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Mar 21, 2012
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BREAKING NEWS - Has anyone seen this on the news? Our dealer group recently partnered with an innovative company that offers lifelike humanoid robots that walk around and greet customers on our dealership lot 24/7 for only $500 /mo!

They sure try their best to help answer customers' questions, but ultimately we just want them to capture a customer's email and phone number so our salespeople can follow up with them after they've already left our lot. Now our salespeople get to focus on better things and not be bothered by helping active shoppers on our lot.

This story sounds absolutely ridiculous, right? But this is exactly what dealers are doing with live chat on their website.

Most dealers would agree their website is the online extension of their showroom. We wouldn't outsource the process of greeting and answering shoppers' questions at the dealership showroom, so why are we doing it on our online showroom?

Take control of your online messaging. Treat the online shopper like they are in your dealership showroom and answer their questions. Your closing rate will go up. Our dealership answered chats close at a rate of more than 2x as our outsourced managed chats.

It's easy to do; most chat platforms offer a hybrid platform that allows you to answer live chats when you're available to do so and then have the outsourced managed chat center answer when you're not available.

Have you taken control of your dealership messaging yet?


PS: This is obviously a parody and a story I posed to our dealer group to get them to realize how silly it is to miss out on the opportunity to help shoppers live on our online showroom.
 
May be an image of 1 person and indoor


BREAKING NEWS - Has anyone seen this on the news? Our dealer group recently partnered with an innovative company that offers lifelike humanoid robots that walk around and greet customers on our dealership lot 24/7 for only $500 /mo!

They sure try their best to help answer customers' questions, but ultimately we just want them to capture a customer's email and phone number so our salespeople can follow up with them after they've already left our lot. Now our salespeople get to focus on better things and not be bothered by helping active shoppers on our lot.
So, can we co-op it?
 
Dude, I simply can't get onboard with this. Most dealerships will have their sales staff answering and managing their chats. Thats bad news.
100% agree when it comes to the traditional old-school salesperson, but we have plenty of upcoming sales talent that thrives with chat and SMS messaging.

Across all of our 64 stores, we certainly have quite a few that don't have the proper staffing to embark on this initiative. It won't work for everyone.

But times are changing and so are customers’ expectations.

PS: When I listen to some of our call recordings I wonder how we got onboard with allowing certain salespeople to even answer the phone. Like everything in this business, it ultimately comes down to having the right people.
 
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Dude, I simply can't get onboard with this. Most dealerships will have their sales staff answering and managing their chats. Thats bad news.
Why so? Our conversions on chat went up drastically when we started having our people handle the chats. Not to mention not looking nearly as foolish as the chat providers often make us look.
 
May be an image of 1 person and indoor


BREAKING NEWS - Has anyone seen this on the news? Our dealer group recently partnered with an innovative company that offers lifelike humanoid robots that walk around and greet customers on our dealership lot 24/7 for only $500 /mo!

They sure try their best to help answer customers' questions, but ultimately we just want them to capture a customer's email and phone number so our salespeople can follow up with them after they've already left our lot. Now our salespeople get to focus on better things and not be bothered by helping active shoppers on our lot.

This story sounds absolutely ridiculous, right? But this is exactly what dealers are doing with live chat on their website.

Most dealers would agree their website is the online extension of their showroom. We wouldn't outsource the process of greeting and answering shoppers' questions at the dealership showroom, so why are we doing it on our online showroom?

Take control of your online messaging. Treat the online shopper like they are in your dealership showroom and answer their questions. Your closing rate will go up. Our dealership answered chats close at a rate of more than 2x as our outsourced managed chats.

It's easy to do; most chat platforms offer a hybrid platform that allows you to answer live chats when you're available to do so and then have the outsourced managed chat center answer when you're not available.

Have you taken control of your dealership messaging yet?


PS: This is obviously a parody and a story I posed to our dealer group to get them to realize how silly it is to miss out on the opportunity to help shoppers live on our online showroom.
It's about time someone pointed this out. The dealership I use to work at in a bigger city before I moved back home, the internet sales department laid back and collected 25-30 sales a month per person just replying to leads. They made it look easy... while the floor sales people ran around with there heads cut off fighting about who saw the up first getting 8-12 sales a month. The future is the internet!