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.

Many people are adjusting to this new technology called Twitter, an application that allows you to make statements in a 140 character block.  They actually limit what you can say per post.  Why?  Well, men have been doing this for years.  We listen just enough to find out if we are interested and then if not we cut you off.  Same with a lot of things.  Our country as a whole is impatient and wants information and answers quickly.  So why is Twitter so hot?  Well, people can pick and choose what they read and it’s quick.  Headlines to top stories with links that people can pick and choose if they are interested.  Dealers everywhere are using Twitter to drive traffic, promote sales, promote service coupons, etc….

No, I am not selling Twitter (it’s actually free).  What I want to bring to your attention is the success that Twitter is having is the same reason why chat is so great.  Based on a JD Power study, 80% of the people leave your website without contacting you by phone or email.  That’s not good because your goal is to have those people so interested that they call or email, right?  So with a country so busy with lots of questions, taking in information at incredible speeds, wouldn’t you think chat is a solution for your shoppers to get the information they are seeking? 

I speak to dealers all the time that say “I just don’t want all these people asking me questions.”  Well here is a message to owners of dealerships….Companies are starting to brand themselves by being the source of information for the community.  Forget your billboards, newspaper ads, and any other short lived very expensive advertising.  Become the source of information for your shoppers and target markets.  You may actually learn more that way also.  So instead of shutting off communication between the dealer and their shoppers why wouldn’t you open it up?  We say people buy from people they like, right?  Well one common theme I see while reading chat transcripts is that people are less defensive for whatever reason using chat.  So, if they are less defensive and you are informative and likable who do you think gets that shoppers’ business?

So how is Twitter going to change the dealer world forever?  People are now expecting things to be even easier than ever and if you are not making it easy you will seem like you intend on keeping it hard for a reason.  It’s not the day anymore where you are the only guy selling that car.  Someone can go online and buy from another dealer in a different state.  More dealers are internet savvy and cutting edge while you are still offering form leads, marking in big red letters CALL ME “RYAN” FOR INTERNET PRICE.  The world is changing but are you?  This is a time where you need to be watching the technology and asking how it can be used to sell more cars.

I sold 3rd party leads before and I sold some leads for as much as $26.95 each.  Yes they were better than most but they weren’t from your website and they didn’t come to you live ready to ask questions.  They were email leads that you still had to call and leave messages for and hope they called back.  Chat can cost less than $200 bucks a month which often equates to pennies a lead.  Heck there is free chat out there.  Dealers are selling cars off of it and using this as an opportunity.  You would be amazed by the results you get from just adding it to your site.  People have questions, they want answers, can’t pick up the phone, and don’t really want all the sales stuff and they can’t talk to you but the guy up the street with chat, he is already in a conversation with them while you got an email lead with a bad phone number.  Odds are you’re out!

Am I selling you my product?  Nope, well…. I will if you are interested.  I am selling ideas…..ideas of technology, ideas that will grow your business and help you sell more.  Ideas that make you step back from your situation and enter into your shoppers shoes.  Check your competitors websites and see what they are doing.  The moral of the story is… I don’t care what chat you use (that’s a lie) just use some chat.

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.

Today I stumbled upon a nicely written post by Kevin Frye, eCommerce Director of the Jeff Wyler Automotive Family, entitled “Live Chat For Auto Dealer Websites - Good Or Bad?“.  Below is an excerpt:

Today’s modern consumer looks for instant gratification.  When it comes to buying a new car, or scheduling a service appointment, many folks will visit a local dealership’s website to get the information they need – and they often want answers now.  Why wait several hours for an email response when they can use the live chat tool to get the information they desire immediately?  It makes inherent good sense that the ability to speak with you online is a great tool to use on an automotive dealership website, but why did this service fail in its early efforts?

I encourage readers to check it out.  Add some comments too if you like…

ContactAtOnce! customer Toyota Sunnyvale has one of the most successful internet departments in the country. In this AIN video Adam Simms shares some statistics and best practices, including the importance of chat in their overall process.

Todd Smith of fellow chat provider Activengage posted a nice article on the DrivingSales.com website yesterday.  From the article:

I was on the phone with a dealer this week and he said he wanted to change the way the dealership handled live chat on the website.  He said he wanted to stop giving out detailed vehicle and other information and curtail the process of getting shoppers’ contact information to continue communication via email and phone.  He said, “We just want to tell them to ‘come on down to the dealership.’

Can you relate?  Dealership website chat, whether from ContactAtOnce! or Activengage, is a powerful tool when used effectively.  Some dealers like the one Todd quotes still have work to do in order to become effective users.  If you follow this blog you already have read about many tips and techniques for effectively using chat to sell more cars…hopefully you are putting them to work!

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.

Our friends over at the DealerRefresh blog launched a new forum site last week.  I would recommend it as a great source of information for any of our customers and readers across a wide range of topics, from CRM to 3rd party leads.  

One of the hottest topic threads so far is about live chat.  Check it out, and please join the conversation. 

http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/low-cost-live-chat-software-62.html.