Auto Dealer Monthly has recognized Hare Auto’s Chevrolet website as the #1 auto dealer website. The full press release can be found here.

Congratulations to Bryan and the entire Hare team on this honor. For all other auto dealers - check out the site and get some ideas.

Today’s press release made official the availability of both a chat rollover feature and a managed chat answering service.   Auto dealers using ContactAtOnce! should find the announcement very interesting.

From the press release:

“Sales people in the dealership are very effective answering a shopper’s questions and setting appointments, so we strongly prefer that they handle our chat leads,” said Drew Fitchett, Owner of North Penn Imports VW Mazda in Colmar, PA. “That said, there are times during the business day and certainly after-hours, when our sales people are not able to answer, yet we still want our prospects to be able to connect with someone immediately. The ContactAtOnce! rollover feature intelligently forwards leads during those times, and ContactAtOnce! managed live chat personnel have demonstrated excellence in handling rollover leads exactly how our dealership wants them handled.”

The chat rollover feature is a software feature that can be used to intelligently and automatically route chat requests to any chat answering service (e.g. outsourced BDC provider or call center).  This feature is not specific to automotive and could be very useful for any business regardless of industry.

The managed chat answering service is the ContactAtOnce!-provided answering service for those auto dealer customers that don’t have an existing outsourced BDC provider.  At this time the managed chat service is very specific to auto retail as the personnel are specifically trained to handle inbound chat leads from car shoppers.

Last week the Kelsey Group’s Mike Boland penned an excellent article about Skype’s new/old plans for local search on Search Engine Watch, and TechCrunch wrote more about the same topic.  Greg Sterling followed it up with a post filled with additional insights and observations.

As readers of this blog know, ContactAtOnce! has particularly relevant experience and technology so we feel compelled to share a bit of insight as well.  As a company our initial “beachhead” has been vertical search, and specifically automotive search, where our customers include many of the industry’s leading search sites including Classified Venture’s Cars.com, Cox Auto Trader’s Automart.com, Rupert Murdoch’s DMRI-owned Motors.co.uk,  and approximately 35 others.  We also work with a small number of local search sites, and in other verticals including apartments, real estate, and law, with aspirations to expand our footprint rapidly.

Based on our experiences, we can confirm that, without a doubt:

• Adding icons to results on a search site improves response rates
• Making it easier for a shopper to contact a business will further improve response rates
• Measuring the shopper-merchant communications is key for search sites seeking to demonstrate/monitize value

Back in 2006 when Ebay-Skype first made their local search plans public we blogged extensively about it.  Those posts are as relevant and insightful today as they were then.  Anyone following Skype’s plans for local search needs to read them, for we have already learned (and already built, in terms of software) what Skype surely will need in order to be successful.   Examples of key lessons learned include the fact that shoppers utilize IM (chat) over click-to-call 20:1 when given a choice, and making the icons “presence-aware” (i.e. the icons only show up if a representative of the merchant is available to answer at that moment) is hugely important to the user experience and thus to response rates.  Read on to learn more…

• Skype Aspires to Be Defacto Solution….
• How ContactAtOnce! Compares to Skype
• How ContactAtOnce! Complements Public VoIP Clients (including Skype)

So is Skype serious this time?  We hope so, from a corporate perspective and as shoppers ourselves.

This is a guest post from my colleague  Ed Parkinson, VP of Sales for ContactAtOnce!.   Ed has worked with auto dealers his entire career. Although it pains me as a Braves fan to provide a Phillies fan with airtime, I believe Ed provides some very insightful observations about live chat in this video.  Enjoy, and comments are welcome.

Microsoft announced some new features today that allow the addition of Windows Live Messenger Chat to any website.  A nice post about it can be found on TechCrunch.  Like Facebook Connect and other similar offerings, this is really just a way to add some social interaction to a website.  So why should readers of this ContactAtOnce! blog care and what does it mean for them?  A couple of things….

First, in case it isn’t obvious, the type of “social interaction” enabled by Live Messenger and similar software solutions is very different from the shopper-merchant chat interactions enabled by ContactAtOnce!.  For social interaction both users must have previously set up userid’s and logged into the Live Messenger service, and the chat sessions are neither measured nor recorded.  No reporting.  No CRM integration.  Etc.  So although it is a useful and interesting solution, it is not in any way a replacement for ContactAtOnce!.

Second, this type of announcement highlights the continuing growth of chat usage.  Even though it is a different type of chat, the fact that more and more of the world’s population is using chat as a wayto communicate (rather than email or the phone) means only one thing…that businesses looking to sell those people stuff, be it a car or attorney services or whatever, better offer chat on their website and within their web-based advertising. What happens to businesses that don’t offer chat?  The shoppers will find another business website that does.  Thats’ what!

Chat is changing the way that people communicate with each other socially (Microsoft’s announcement is proof), and businesses need solutions like ContactAtOnce! to capitalize on the chat trend and increase sales .

Today we announced a relationship with TK Carsites, a developer of custom auto dealer websites that specializes in search engine optimization (SEO).   Thousands of dealers are utilizing TK Carsites-powered websites and so it is a great honor for ContactAtOnce! to have been selected. 

TK Carsites customers should contact their TK Carsites representative immediately to take advantage of the improved conversion of website visitors into sale leads that comes from the addition of ContactAtOnce! to a dealer website.  The fact that TK Carsites has pre-integrated ContactAtOnce! means the implementation process is simple and easy.

At NADA in New Orleans, Cars.com today announced that “DealerChat”, powered by ContactAtOnce!, is available to all Cars.com dealers. We issued a corresponding press release. The use of live chat software by car dealers has been steadily increasing over the past several years, based on the relatively low cost and high rate of return it offers. With Cars.com now proactively making chat available to roughly 17,000 dealers nationwide, that trend Is likely to accelerate.

If you already use ContactAtOnce! on your dealership’s website, hurry up and contact your Cars.com rep to ensure you are at the front of the 17,000 dealer line. You’re likely to increase the number of Cars.com leads you receive and you can further leverage your ContactAtOnce! investment.

If you have never tried ContactAtOnce! on your own website, why wait any longer? It works!

Cambria Automobiles Holdings Ltd, a UK ContactAtOnce! customer and one the fastest growing dealer groups in the UK, today issued a press release highlighting the business benefits that chat has delivered for them. It is a very impressive story. Below is an excerpt, but consider reading the full release here if you are interested in what presence-aware advertising and chat can do for your business.

“Cambria has a history of innovative online marketing initiatives”, said Ian Godbold, Head of Group Marketing at Cambria Automobiles Holdings Ltd. “but we could never have anticipated the magnitude of the business benefits derived from adding live chat to our websites including, most notably, increased sales that are the direct result of making our associates more accessible to in-market car shoppers.”

Cambria has documented results showing that 50% of consumers who initially contact a dealership via chat will ultimately go on to supply their full contact details and visit the dealership.

Today ContactAtOnce! announced partnerships with AutoConX and Dealer HD, two auto dealer website providers. Both companies have integrated ContactAtOnce! with their website solutions, enabling their dealer customers to purchase ContactAtOnce! on a bundled basis. Dealers benefit from improved conversion of website visitors into appointments via presence-aware graphics, such as the business card drop-in, that stimulate higher response rates. Dealers also benefit from enhanced measurement of website effectiveness, including tracking of live chat and phone leads via the ContactAtOnce! call tracking and click-to-call features. Read more here and here.

Today we issued a press release announcing that ContactAtOnce! has been deployed on Cox AutoTrader’s recently introduced web2.0 automotive website CarShopSmart.com. It is a sister site to AutoMart.com and incorporates some great new features that place it at the intersection of social media and automotive.

In all likelihood CarShopSmart.com is a harbinger of what we will see on all online classified websites soon. As such, we are truly honored to be a part of it.

By incorporating the Contact At Once! car dealer live chat service, Cox AutoTrader makes it possible for car shoppers to see when a dealership’s sales people are available to answer questions and to connect with them instantly, even from work.

Why is “even from work” an important point? Because that’s where the majority of online car shopping takes place, and car shoppers are less and less likely to fill out lead forms these days – they much prefer a live conversation with a sales person, discreetly conducted (unlike phone calls) so that co-workers and bosses don’t know that they are shopping instead of working.