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What's important to you in chat?

I really like what Active Engage has done with the tool bar feature as seen on the bottom of these two websites: Checkered Flag and Daytona Toyota

I like how you can be chatting and connect to some of the different social media venues without ever leaving the dealers website. I can imagine that it would be nice for the salesperson to direct the customer to one of the links on the tool bar. Such as, "Would you like to see what some of our current customers are saying about our dealership? Please go check out some of our reviews located on the tool bar to the left." Or, "Go ahead and click on the YouTube icon to see a video we recently made demonstrating the vehicle you're considering." That's powerful!

It will be interesting to see what else can be added to this toolbar. How's the tool bar working out for you Alex?
[FONT=&quot]http://www.checkeredflag.com/[/FONT]
 
lol....kind of funny you bring that up. The social media tool bar has nothing to do with chat really. Place holder maybe, i guess? Again, I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings so I will be polite....I'll just say its not rocket science and you can get that same feature for free at Free Web Toolbar | Wibiya.

Please help me understand how the Social Media bar improves the chat experience? I am all ears. You could push links to pages or push pages using the co browse feature. I am 100% with Todd on the fact that you should NOT EVER offer links on your site that takes you away from your website. I see why he did that because it's a great feature. I am just confused on how that improves sales with chat. Better user experience? Maybe......but it's a pretty shiny object that when all is said and done may improve your site but the focus is being directed in the wrong place. What chat boils down to is sold cars. You can dress it as a pretty women or you can strip it naked if it sells cars it works.

I have taken a look at his tool bar and like it. Not sure I would pay for it but overall it's an improvement and it brings awareness to a lot of great things like keeping people on your site. Todd is an innovator and I like his ideas.

Not trying to knock you Jerry but I am only interested in chat ideas. Joe's comment was almost identical to what you posted without the spin for AE.

I had a feeling a post like this would pop up after the post from earlier. lol....I have a great sense of humor so it doesn't bother me. As far as I am concerned you will always be cool with me :).

We also don't want to be AE. We are two completely different companies offering two completely different products. Thank you for the suggestion but we want to separate ourselves from our competition. This post was about gathering ideas for chat.

Love you and I hope I didn't hurt anyone during this post. I have a very fun loving dry sense of humor and it can come off like I am firing off sometimes but I am not.
 
It has made the chat more noticeable for us without having to put flashy stuff on our site. Just making it more noticeable is probably the reason why our conversion has increased. << I think this is worth noting for a chat tool Ryan :)
 
Ryan,

I just liked it when i saw it, made a lot of sense to me. Like I said above, I also think having pictures of beautiful women appear in the chat box would lead to more chats. I'd like to see a chat vendor try this. Populate one dealership chat with pictures of good looking women and another with a bunch of ugly old guys. Let's see who gets more chats. This could be a fun study.
 
Rapport, Rapport, Rapport.

When I was managing the BDC of a local Suzuki/Isuzu dealer, I was hit with a LOT of questions about price, payments, bad credit, etc. We always went by the general rule of thumb to not prequalify customers, so we had to talk around this.

You cannot sound scripted - Live Chat isn't new anymore, so people have used it, and they know a robot when they see one. It's important to sound natural, comment on their choices, and make general conversation.

Just my $.02