ContactAtOnce! delivers intelligent routing of auto dealer chat leads to trained staff when dealership personnel are unavailable.
ATLANTA, GA – May 5, 2009 – ContactAtOnce!, a leading provider of auto dealer chat and other internet marketing tools that move online shoppers into live conversations with car dealers, today announced the immediate availability of its chat rollover feature and managed live chat service. The ContactAtOnce! auto dealer chat service gives dealers the industry’s most popular tools for answering their own chat leads and intelligent routing of chat leads to trained staff when dealership personnel are unavailable.
Adding auto dealer chat to a website has been shown to increase the number of site visitors with whom a dealership is able to set appointments; however, dealerships using chat have had to choose between answering their own chat leads, or outsourcing to a call center, both of which presented challenges. Dealership personnel are more informed and effective at engaging potential customers and setting appointments. On the other hand, outsourcing assured that someone was always available to answer in a timely fashion. The ContactAtOnce! automotive virtual chat solution gives dealerships the best of both worlds by allowing dealership personnel to answer when available, and automatically rolling chat messages to a qualified answering service when dealership personnel are not able to respond immediately.
“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 ContactAtOnce! auto dealer chat rollover feature works by automatically forwarding inbound chat requests to an answering center if dealership personnel do not answer within a specified period of time. The ContactAtOnce! rollover feature can forward chats to any automotive virtual chat center, a unique feature, according to founder and executive vice president of products for ContactAtOnce!, Marc Hayes. “We have many dealers with existing outsourced call center and business development center (BDC) relationships. As a company, we welcome the opportunity to work with those providers and have designed the rollover feature to support multiple partners.”
“The fear of ‘not having someone to answer all the time’ has kept some dealers from adding live chat to their website,” said Hayes. “To them, I say ‘fear no more’. Now every dealership can set more appointments by giving shoppers what they want – the ability to chat.”
Both the auto dealer chat rollover feature and the managed live chat service are available immediately from ContactAtOnce!.
The Outsourced Chat Debate - Post #3 - Rollover
This is the third in a series of five posts regarding “The Outsourced Chat Debate”. The introductory post provided important background and context that should be referenced before continuing with this post. The second post made the case for answering your own chat leads. In this post, an argument is made for answering your own chat leads but with an assist after hours and during those times when you are simply too covered up to answer your own - what we call “rollover”.
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.