once! has solved this problem, has woven itself into the fabric of the automotive industry, and is literally improving the effectiveness of every automotive website to which it is added.  That list that today includes thousands of car dealer websites and leading automotive classified sites such as Cars.com, CarsDirect.com, CarSoup.com and others.”

Atlanta, GA - January 6, 2010 — Contact At Once!, LLC, (contactatonce.com) the leading provider of dealer live chat software and other internet marketing tools that move online lookers into live conversations with dealerships, announced today that the ContactAtOnce! dealer live chat service powered its two millionth live chat conversation. The company also released statistics and trend data showing dramatic industry-wide growth in the use of dealer live chat for online automotive marketing.

“The two millionth consumer-to-dealer live chat conversation took place on December 30th,” said Marc Hayes, Contact At Once!, LLC founder and executive vice president. “It was a happy coincidence that the conversation led to a sale for one of our dealer customers, Ken Garff Nissan in Orem, Utah.”

Contact At Once! shared the celebration by providing a commemorative plaque to the dealership that took part in the landmark live chat conversation.

“The popularity of text-based communication has exploded, including SMS text messaging on mobile phones, Twitter, and instant messaging services such as Google, AOL, Yahoo!, MSN and Facebook, so it naturally follows that many consumers prefer text–based communication while car shopping,” said Hayes. “As the leading provider of dealer live chat software, with over 6,000 dealers using the ContactAtOnce! dealer live chat service every day, we have made it easy for dealers and other automotive website providers to capitalize on this trend, as evidenced by the dramatic growth in chat conversations depicted in this graph.”

The inclusion of dealer live chat in online automotive marketing of all types is a significant industry trend. In the past year, major automotive sites such as Cars.com, CarsDirect.com, and CarSoup.com have added chat features to advertising packages, while thousands of dealers have added chat features to their own websites, landing pages and eNewsletters. Chat technology isn’t new, but ContactAtOnce! has taken the it to a new level for the automotive industry by making it easy for dealer sales personnel to use, personalizing it for consumers with real images of dealership staff, and eliminating the need for expensive, less effective external call centers through “presence aware” smart technology that knows when dealership personnel are ready and able to chat. By enabling integration with aggregator sites like Cars.com, the ContactAtOnce! dealer live chat service multiplies the number of potential customers connecting with dealers via live chat.

Despite nearly 200% growth in the number of automotive live chat conversations during 2009, Hayes estimates that less than 20% of auto dealers currently use live chat. That will likely change in 2010 though. “We expect the vast majority of dealers will be chat-enabled before the end of this year, compelled by the business benefits, easy-to-use technology, and widespread support by major automotive sites.”

By Popularity

If you like sure bets and believe in the power of crowd-sourcing then answering your own chats is the right choice.  More dealers answer their own chats by far versus rollover or fully outsourced.  

By Common Sense

If your dealership outsources the handling of non-chat leads then outsourcing chat leads is just plain common sense.   And if you work in a marketing department that is still measured by the number of email leads you direct to dealerships, outsourcing is the right choice too (not necessarily the choice that will maximize the number of cars sold, but absolutely the choice that will maximize the number of email leads you’ll deliver to your dealerships…).

By ROI

For dealerships that prefer to answer their own chat leads, but acknowledge that they can’t staff chat every minute of every business day let alone the nightwatch, rollover is the right answer.  It is our experience that dealerships using rollover maximize the return on their chat investment and sell more cars.

What Are Your Thoughts and Experiences?  Please share via the comment section below.

Taking Your Website Online Chat to the Next Level
 
O.k., so you have added the ability to have an online chat with prospects while they are on your dealership’s website.  Great; we all know that the best time to communicate with a prospect is while they are currently on and viewing your website.  So, what could be wrong with this picture?
 
Something that you might consider is what happens to your unanswered chats during busy times at your Dealership, after your Dealership has closed for the evening or before opening in the morning, or if your dealership is closed one day a week (such as Sundays in some states)?  Turning off your Chat Service in the evening only eliminates the possibility of chatting with prospects that do not keep the same hours as you and means you have no way to get their attention or get them into your Dealership.
 
The solution is to work with a service provider who can answer chat leads on your behalf 24 hours per day, seven days a week, 365 days per year and during those times when the Dealership staff is unable to answer or are not present at the Dealership.
 
And how does one select such a service provider?  Here are a few things to consider…
 
Depth of Services
 
Chat Tools – it is important that the service provider’s chat tools include specific “rollover” functionality to ensure the service provider’s personnel know, and are reminded with each inbound chat, how you want them to handle your leads.  Ask for a demo so you can see what the person answering on your dealership’s behalf will see when a new chat lead comes in.
 
Chat Integration – as more and more 3rd party sites enable chat as a means for prospects to contact dealerships it is critical that the service provider fully integrate with the chat systems used by the 3rd parties.  Cars.com, CarsDirect.com, CarSoup.com, Cox Auto Trader, and many other local newspaper and classified type auto websites support chat leads.  If the service provider can’t handle your chat leads coming from the 3rd party sites you use, you’ll lose those leads, so ensure that your service provider supports chat integration.   
 
 
Breadth of Services
 
Some chat service providers have their own chat tools, while others are able to work with various chat tools.  The “Switzerland” approach, i.e. being able to work with whatever chat tool you choose, means a service provider is focused on one thing only, answering your leads effectively.  Those that force a specific chat tool upon you…not so much.
 
A service provider capable of delivering the full breadth of call center services (e.g. phone, chat, BDC, and promotion staffing services) is better able to partner with a dealership for success, versus a chat-only service provider.
 
Outsourcing chat leads is a cost effective way to increase sales and further leverage your investment in chat.  Consumers like chat, and you have the opportunity to leverage that affinity into more sales by maximizing your dealership’s availability for answering chats.

ATLANTA, GA – December 2, 2009 – ContactAtOnce!, a leading provider of live chat for car dealer websites and other internet marketing tools that move online shoppers into live conversations with car dealers, today announced the immediate availability of features that enable customers to integrate ContactAtOnce! live chat for car dealer websites with website analytics and business intelligence platforms from Google and Omniture.

“Analytics help our customers understand consumer behavior and, ultimately, which of their marketing initiatives are working and which aren’t,” said Marc Hayes, Founder and EVP of Products for ContactAtOnce!.  “By integrating our live chat for car dealer websites solution with the leading analytics and business intelligence platforms we are making it simple and easy for our customers to get even more value from their ContactAtOnce! investment.”

ContactAtOnce! powers presence-aware “drop-in business cards” that appear on car dealer websites alerting shoppers when dealer personnel are available to answer questions.  Shoppers may then initiate instant communications whenever they choose.  ContactAtOnce! live chat for car dealer websites automatically measures advertising effectiveness, helping dealers constantly improve their businesses.

Google Analytics is an enterprise-class web analytics solution that provides rich insights into website traffic and marketing effectiveness.  It is provided by Google free-of-charge and is widely used on car dealer websites.

The newly released website analytics integration features are immediately available, free of charge, to all ContactAtOnce! customers.

The term rollover is borrowed from telephony where phone systems can be configured to automatically “roll over” unanswered calls to another extension or number.   In the same way, chat systems such as ContactAtOnce! can “roll over” unanswered chats to another group of users.  In the typical automotive scenario this means rolling over chats not answered by dealership users to an external group of users that work for an answering service.  The answering service answers on behalf of the dealership, collects the shopper’s contact info ( name, phone, email and any additional info), then sends it back to the dealership as an email lead or, in some cases, “hot transfers” the conversion to the dealership. 

Unlike phone systems, chat systems such as ContactAtOnce! can provide a wealth of information to the answering service when a chat is rolled over, including not only the lead context (e.g. make, model, stock#, etc.) but also specific instructions from the dealership for answering, qualifying, and forwarding leads on the dealership’s behalf. 

With rollover a dealership gets the best of both worlds - the advantages that come from answering your own leads, plus the assured coverage and availability that outsourcing to an answering service provides. 

Here’s an interesting tidbit…time of day has a lot to do with a shopper’s willingness to give out their name and contact information.  This fact is based on large amounts of data collected and analyzed by the ContactAtOnce! rollover team.  To be more specific, shoppers reaching an answering service after business hours are nearly twice as likely to willingly provide their contact information versus those reaching the answering service during business hours.  Why?   As highlighted in the previous video post, shoppers prefer to chat with a knowledgeable person at the dealership and build a trust relationship (and are thus disappointed to reach an answering service during business hours), but are realistic when initiating chat during non-business hours (and are thus accepting of the fact that someone at the dealership will have to call them back).  

Having observed over 6,000 dealers using the ContactAtOnce! chat service it has been our observation that the rollover option provides the highest return on investment (ROI).  That doesn’t mean it is universally the best fit for every dealership, but we recommend that our customers strongly consider this option and at least give it a try for a few months to measure the ROI.