Dealer chat is moving from the early adopter stage into the mainstream as more and more dealerships look for ways to increase internet sales and reduce costs to acquire new dealership customers. The dealership's website has the highest potential for increased results and should be the focus of your dealership if you are looking to boost your online internet sales. Here are five areas of concern and some good questions you might want to ask your dealer chat vendor before you buy any dealership chat solution.

Functionality- What are the capabilities of the dealer chat system and what will you actually use on a daily/weekly basis? What new features are planned over the next 6 months to a year for the chat vendor? Does the company own the technology or are they licensing a third party solution? Obviously this will greatly impede any ability to customize the chat software for your dealership's needs. It will also affect what new features get released. It is important to remember that making sure whatever dealer chat software you purchase will easily communicate with your existing dealership technology.

Scale-ability- How will it work for multiple dealership websites? Will you need a log-in for each dealership URL or does the software offer one enterprise log-in that will allow you to review and interact with all your dealerships from one place? Can you place chat across all areas a consumer might want to engage your dealership (i.e. facebook, eBay, Craigslist, email, newsletters, microsites, landing pages, blogs, etc.)?

Userability- Is it easy to use? Does it help you to run your dealership Internet department or is it just another tool? Can you be up and running quickly using the dealer tool? What level of training and support comes after you purchase the automotive chat solution? Training and support are critical for the success of your deployment and continued used. I often see many technologies and services sitting idle at dealerships. Make sure you have access to continuous training and improvement from your solution provider.

Integration- What type of proactive invitations can you choose from and what level of customization is possible for your dealership? Can you generate and deliver a custom message on the fly or does it just happen automatically? Does the proactive chat engine have business intelligence built into it so the message consumers see is relevant to the dealership web page they are on and what they are looking at? How does the information go from the dealer's chat conversation into the CRM/ILM? How much information is transferred over?

Reporting- What type of reporting is offered and how useful is the information to help you make better dealer business decisions? Nobody in the automotive industry has time to look at useless information. Today’s dealerships demand information that will help them to make better decisions about marketing, SEO, SEM and how effectively their social media plan is being executed for the dealership. Web analytics and individual user click path information is only as good as it can be analyzed and interpreted.

In too many dealerships cost is the main driving force for how we select our dealer chat solution only to regret it later, or worse, we have to change out the solution because it didn’t meet the needs of the dealership as expected. Remember the old carpenter's saying, “Measure twice, cut once.” Change in dealerships is usually painful and slows down sales productivity so take the time and select the right chat solution for the long term. Technology might be changing all the time but with the right dealership chat vendor you will always be one step ahead of the dealer competition.

Happy Chatting,

Todd Smith