Chat ConneXion works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to engage online visitors, turn them into leads, and eventually turn them into customers for your dealership. With online chat, there are several options. Blended or managed chat is available so that if you don’t have a designated employee that can be available at all times for chat, you can hire a company to do so for you.

Managed chat has been around for some time and is defined differently within the industry. Some third party chat providers will define managed chat as a passive or automated system that will capture name, email or phone number and forward to your CRM similar to a web lead. Others provide staff to answer chats after hours. This model is widely used to also generate leads for your during off hours then forwarded to your CRM.

On the other hand, blended models are undoubtedly the most effective. This model gives you or your staff the ability to answer leads either during business hours or after and to have them rolled over to a chat representative at a predetermined amount of time if the chat is not answered by you or your staff. For example, you can set your answer time to 15 seconds. This would mean that if you or your staff did not answer within that time, the chat provider’s staff would take the chat and get the customer’s information and forward to your CRM for follow-up.

The third option is to completely outsource your chat. Some dealerships do not have the staff to manage chats coming into the dealership so they completely rely on a third party company to answer all chats. While this might be a necessary option for some dealership, it is not the best option simply because you are most familiar with your inventory.

Here are some tips:

1. Make sure you have an employee that is available at all times to answer the chat conversations, or either outsource. It is important to make sure your online visitors are getting their questions answered. You wouldn’t ignore someone that walked onto your actual car lot, so make sure you don’t ignore online visitors as well.

2. Be cautious and careful about your approach. It is easy for the visitor to exit out of the chat or your website with one click. Make sure you aren’t too pushy and let the visitor ask questions. Be there to answer them and ask when they would like to come take a test drive..

3. Follow up. Get contact info from them if possible and make sure you follow up. It is important that the visitor knows you are interested in them and you are available if they have further questions.

Don’t miss any more online leads! Give us a call for your free 30 day trial of Chat ConneXion and we can help sell more cars!

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