[Maria Espinoza]

Would you feel comfortable letting shoppers mull around your lot or your showroom without ever being greeted, welcomed or offered assistance? What would the impact be to your bottom line if your sales people took such an approach with your walk in traffic and waited for the customer to approach them?

As disturbing as this is, this is exactly how most stores handle their web traffic. According to Google Analytics, if you do not take the opportunity to engage with your Internet visitor within the first two minutes they are on your site, 98% of the time you are missing the opportunity to capture and convert these shoppers to sales. This means that your website becomes nothing more than an “informational site”.

As a retailer you invest in building the best website you can afford, pump large sums of money into advertising and marketing it in order to drive traffic to it. What is your current website doing to engage visitors within the first two minutes?

Live chat, done right will provide a simple cost effective solution to engaging your customers within those first two critical minutes. When you take into consideration that a chat lead typically costs a dealer less than $2 dollars per lead as opposed to $21 per third party lead, it quickly becomes apparent that a live chat lead offers a better bang for the buck. A lead generated from chat is a more substantial sales lead because it is YOUR lead not a lead that you paid for.

There are two types of chat capabilities, proactive and reactive. Statistically, proactive live chat generates five times as many leads on a dealer’s website than on a reactive live chat. Proactive chats will engage the visitor within the critical two minutes of their visit.

There are a few important factors to consider when choosing a live chat provider:

• Proactive live chat capability versus reactive
• 24/7/365 live chat coverage
• Ability to handle multiple chats simultaneously
• Ability to deliver chat transcripts in real time
• Ability to push individual pages to the consumer i.e. lead forms
• Ability to send chats to correct dealership departments

Without an opportunity for a live chat you are in essence allowing the prospect to gather information on your dime only to “drive off” to the next site loaded with questions they got while visiting yours. You can trust that your competitor’s eager live chat agent will seize the opportunity to answer those questions and therefore generate a lead and earn their business. The longer you wait to incorporate proactive live chat on your site to help you cultivate these sales leads, the longer you will continue to be a great lead generator for your competitor.

[Jeff Kershner]

Thanks for the fyi on chat. Let me guess...perhaps you work for a vendor selling chat?

I feel like this would had been more appropriate in response to someone asking about chat rather it's own new thread. We'll let it fly since you are offering some information here. And I do agree with you on much of this..chat leads, if done properly, turn into some high quality leads.

Engaging the customer with your website is a much but we need to be careful to not "intrusively engage" the visitor as well. Find the balance!

[DrewAment]

LOL - she is a vendor --hey I am one too..sort of. Here is my 3cents:

1. Managed chat - offsite that doesn't really answer the consumers questions - they are just there to get a name, phone number, and email - then someone will contact you back. If I wanted an answer later - I would have emailed you the question - right? I chatted to have my question answered NOW!

2. Dealer Chat - GREAT, but I have only seen 3-4 (a small handful) who do it right. They are "there" when I click the chat button. They answer my questions. They INTERACT with me.

I will always go with number 2 - but hard to find the committed dealer personal that have product knowledge, and are consistently in front of a PC.

[Jeff Kershner]

You're right about that. I have chat vendors calling me all the time and I have to tell them "we are not ready" for chat. Heck, we shouldn't even be answering the phone. First impressions are make or break.

I have a dealer on chat by default (before I took on the position) and I get copied on all the chat sessions. Wowzers! Well, maybe it's not that bad. They are at least professional (excluding mis-spells).

If they handle the phone in the same manor, we are in trouble. And of course most dealer will slaughter the chat session just as they do the phone call.

First impressions:
bad chat session = no opportunity
No chat session = possible opportunity

If you are going to get into chat on the dealer level you better train, train and train some more.

If you have your team doing a stellar job on chat, you will no doubt increase leads and possible sales.

As for outsourced chat - I can only say there is play there but be sure you choose the right company and hold them to high standards but it can work.

[Maria Espinoza]

Absolutely - No matter what kind of chat system you use training is the key to making it a success!

[Maria Espinoza]

f you want your answers "NOW" then , I think live chat would be a good fit. How would a consumer get any type of answers after hours other than from live chat? Trained chat agents are able to answer questions and generate leads for the dealer.
The dealer manage chat often creates inconsistent experiences for customers being sometimes the feature is available and sometimes its not. You cant be chained to your desk every minute of the day and if you forget to log off a customer can be waiting for a response thinking that you are "online".
Furthermore, only one chat conversation can be handled at a time which then requires a customer to wait until an ongoing chat session is finished.

[Jarrett]

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