It may be a hard truth to hear, but customers dread going to the car dealer to buy a new vehicle. There’s plenty you can do to improve the customer experience at your business, but you can’t change bigger trends shaping the industry. Instead, you have to adapt, and that means you need to handle more of the purchasing process online. By using a dealer live chat on your website, you let customers book test drives and service appointments, get live answers about your inventory, and apply for credit, all online. There are 4 primary reasons that dealer live chat works, and all of them have to do with making the most of a new medium for interacting with customers.
Inventory Integration – Inventory integration is at the heart of Gubagoo auto chat software, a live chat designed specifically for car dealers. In the auto industry, the vast majority of chat queries are made about inventories, so chat liaisons should have your dealer inventory readily accessible.
Video Resources – Video is the most persuasive medium, which is why it’s crucial that your live chat uses plenty of video resources. Online liaisons at Gubagoo call centres are trained to use video resources like YouTube reviews and test drives, and can even incorporate unique video material made in-house. Over half of all car drivers use video to research their decision.
Images (VDP) – Early on, marketing analysts quickly figured out that long paragraphs of text do not work for live chat. A successful live chat conversation requires the least amount of work (or friction) possible, and reading lengthy paragraphs strains attention spans. When there’s a lot of information to be transmitted, a more successful strategy is sending a link to the prospect for them to read in another window. Often, chat users will tab between the chat window and the company website or a resource. A successful live chat experience relies on visuals, and Gubagoo Chat Smart uses VDP to provide link previews in the form of high quality images. The click-through rate of images is much higher than hyperlinked text or full-length URLs.
SMS – There are huge benefits to using SMS channels to communicate with leads, including the fact that offers sent by SMS are 8 times more likely to be redeemed than those offered by email, and that the open rate of text messages is 98 percent, compared to 22 percent for email. Switching from web to SMS communication pays off when you’re nurturing a lead, and a live dealer chat software can make the transition seamless. In both Canada and the US, legislation exists to protect consumers from unwanted marketing material on their phones, which is why you want to make sure that when you start using SMS-integration, the solution is fully compliant with local laws. Typically, that means requiring customer opt-in before you can start chatting or sending resources by text message.
More than anything, what your customers want is to control how they talk to the dealer. They don’t want to have to physically visit five lots before they make up their mind; they want car shopping to be easy. The test drive should simply confirm the decision they’ve already made to make their purchase, with just about everything else handled online, at the customer’s convenience. Car buying is moving toward web and mobile communications and a dealer live chat will help you stay competitive on the channels where you find your customers.