How Your Dealership Can Stay Open All Hours Without Hiring Extra Staff

Customer standards keep on rising, presenting quite the challenge for automotive retailers. If car dealers fail to meet the demands of consumers, they risk losing out on sales, but some expectations are unrealistic, like offering 24/7 customer service. Although, as customer standards change, technology adapts to enable retailers to go above and beyond expectations.

Dealing with Queries and Bookings After Hours

Car dealer websites receive the highest volume of traffic between 6pm and 9pm, while your physical dealership is most likely shut and all your staff gone home. Impatience is common in consumer culture nowadays and a customer with a query may not want to wait until you open again for a quick answer.

Implementing a live chat function on your website may be the solution to your problem. This is becoming a popular option for companies, as it gives customers the service they are after and ensures that they don’t start looking elsewhere. Offering live chat does not mean that you need to have a member of your sales team sat by the computer at all times to handle incoming messages, live chat providers often have their own professionals who can deal with enquiries on your behalf.

Most queries will regard stock or booking a test drive, so as long as third-party professionals are well-briefed and are given access to your dealership’s schedules, they should have no difficulty handling basic enquiries. You could choose to let live chat providers take over only when no one will be available from your team or 24/7, so that you do not have to worry about managing the feature at all.

Managing Finance Deals and Reservations After Hours

Live chat is an excellent tool for ensuring that customer queries are responded to after hours, but what if a customer wants to find out whether or not they will be accepted for finance, or actually purchase a car? If a customer has made the decision to buy a vehicle from you, but doesn’t have time to actually come to your dealership to make the transaction, the vehicle may have been sold by the time they get there, leaving you with an unhappy customer.

Although this situation is out of your hands, the experience may deter that customer from returning to your dealership in the future. There is, however, new technology available which will enable consumers to not only reserve online, but also arrange their own finance deal and receive a lender decision without your involvement.

While some people will always prefer to speak to a sales team member in person, consumers are increasingly willing to handle their purchases autonomously online. Live chat and online retailing technology allows customers to do this, removing the hardest part of the sales process, which is capturing leads, so you can sit back, relax and let car buyers come to you!

For further information about live chat tools or our own online retailing platform, ClickEngage™, get in touch today by emailing marketing@clickdealer.co.uk, calling us on 01782 478220 or via our contact page.