To not call?

We all feel apprehensive about handing out our phone number on a website online. Even though we may be interested in the product and have questions, we imagine ourselves as being pestered out of our wits by an eager salesperson, and decide against it. Understandably, a study by Vital Design found that lead capture forms that have phone numbers have 48% less conversions.

And even if a company is able to successfully capture the phone number, most don’t have the efficient operation necessary to call back within the ideal time window. Studies find that companies that call their leads immediately can vastly improve their conversation rates, but the industry average response time hovers at a dismal 46 hours. For most companies, the entire process of gathering phone leads, distributing them amongst sales reps, calling them, and finally connecting just has too many gaps to achieve that kind of efficiency.

Or call?

And yet, if your sales experts are able to make a phone contact, the conversion rates are vastly better than other means of communication like email (8.21% vs 0.03%). Dealerships also know this from personal experience. Selling a car has a strong human angle where the in-person intimacy and ability to deliver a custom pitch over phone gives them a much better chance of convincing a prospective buyer.

Neither!

Dealerships are therefore caught in a strange dilemma. Should you forego the phone number up front, and capture more leads, but be unable to contact them effectively? Or, should you capture the phone number up front, netting in less leads in the process, but contacting and converting them effectively?

The answer is neither.

Fortunately for us, recent developments in web technologies give us the option of capturing the best of both worlds. WebRTC technology allows dealership websites to add audio calling capabilities right on the website, which allows the prospect to talk to the sales rep, without a phone number ever being exchanged. Technically, this is very easy to achieve. Most WebRTC widgets just require you to add a simple line of code to your web pages, which populates them with a “Talk to a rep now” or similar button. The prospect just needs to click on the button to immediately initiate a voice conversation with a sales rep. This approach has multiple benefits:

1. Convenient. Although it is a new, enabling voice conversion is really a simple one step process with this approach. Compare this will collecting a phone number by filling out a field, distributing it to a sales rep, calling the prospect, and connecting (or not).
2. Overcome the prospect's natural apprehension. Since the prospect does not have to share their phone number, they are more likely to participate in a voice conversation and get their questions answered.  
3. Retain the human angle. By enabling a voice conversation purely online, dealerships can overcome apprehensions, and still retain the benefits of an intimate voice exchange. They can quickly answer the prospect’s questions and lay the ground for further conversations, or even ask the prospect for their phone number.  

About Pankaj Taneja

Pankaj is Marketing Manager at HyperOffice. HyperOffice's uShare.to sales enablement solution allows dealerships to capture leads with live audio, video and chat on their websites, and take them all the way to the sale in the same environment. 

The technology for offering live video on the website has been around for few years. Yet, even while website chat is a big hit in the dealership and other industries, live video on the website hasn’t seen widespread adoption so far. A number of reasons are proposed – that the technology isn't yet mature, live video is invasive, it’s too onerous upon the website visitor to set up and so on.

Although some of these arguments may have been true formerly, we feel the right moment for live website video has arrived, especially for auto dealerships. Here’s why:

The biggies are doing it. Large enterprises have the volumes and research departments to test the effectiveness of new technologies. Gartner found that more than 100 of the 500 largest global businesses will introduce video-based chat by 2018 for customer-facing interactions. Large brands like American Express, Hertz, Activision Blizzard, E-Trade, Bank of America and Target have experienced success with one-click access to help via video chat. So if the behavior of large companies is something to go by, there’s something to it.

It gives dealerships the in-person touch even in an online world. According to Mckinsey, car buyers visit 1.6 auto dealerships while car shopping, down from 5 dealerships ten years ago. There are new facts dealers have to contend with - an ever larger part of the car buying process happens online and people are visiting dealerships less. However, the in-person connection has always been part of convincing people to buy a car.

Live video allows dealerships to deliver the intimate touch of an in-person interaction even while touching the customer online.

Because its possible, even easy. WebRTC and the wider acceptance of web standards has made it incredibly easy for people to initiate audio and video right on a public website. This alone is a good argument to at least make live video an option on the website. Let the customer choose. (our approach with uShare.to is to allow dealerships to offer audio, video and chat as options on the website).

Improve your lead response time. Online lead response time is a key metric in the auto dealership industry. OnlineDrive found that dealerships which respond to online leads in the first ten minutes are three times more likely to get a store visit. However, according to a Pied Piper’s 2016 study dealerships took more than 30 minutes for half of the leads.

Today, a lead response involves expecting a customer to fill out a form, enter their phone number (a big hurdle), then have someone call the customer back, hope the customer picks up their phone, and then finally initiating a contact. Putting website visitors in single click audio/video communication with your rep right on the website will definitely improve response times.

Dealership website chat may be likened to courtship which begins with a bang, but fizzles out post-haste. But first, a few good words about website chat.

The bang

Online is big. Dealerships know this based on personal experience and market studies. According to Accenture, 80% of car buyers begin the research process online. No wonder dealership website chat is such a hit. It allows you to proactively engage and capture people who visit your website rather than letting them passively browse and bail.

However, the buying process does not end with the initial engagement.  Multiple interactions follow – questions are answered, additional stakeholders added to the loop, till the final contract is signed.

Fizzle

Unfortunately, while dealerships use the latest-and-greatest tech up front, the successive exchanges happen over age old email and phone calls. Today, where the new generation says phone calls are their least favorite (Mary Meeker 2016), and consistently prefer mobile messaging over email (Appannie 2016), might there be a better way?

The uShare.to Philosophy: Aiming for a fairytale journey

Ironically, the technologies exist to improve this experience. WebRTC allows dealerships to easily add video and audio as engagement options right on the website. Persistent communication environments which live on (as opposed to ad-hoc meeting environments) have already had great success in the team communication space.  The open standards of web environments also allow for innovative integrations with other tools to improve processes.

In uShare.to, we took upon the task of bringing together the latest web technologies and building a solution which would improve the online selling experience for Dealerships, and improve key metrics like lead conversion rates, time to conversion, and satisfaction.

uShare.to improves on traditional dealership chat solutions like Gubagoo and Carchat in the following ways:

• In addition to chat, engage visitors on the website with “in-person” channels like audio and video
• Continue the conversation in the same place through persistent workspaces
• Share information to educate the client – videos, images, brochures etc.
• Include additional stakeholders like family members, financers etc into the loop
• Close the sale with eSignature capabilities

With uShare.to we hope a great first date will change into a great relationship. We would be thrilled for you to give it a spin and prove your feedback.

Dealerships and auto manufacturers are sweating over ways to woo millennials for a reason - they are the single most important demographic in the coming years. According to a 2016 study by JD Power, the share of millennials amongst new car buyers has already gone to 28%. And millennials will buy 40% of all new cars in the next 10 years, says Deloitte. No wonder Millennials are such a hit.

Successful dealerships will be those which adapt their ways to the buying habits of millennials. The old approaches won’t work. Millennials are just too different.

Catch em’ online

80% of all buyers today do some form of research before buying a car, finds a 2015 Accenture study. The number probably nears 100% for millennials. Since the journey begins online, dealerships which capture them right at that step will be the most successful.

Dealerships have internalized this insight to a large extent. Hence the substantial investments in websites and online marketing budgets. However, more needs to be done. Once a prospective buyers lands on your website, there’s a good chance they might leave and never return. Using simple chat engagement tools like Intercom or richer engagement tools with audio, video and chat like uShare.to allows Dealerships to initiate that first conversation and increase the chances of a conversion.

Engage, not frustrate

The engagement process today usually just consists of a prolonged series of phone calls and email exchanges. My some counts, it takes as many as 45 touch points before the car is finally sold. This obviously won’t fly with millennials. According to Mary Meeker’s internet trends report, social media and web chat are the favorite means of communication for millennials, and phone calls the least favorite.

Millennials are more than happy to complete the entire journey online, with minimal trips to the dealership. In a 2015 Accenture survey, 69% of buyers said given the opportunity, they would consider buying the car online, including financing, price negotiation, paperwork & home delivery. Mckinsey found that Car buyers visit 1.6 auto dealerships while car shopping, down from 5 dealerships ten years ago

The engagement tools that Dealerships use need to factor in the interaction habits of this whatsapping, facetiming generation. For example, uShare.to also doubles up as an engagement environment where customer questions are answered on an ongoing basis using video, audio and chat, and information like brochures, images, links etc. can be shared.

Don’t sell and scoot, but sell and serve

Too many dealerships today are geared towards closing the sale. After sales follow up is shoddy at best. This results in substantial lost opportunities in terms of upsell and cross sell. Accenture found that buyers felt that aftersales service was the weakest link in the digital car buying experience.

Those dealerships which ignore service do so at their own peril. McKinsey found that the more profitable dealerships focus on practices in the service department. Dealerships therefore need to invest in tools which allow them to continue the engagement much beyond the sale. Texting service reminders and deals is a simple way to keep in front of your customer. However, others might prefer full blown engagement features like audio, video and chat.