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.

Switching agent identifies is a very useful feature when one of the following business situations occurs:

1. When employees switch offices but not computers
2. When a single computer is shared by multiple users (on the dealership floor, for example)

Let’s look at a scenario 1:
The agents all have the Contact At Once!  software installed on their computers.  They are all told to switch offices, but will be using the computer that was already in the office rather than moving the one from their previous office.
To change the CAO software to let it know that the person using the software has changed do the following:

• Right click on the boomerang in the system tray (lower right near the time).
• Select Modify Account
• Select Change to a Different Agent Account.  Give it a few seconds and the list will be populated with all the agent names that have been provisioned (added) as agents.
• Find your name and select it.
• Select Assume Agent Identity and SAVE.

The exact same procedure applies to scenario 2 as well.

Please note that this procedure also works well when a new sales person is hired and takes over the computer left by the person that just got fired (I know…that very rarely happens in car dealerships…but just in case….).  There is one extra step required, however.  The administrator on the account needs to login to the customer portal and provision (add) the new agent before they would show up in the list of agent identities.