• Stop being a LURKER - join our dealer community and get involved. Sign up and start a conversation.

TAKE POLL How many offers to CHAT would frustrate YOU?

I don't think Ed intended to rub you the wrong way.

From my perspective, this is the perfect case scenario. I monitor my time on site, average page views per visitor, and number of return visitors. These numbers continue to get better. I watch this site traffic, and as it increases so does my floor traffic. THIS IS WHAT I WANT! I want my website visitors to hop in their car and drive down here. I don't want to "Chat" with them, email with them, text with them, send smoke signals or Carrier Pigeons. I want to shake their hand, physically touch the car with them, actually look at their trade in with my own eyes, and be able to read their body language.

This is how I rank my categories of customer engagement"
1. Live and in person customer visit to my store.
2. Customer spending more than 5 minutes on my site
3. Customer viewing more than 8 pages on my website AND scrolling down my homepage to the Why Buy section.
4. Customer views my website and CALLS. Like a telephone call. Like we interact with one another.
5. Customer initiates an email that is done independent of any CTA form on my website. The customer clicks on an email address link for myself or one of my employees and actually sends a real email. Not a form lead.
6. Customer views my website and submits a complete CTA Form, no matter the form. Long form Credit App doesn't count here, because the majority of these come to us as a result of us guiding a customer to this section.
7. Customer clicks on the Chat Button (which no longer exists)
8. Customer clicks the Text Us button on the VDP.

Now, I do have lead forms, text buttons, etc., but they are mostly there because I believe that one day I am going to wake up and everyone within 75 miles of my store is going to start using all of them. Customers in my market are going to to have this awakening that they really need to start using these things and I am going to have myself brilliantly positioned. I guess I leave them for the rare customer that actually wants to use them. Honestly, I am not really sure why I leave them.

In a perfect world, yes but it's not really about what you want in a transaction necessarily. It is what customers want and how they want to engage. I spoke with a dealer yesterday, using one of my competitor products and he tells me they get 15- 25 chat requests per day with a 1 out of 4 closing ratio. We both agree that this is mainly due to the ability to continue a chat throughout the day regardless of where the prospect is.
 
In a perfect world, yes but it's not really about what you want in a transaction necessarily. It is what customers want and how they want to engage. I spoke with a dealer yesterday, using one of my competitor products and he tells me they get 15- 25 chat requests per day with a 1 out of 4 closing ratio. We both agree that this is mainly due to the ability to continue a chat throughout the day regardless of where the prospect is.
Do you know if they used a fully managed chat service or do they field the chats inhouse?