I love this forum, it's awesome to have access to so many talented people! We're making a decision soon about changing our chat provider at our dealership and wanted to throw out a couple things with the hope of getting some great feedback. By the way I apologize in advance if this has already been discussed elsewhere recently and I missed it.
Long story short I'm not thrilled with our current online chat provider and process. While in theory it's great to have engagement by our prospects with our BDC team, it's often too time consuming. What would normally be a 3-5 minute conversation can easily turn into a 30 minute one with each person taking turns typing, etc. Furthermore we're doing good things with our digital marketing and have plenty of leads, so it's not as though our reps will be sitting around with nothing to do. The solution of course is to go with fully managed chat by a company with reps that do more than the "I can help with that...give me all your information...I'll have someone get back to you" (I can't begin to tell you how awful I believe that is). One of the vendors we like doesn't offer it 24/7 which brings back the age old questions, if chat didn't exist would the visitors just submit an inquiry anyways?
So we're doing our due diligence, shopping a few vendors, and getting close to making a decision and have a visit by a rep for a vendor we already do business with. His company has recently introduced a new product that includes video chat and the demo wowed me throwing a monkey wrench into things. I don't want to pitch the product here but it offers the visitor a Skype/WebX type interaction; the visitor will have the option to video, voice, or text chat with us and can even choose to see us without us seeing them. In addition it has some other great features one of which seems similar to Kindle's new "Mayday" feature. The drawback of this product is that they don't offer any type of managed chat, it's being tested but not available yet. So from a positive perspective I get to offer my visitors an experience that none of my competitors can. Not only that I believe in my team and I think the more personal interactions while lead to a much higher conversion rate. The negative is I'm not really solving the problem I have with text based chat taking up too much of my reps time. Furthermore if none of our team is available will we miss an opportunity.
Again I'd be interested to hear any thoughts on anything I threw out there. Thanks!
Long story short I'm not thrilled with our current online chat provider and process. While in theory it's great to have engagement by our prospects with our BDC team, it's often too time consuming. What would normally be a 3-5 minute conversation can easily turn into a 30 minute one with each person taking turns typing, etc. Furthermore we're doing good things with our digital marketing and have plenty of leads, so it's not as though our reps will be sitting around with nothing to do. The solution of course is to go with fully managed chat by a company with reps that do more than the "I can help with that...give me all your information...I'll have someone get back to you" (I can't begin to tell you how awful I believe that is). One of the vendors we like doesn't offer it 24/7 which brings back the age old questions, if chat didn't exist would the visitors just submit an inquiry anyways?
So we're doing our due diligence, shopping a few vendors, and getting close to making a decision and have a visit by a rep for a vendor we already do business with. His company has recently introduced a new product that includes video chat and the demo wowed me throwing a monkey wrench into things. I don't want to pitch the product here but it offers the visitor a Skype/WebX type interaction; the visitor will have the option to video, voice, or text chat with us and can even choose to see us without us seeing them. In addition it has some other great features one of which seems similar to Kindle's new "Mayday" feature. The drawback of this product is that they don't offer any type of managed chat, it's being tested but not available yet. So from a positive perspective I get to offer my visitors an experience that none of my competitors can. Not only that I believe in my team and I think the more personal interactions while lead to a much higher conversion rate. The negative is I'm not really solving the problem I have with text based chat taking up too much of my reps time. Furthermore if none of our team is available will we miss an opportunity.
Again I'd be interested to hear any thoughts on anything I threw out there. Thanks!
