Why outsource all of your automotive dealership instant messaging if you have salespeople working on commission? Think of your chats as you would your telephone calls. If a salesperson is available, they will answer; if they are busy the customer will leave a message or be rolled to someone to take the message. Your salespeople are the only ones who can accurately answer the two main questions customers call or chat in about:

1. Is this specific vehicle available?
2. What is the price?

An outsourced automotive dealership instant messaging company cannot know with certainty if a vehicle is available nor can they negotiate pricing. All they can do is take the lead information and pass it along to your salesperson. Then your salesperson is tasked with returning the call and trying to reach the customer. This is fine for a small number of chats, but not all chats. If your salesperson can answer chats, they can strike while the iron is hot and when the customer is available; not three hours later after they spoke with your competition down the street.

The process for answering telephone calls and answering chats is exactly the same; you either end up with an appointment, a lead, or an anonymous customer. Each dealership has their own procedures for how to work with and follow up with customers; the only difference is how the lead arrived.  So don’t over complicate your automotive dealership instant messaging!

Cars.com announced a webinar to discuss how to reach in-market car buyers with online chat and build effective processes for ongoing success. The free workshop, “Win the Sale With Online Chat,” begins at noon EDT on Oct. 9.

Read the full press release here. It includes a more detailed description and signup instructions.

We all know how wonderful live chat is and how it benefits the dealership; however, is it being used effectively? Every chat customer is a potential buyer and should be treated that way. Here are a few common sense tips that you already apply in phone conversations but are sometimes forgotten while chatting:

1. Answer a customer’s questions promptly, even if you are looking up information for them. In a phone conversation you’re naturally going to say, “Hang on for a second while I check on that info.” In chat the need to acknowledge the customer is even more important because they can’t hear that you are actively doing something and might think you forgot about them. In the ContactAtOnce client you can use the predefined Status shortcuts to help you out, for instance “Bear with me a moment while I look that up.” Is the very first shortcut in the Status group.
2. Be polite and professional. In a phone conversation, if a customer gets heated and begins to raise their voice, you remain professional and do not raise your voice back. The same goes with chat, you do not have to YELL just because the customer is YELLING. Your attitude could make or break the customer’s experience and could send them, and their money, down the road to your competition. You would never want your receptionist to answer the phone “ABC Dealer, what do you want?”, just as you would never answer a chat “You’re bothering me, what do you need?”.   As your mom said, “Be nice and saying please and thank you can go a long way”. And remember that if you use another application that requires caps to turn off your caps lock when you answering the conversation.
3. Tell the customer who you are. Just as you would on the phone, say “Hi, My name is ___”. Usually the customer will respond with their name, and you didn’t even have to ask. Now that you have their name, it will be easier to get their contact information later in the conversation. For example, if the customer asks if a certain vehicle is available, you can say “Mark let me check on that for you, but it could take several minutes. Can I call or email you when I have the information?” Since they asked the question, they want the answer, and will usually give you their contact information.

Customers expect to be treated well from the beginning of the sales process and often times that begins with a chat, email or phone call. Customer service is the key and a potential car buyer will keep looking until they find the “right place” to purchase their vehicle. The “right place” not only has the right vehicle at the right price it also has the right channels through which the potential buyer may communicate with the dealership.

The “right place” will offer chat, email and phone and be consistent in using all three. When shoppers choose an avenue to communicate through, respond quickly and answer their questions. A quick response will let them know they are important and you are interested in their business. Build a rapport with the customer and promote the value of buying from your dealership, and in a short time you have created the “right place”.

Chat: Chat provides shoppers some initial anonymity while they are researching vehicles however; it is easy to get their information by gaining their trust. Respond quickly and promptly to their questions and keep your IM messages short. Once you have answered the first question, prompt the customer to tell their name with something similar to “My name is Jill, what’s yours?” Even though your name is displayed, this gives the customer the cue to provide theirs. As you answer their questions you will find opportunities to ask for contact information to provide follow-up information. Remember setting the appointment is key!

Email: Communicating via email is easy but not effortless. It requires your timely response and attention to detail. Grammar, punctuation and spelling are key ingredients to an effective email. Always ask open ended questions and engage your customer in dialogue until they are ready to commit to an appointment. Even if they are not ready to buy now, keep their email address and follow up with them every two weeks to once a month. This is a fast and easy way to keep customers in your sales pipeline.

Phone calls: Customers who phone in are often neglected. They are lost in the automated system, put on hold, transferred to the wrong extension, and usually left to leave a voice mail without a timely return call. Make these customers a priority and call them back within thirty minutes, and focus on answering their questions, gaining their trust, and setting the appointment, instead of making the sale.

Instant Messaging usage has best practice guidelines. The following tips can help you communicate more effectively, and by doing so, convert more potential clients into paying customers. 

Photo

First impressions count, so use a professional looking photo for your drop in.  This photo should be a headshot of you smiling and looking relaxed, and taken at your desk or in your work environment.  Adding a photo personalizes the live chat experience for the customer. 

Introduce yourself

Start out the live chat with, Hello, my name is ___.  How may I help you?  This will often times give the customer the clue to give you their name back and tell you what they are looking for. 

Messages should be short and to the point.

Keep messages simple, concise and give people time to respond.  “Machine gun” messaging is a really good way to get people to totally ignore you in future. Multiple questions sent to a recipient before they’ve had a chance to answer can seem more like an interrogation rather than a conversation. Pose a question, then give the other person the opportunity to respond - they may not be as fast a typist as you or may have been distracted. As a courtesy, you should also only ask a single question in each message and acknowledge the person’s answer when they do respond.

Don’t “SHOUT”

TYPING YOUR MESSAGES IN UPPERCASE is extremely rude - it’s considered shouting and very aggressive.

Remain polite and non-judgemental

While you may be comfortable on live chat, your customer may not be, or may not be a speedy typer.  Not only may these people be slow to respond, but their responses may seem too brief, curt or bordering on what appears to be illiteracy! Try not to judge the person based on your initial conversations. If a person seems to be abrupt, there’s no need to match the abruptness; remain professional but polite. Just because someone else may not use the terms “please” and “thank you”, it’s no reason for you not to.

Pay attention

If a person has taken the time to request a live chat with you; give them your attention. You know what it’s like at a store when the person is serving you and also speaking on the phone; it’s just plain rude. 

Wherever possible, give the person you are communicating with your undivided attention. It’s not just a sign of respect, but if you have multiple conversations happening or are allowing other issues to distract you, you may miss an important point in the other person’s messages or lose the gist of the conversation.

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. Until you get to know the person better, or you see them using the same lingo, best to steer clear of it. 

Humor - be cautious

Just as with email communications, be very careful about the use of humor in live chat and instant messaging communications. In fact, in initial business conversations steer clear of jokes etc. unless the other party initiates them, and even then be careful as to how far you push it. There are all sorts of cultural and personal differences among the population, so what may seem funny to you may be considered weak or even offensive to others. 

Probing questions

Be cautious about asking too many probing questions right off the bat with a potential customer.  You may be comfortable talking about credit scores, down payments and monthly payments, but often times a customer is not.  Know your limits and have a plan in place to direct the customer to a secure credit application or discuss this when they come into the dealership for their appointment.   If you start digging too deep with a customer about their business or personal life and you may scare them off.

Using canned text

ContactAtOnce! offers shortcut buttons to use during the live chat.   These allow you to store texts that are used often; such as a response to a commonly asked question - this is called “canned” text. It is easy to set up and you can also modify the text before sending it to the customer. 

http://portal.contactatonce.com

Settings

My Account Settings

Agent Facing Settings

Give the shortcut button a label name and type in the desired text

Save

Think before hitting the enter key

I’ve been in a number of IM conversations where things become a little heated, but I always try to stop and think before hitting the enter key.

 Instant Messaging conversations lack the advantages of physical signals such as body language and vocal intonation. In situations where emotions are running high, one wrong word can turn a difficult situation into explosive.

Ending a conversation

It’s important to properly end an IM conversation - you may think the chat is over, but the other person may not. Your main goal is to set the appointment for the customer to come into the dealership.  At the end of the conversation, reaffirm the appointment date and time, ask the other person if they have any more questions and if not, thank them for their time.

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

Trustworthiness, transparency, credible authority, lots of high-value content, and just plain old decency…

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.

Today ContactAtOnce! announced a new feature called Chat Rollover and a new managed service for answering chats on a dealer’s behalf. Both represent significant announcements that will be of interest to readers of this blog.

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.”

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.

We’ve received several questions about sharing/posting actual chat conversations - specifically some (apparently) funny ones. 

So long as any personally identifying information is redacted/blanked out, there’s no problem.  So….consider this a call for conversation transcripts ….the funnier the better.  Post them as comments here and let’s all have some good laughs!

I remember one of my first years in the car business I met a gentleman named Sheldon.  He was the best car salesman I have ever seen still to this day.  He taught me so much like NEVER make excuses why you should work hard or sell this many.  See it was January and everyone was hanging out dipping to the mall and I was following Sheldon.  I saw his commission check so I wanted what he had.  He was about 40 and I was about 20 or 21 at the time.  Sheldon would sell about 30 or 40 cars a month.  You say wow that’s a lot.  Well it’s more than just a lot because he would take a week to 2 weeks off a month and still did those numbers. 

His advice to me was

1) Know the flow of your store - meaning know if your store is a night store or if you have a day of the week that is heavy traffic.

2) Everyone is a prospect…..EVERYONE - meaning never discount the fact that everyone drives and needs a car or wants a new car.

This applies to what I want to talk about, trust me.

So I can tell you now that majority of your traffic to your site is between 10am and 2pm.  You may also have a peak between 8 to 10pm.  So what does that tell you?  Be at your computer and schedule your appointments around those times.  You are the manager of your time.

Secondly, every chat is an opportunity to earn business.  A lot of Sheldon’s customers came from Service.  So if you are taking chats why not take service chats and give them what they want but let them know you are here for them.  Take every chat and work it to the end.  I even suggest our rollover product because we answer the chats that you don’t get to.  So if you can’t be available during those hours or you can’t give every chat the sufficient time to work it to the end, we can.  (I know…this sounds like a bump to get rollover, but it is just an explanation of my examples above.)