Contact At Once! Offers Fully Managed Chat
Contact At Once!, a provider of chat solutions for auto dealerships, has added a fully managed chat offering to its family of dealer chat solutions. This new fully managed chat offering is intended for dealers seeking to outsource the answering of shopper's chat requests to a trained staff of automotive professionals.
"Until now, dealers wanting to fully outsource their chat leads had to choose between low-cost offshore call centers and deal with issues such as cross-border data privacy laws, or high-priced services, which are incompatible with chat technologies used on the major third-party automotive Web sites," said Contact At Once! CEO John Hanger, in a statment. "Now dealers have the best of all worlds: a solution that not only provides fully managed chat on their own Web sites, but also connectivity with the industry's leading third-party and OEM Web sites, all at a reasonable price."
The fully managed chat offering allows dealers to leverage a proven, professional resource to engage online shoppers, freeing sales staff to focus on in-store customers.
"Before using fully managed chat from Contact At Once!, our sales staff was only answering about 60 percent of our inbound chat leads," said Chris Forsythe, Internet and BDC director of David Stanley Chrysler Jeep and Dodge located in Midwest City, Okla. "Now 100 percent of our chat leads are answered, including those that come in after hours, on weekends, and on holidays. Since we outsourced chat to Contact At Once!, we're getting a lot more leads and a lot more appointments, and we're selling a lot more cars."
As with all Contact At Once! solutions, the fully managed chat offering can be deployed on a dealer's Web site, but it also can be leveraged on third-party listing sites, such as AutoTrader.com, Cars.com, CarsDirect.com, CarSoup.com, and EveryCarListed.com, as well as on Facebook and Craigslist. The fully managed solution will also support the Mobile Text Connect feature, which allows consumers to initiate live chat directly from their smartphones by scanning QR Codes in advertisements, or by clicking banners or icons placed on a mobile version of a dealer's Web site.
Contact At Once! also this week announced that VinSolutions, a developer of Internet-based CRM and lead management software and the all-in-one Dealership Marketing System, will embed its dealer chat offering into the VinSolutions suite of dealer solutions.
"As we worked with dealerships to develop comprehensive online marketing and customer relationship solutions, it became clear that dealer chat is a must have," said Sean Stapleton, chief sales officer at VinSolutions, in a statement. "In seeking more than a superficial level of integration, we evaluated numerous chat software vendors, selecting Contact At Once! based on both their rich APIs that enabled us to tightly embed their solution, and on the built-in connectivity to their dealer chat network, which includes many of the Web sites from which our dealers get leads."
"No dealer wants the hassle and complexity of having to use different chat solutions for each Web site on which their inventory appears," said Contact At Once! founder and executive vice president, Marc Hayes, in a statement. "By embedding our solution, VinSolutions has greatly simplified things for their dealers who can now utilize a single chat solution to manage chats originating from their dealership's Web site as well as the third-party and OEM Web sites that are part of the Contact At Once! dealer chat network."