On the surface, one might think that website chat systems are very straightforward, that they're all pretty much the same. They're not the same and with one of the three most important components, the differences can be huge.

When analyzing the effectness of your chat system, it's easy to see if something is working or not. It's harder to determine what to do to make it work other than to pick a different dealer chat provider. Here are three things to consider in your chat strategy when making decisions:

1. Placement Counts - There are personal preferences about where to place chat buttons and calls to action. Some like going big with prompts that encourage interaction and buttons available throughout. Others like to put a little button at the top of the page and leave it at that. We believe strongly in encouraging website visitors to chat with you. They'll fill out a form or call you based upon their escalating needs, but sometimes getting them to talk to you in the first place takes prompting.
2. Scripts and Integration Help - Most of the questions that come over chat have been asked many, many times before. There are certain talk tracks that can be inserted into a chat box that has been shown to be most successful to help your website visitors and encourage further interaction. Also, having the ability to quickly send them a CarFax or an Edmunds vehicle report gives you the ability to be exceptional for your website visitors above and beyond the last website they visited or a competitor they'll go to in the future.
3. Be Present at All Times - The most appealing part of chat for most of your website visitors is the real-time interaction. It's not like a form that can take time to respond. Having your chat available 24/7 has been shown to dramatically improve how your website visitors perceive your ability to serve them, not to mention it increases leads.

It's in this last one that chat companies differ in opinion. It's easy for me to say that 24/7 is important since that's what's offered by my company, but the data has shown that beyond a shadow of a doubt people are using the internet at night. They're on your website at all hours. They're on your website on weekends. Don't fall for the pitch that people only go to your site around business hours.

If you know these three things, you'll be able to determine how to make your chat service more productive and efficient. It's all about results.

The automotive industry is really starting to come around to the idea that they must have chat on their websites. It has moved from being a luxury to becoming a requirement due to the increased use of mobile and the trend towards real-time communication.

Now, the debate has been shifting to an old question: manged or self-serve? There are advantages and disadvantages to each that we've discovered and we'd love to hear from the DrivingSales community about their opiinon.

As we covered on a recent blog post, the reasons for managed are plentiful:

• 24/7 Coverage
• Professional, Consistent Responses
• Experience of Managing Chat Constantly
• Proven Scripts Over Off-The-Cuff Replies

For every argument, there's a counter-argument. Self-serve chat software has its own advantages:

• Live Answers to Inventory Questions
• Direct Appointments Instead of Inquiries
• Dealership Personality

Again, we offer both so we have all of the horses in this race. We simply want to know what you guys think. What results have you seen from either or both? What would you like to see from a chat provider that you haven't seen yet?

The key to a strong chat service, whether it's self-serve or managed, is getting feedback from the people in the trenches. What have you seen in your travels?

As website communication tools go, chat has grown at the fastest rate of adoption on car dealer websites for years. It’s not new, but more dealers are embracing what chat can do for them to engage with people visiting their website.

There are two primary reasons that it wasn’t a fad that died away like so many other website addons over the years. First, it is an ideal method of communication for the expanding number of people who prefer to use their phones for texting rather than calls. Our society is shifting towards testing as more people embrace it and chat is the closest thing to that type of communication available on a dealer’s website.

Forms and emails do not have the real-time dialogue abilities that text and chat have. Scientific research has shown that many people avoid calling a dealership (or any business) as much as possible because they no longer possess the pacing control. With chat or texting, they determine when and how they reply. On the phone, it’s more direct. In essence, website visitors have more control over chats and texts than they do with phone calls.

The second reason that chat continues to grow is because in most cases and with some providers like CarChat24, chat is the only way for dealers to have a conversation with a website visitor late at night or early in the morning. Despite what some would have you believe, today’s consumers do their research and shopping at all hours of the day or night.

One of the best things about the internet is that it has empowered us to not be restricted based upon time of day. For many, the best time to get online and do serious research like shopping for a car is off business hours. The idea that people only shop for cars during daytime hours is incorrect. The number show that there are plenty of people visiting and chatting even after midnight. You can see this for yourself by checking your analytics and breaking down visitors to your website by hour.

With these two pieces of information, let’s now discuss why 24/7 is so important.

The Power of Being Always Open

It all comes down to differentiation. For most dealers, they either have no method of communication on their website late at night or the communication is not working properly. That’s how you should look at it. If your chat says “Offline” at night, then it’s not working properly. It’s not accomplishing what your website visitors expect from a chat box.

Late night visitors are not “weird” or any less likely to buy. They aren’t visiting for fun. If anything, the fact that they’re up late at night investigating your dealership is a sign that they’re truly serious about it.

Chat offers the only way for your website visitors to get answers immediately. Through managed chat with CarChat24, you’ll have an “always open” presence that your competitors are missing.

If you’re selling the same vehicles at approximately the same price, you have to differentiate yourself. Sometimes, the ability to contact you is all of the differentiation you’ll need to start to earn their business.

We all love to focus on leads. That's the name of the game in pretty much everything you do on your website. Many dealers are starting to understand that it's not all about leads since many people, particularly mobile visitors, are not filling out forms as they were in the past. Still, it's a big focus.

One thing we've seen over the years is that sometimes a happy potential customer can be earned by simple customer service. When people come to your website, it can take a quick answer to an easy question that can be the difference in making a sale or not.

Chat is the easiest way be there for your website visitors. Many people don't want to make a phone call and filling out a form to get a quick answer is not appropriate. Maybe they just want to see if a vehicle is available before they hop int he car. Perhaps they want to know if you take trade ins (yes, there are people who aren't sure). Whatever their need is, the presence of a chat operator to answer their questions is necessary.

It can take the form in more detailed questions as well. They might want to see the CarFax. They might want to get information about the car from Edmunds. Using a chat service that interfaces with the right partners can be a huge win, especially if they've already visited one of your competitors' sites and did not get the information they needed.

Chat is about leads, but it can be so much more. In some cases, it can be less, and it's in these little details that you have the opportunity to make a new customer.

You can and probably should call this a no-brainer, but it's still an important message to deliver. Results are the only thing that really matter. Everything else is a nuance.

That's not to say that the ways the results are achieved aren't important. We all know that there's a right way and a wrong way to get results in the car business through many of our marketing channels and getting more leads to sell more cars falls squarely into that category. All I want to make sure we all understand is that a method or style might sound great, but the results have to match.

In the world of chat, we're faced with the challenge of an ever-changing environment. Consumer habits change. Website features change. Best practices change. Any one hot concept can become very cold very quickly. It's not just about getting results today. It's about getting results sustainably over time.

My advice to dealers: compare apples to apples. Results always vary, but getting a baseline from a company about the results they're achieving can help dealers make the right decisions about many things, not just chat. Here are some examples of things dealers should look at when comparing any marketing companies:

1. Define the Lead - Different providers consider different forms of interaction a lead. Make sure that if one company is claiming something that's much higher than all of their competitors that it's not just a manipulation of the term "lead."
2. Look for Averages, Not Optimal Situations - Every vendor has great examples of their work, but they also have examples of failures. Of course, nobody will show you these. That's fine. What you want in order to make an educated decision is to request examples of their average customers. You want to know what to expect as a client, not what the best case scenario might be.
3. Find the Same Numbers in Reports - Everyone has different reports. When comparing them, just as when comparing leads, make sure that the numbers are speaking on the same terms and in the same language. If you can't find the common language, ask one or both of the vendors to generate reports that truly make it an apples to apples comparison.

There are other things that dealers can do when comparing, but I cannot stress enough that the most important factor is pure results.

Are you getting more leads? Are the leads of a high quality? Are you selling more cars? Those are the real questions you should be asking when looking at different vendors, including chat.

Millennials are emerging into the car buying market. That fact alone should make it very clear that text messaging is becoming an important component of mobile marketing and the lead process for car dealers, but there's more. Existing car shoppers who weren't texting very much the last time they were in the market are starting to embrace texting more every day.

Texting isn't just for young people. Even people in my generation are moving towards texting. I personally text much more often than I talk on the phone.

There is a growing percentage of dealers who are taking advantage of the text messaging trends when it comes to working their leads. That percentage is probably higher than normal here on DrivingSales. However, there is still a gap when it comes to using texting for marketing. Between texting rules and software nuances, trying to generate more leads through text messaging can be a challenge.

Thankfully, chat is filling much of the gap. Compared to phone calls, emails, and lead forms, website chat is by far the closest that a lead converter can come to replicating the texting experience. As we described in our blog post, chat mimics texting on dealer websites. It's not exactly the same, but a clear increase in the percentage of website visitors utilizing chat can be easily attributed to its similarities to the ever-popular text.

It's real time.

It's back and forth within a single mobile interface.

It doesn't require people to open their mouths and talk.

As the popularity of mobile continues to expand and the market becomes more saturated with people who like to text, having a properly positioned mobile chat interface can help dealers takea advantage of the evolution of communication.

In our blog post about the two ways dealers can increase leads, I talked about the differences between driving more traffic as a strategy versus improving your websites ability to generate leads from the traffic it's already getting. This is on our blog and obviously I'm going to lean towards our own expertise when posting to my website, but here I'd like to point out the obvious: you don't have to choose one or the other.

Why can't we have both?

When I was a sales manager, I would hear about how this advertising campaign brought in weaker traffic or that campaign brought in too little traffic. We were always searching for the goose that would lay the golden egg - better foot traffic and more of it! Now that everything has gone digital, the old complaints are manifesting in the form of lead generation.

Driving more shoppers to your website can help you generate more leads and improving the way that website converts them can do the same. Let's look at the math to see which is better:

I can already hear the complaints.

"Jeff, your numbers are rigged."

"Jeff, you're oversimplifying it."

"Jeff, your figures are too high/low/sideways."

It's simple math to illustrate a point that everyone here already knows. If you increase traffic and improve lead conversion, you have the best chance of generating more leads, period.

Dealers shouldn't put all of their eggs into one basket when on the quest to drive more leads from their website. You don't have to settle for better lead generating tools or more website traffic. You can do both. That's the point.

It doesn't have to be complicated. I don't need a fancy chart to illustrate it. Focusing on one doesn't stop you from focusing on the other. Why not both?

In the chat segment of the automotive industry, there's a question that comes up from time to time when I'm talking to dealers. We talk about leads as one of the primary focuses of our software and service options, so it's natural for savvy dealers to ask, "Is it really adding more leads or simply replacing leads that could be coming from other sources?"

The question is valid. Our experience clearly shows that dealers see an increase in overall leads when they integrate chat for their websites. It's in the nature and mentality of the modern car buyer that the explanation for this can be found.

We have a million different ways to communicate with each other and with businesses. It wasn't too long ago that the options were limited to phone, email, and form submissions, but today there are plenty of choices. With so many choices, people naturally tend to find a preference. For me, it's text. I love talking to people on the phone but I'm on the phone so often that I can miss calls. It's almost impossible to miss a text. I know I'm not alone.

For those who like to text, chat is usually the closest available option to for website visitors to contact a dealership with questions. It has the real-time benefits that forms and emails do not have while maintaining a degree of separation for those who aren't ready or willing to call the dealership directly. In other words, the website visitor has a perception of conversational control with chat that they don't get with phone while getting the instant answers they want that they can't always get with forms or emails.

Perhaps the most important reason that chat is effective for increasing rather than replacing leads on dealer websites is that it's simple. It's wide open. They can voice their questions and engage in a direct conversation in ways that forms cannot accomplish. The numbers clearly demonstrate this and it's becoming more pronounced. Compared to the early days of chat, the number of strong leads coming through to dealerships properly utilizing chat is steadily increasing.

Some swear by chat. Others are skeptical. You may be one of those who aren't certain about the effectness of chat. Perhaps you've had it on your website in the past. It's better today than ever before. Of course, the only way to know for sure is to put chat on your website and see how the numbers pan out.

There may have been a time in the past when chat replaced more than it increased leads, but those days are long behind us.

Every day, we hear about how forms on websites are generating fewer leads than they once did. It's a shift that has been happening for the last couple of years, which is surprising because business has been up at most dealerships across North America.

Some say that it's the technology that hasn't truly evolved much that's the culprit, but we know that reason is simply untrue. First, lead-generating technology and website platforms have improved. Second, chat technology (something I know very well) has also improved at the same rate. However, the number of people chatting and the number of leads generated by chat are on the rise, so there's more to the equation than technology fatigue. Consumers still want to communicate with dealers, but more and more are choosing chat over lead forms and phone calls. Why?

Nobody likes to miss an opportunity, so we continue to test (as we always do) not just the methods of improving website chat but also the science behind the increase in frequency. What is it about chat that makes it more appealing today than a couple of years ago? For the answer, we turned our attention to good ol' common sense.

Texting has been on the rise since the first text was ever sent. Unlike voice calls and lead form fills, texting is the one component of the mobile experience that has grown over the past couple of years. Some dealers have even tried to implement texting as a lead option on their websites with varying degrees of success. Yet, chat continues to rise. Is there a correlation.

Our contention is that chat, when done properly on a dealer's mobile website, offers a similar experience to consumers who adore texting. However, it's better for many of them because it offers an anonymity that they do not get from texts, voice calls, and lead forms. They have the ability to get their answers in a format very similar to their beloved texting without having to hand over their personals up front.

We have seen the biggest increases in chats and leads when the mobile chat is proactive on their phones and when proper scripts are used by the operator to prompt the leads accordingly. People are still skeptical about giving their personal information, but they're willing to give it to you once they are comfortable. That's the purpose of chat, to create a gap between the dealership and the consumer that they're allowed to cross at their discretion.

When you put the right chat interface in front of them and allow them to control the initial part of the conversation, you'll be able to improve the overall lead-generation on your website. With leads comes more sale. Isn't that what we all want?

The internet has changed our world. The concept of "business hours" has been turned on its head. People are buying things online at 2 in the morning. They're researching vehicles after the kids are in bed. They're planning out how to drop off their vehicle in your service department and still get to work on time at 4am.

When they have questions, are you there for them? Chances are that you do not have a receptionist there to answer questions by phone overnight. A contact form or email simply won't fulfill all of their needs in the timely manner they expect. This is where 24-hour chat comes into play.

In the example above, we described the person who wants to know about your service department and how she'll get to work. This isn't a hypothetical. It actually happens. We see chats all the time inquiring about hours and transportation. If you're not there to answer their questions, you're missing out on potential business. She can't wait until 7am to decide where to drop off her car if she has to be at work at 8am. Answering her questions at 4am when she's inquiring is the key to getting that business secured.

Many people like to do the majority of their web surfing at night when there are no distractions or responsibilities. Those who do not have 24-hour chat miss those opportunities when people are surfing their website late at night or early in the morning and they have questions that they need answered.

There's a reason that many companies do not offer 24-hour chat. It's not easy to maintain a properly trained chat operator staff that can be there at all hours of the day or night, so they talk about how "real" buyers only inquire during business hours. We've seen that the exact opposite is true, that people who are researching during off hours are often easier to convert into a lead than someone who is researching during the day.

When your customers come knocking at your virtual door, are you making your dealership available to answer their questions?