Does Your Dealership Ignore Customers?

Would you feel comfortable letting shoppers mull around your lot or your showroom without ever being greeted, welcomed or offered assistance? What would the impact be to your bottom line if your sales people took such an approach with your walk in traffic and waited for the customer to approach them?

As disturbing as this is, this is exactly how most stores handle their web traffic. According to Google Analytics, if you do not take the opportunity to engage with your Internet visitor within the first two minutes they are on your site, 98% of the time you are missing the opportunity to capture and convert these shoppers to sales. This means that your website becomes nothing more than an “informational site”.

As a retailer you invest in building the best website you can afford, pump large sums of money into advertising and marketing it in order to drive traffic to it. What is your current website doing to engage visitors within the first two minutes?

Live chat, done right will provide a simple cost effective solution to engaging your customers within those first two critical minutes. When you take into consideration that a chat lead typically costs a dealer less than $2 dollars per lead as opposed to $21 per third party lead, it quickly becomes apparent that a live chat lead offers a better bang for the buck. A lead generated from chat is a more substantial sales lead because it is YOUR lead not a lead that you paid for.

There are two types of chat capabilities, proactive and reactive. Statistically, proactive live chat generates five times as many leads on a dealer’s website than on a reactive live chat. Proactive chats will engage the visitor within the critical two minutes of their visit.

There are a few important factors to consider when choosing a live chat provider:

* Proactive live chat capability versus reactive
* 24/7/365 live chat coverage
* Ability to handle multiple chats simultaneously
* Ability to deliver chat transcripts in real time
* Ability to push individual pages to the consumer i.e. lead forms
* Ability to send chats to correct dealership departments

Without an opportunity for a live chat you are in essence allowing the prospect to gather information on your dime only to “drive off” to the next site loaded with questions they got while visiting yours. You can trust that your competitor’s eager live chat agent will seize the opportunity to answer those questions and therefore generate a lead and earn their business. The longer you wait to incorporate proactive live chat on your site to help you cultivate these sales leads, the longer you will continue to be a great lead generator for your competitor.