Today we went live with a new consolidated blog that brings together the content from what were previously two separate blogs and provides us with a solid platform to support our future growth.  The conslidated blog assumes a format that is consistent with and fully integrated with the corporate website and has the URL http://www.contactatonce.com/blog.    

Our previous blogs included this blog, Presence Bits,  and an Auto Dealer Live Chat Tips and Techniques Blog.  All historical posts and content from this blog have been migrated to the new blog and are easily searchable using the site search function there.   The new blog logically organizes content so you may also search using categories - searching posts categorized under the “Auto Dealer Live Chat” or “Commentary”, for example. 

If you are not yet subscribed, you should subscribe via RSS or email right now!

If you subscribed to either of the previous blogs via RSS you will need to update the feed URL to http://feeds.feedburner.com/ContactAtOnceBlog.  

If you subscribed to either of the previous blogs via email, you need not do anything.  You will continue to receive emails whenever content is added to the new blog. 

Oh..and if you have not already done so, please follow us on Twitter as another way to stay up to date on all the latest from ContactAtOnce!.

Today we announced that CarsDirect has licensed ContactAtOnce! and has made it available to all dealers with their premium advertising package.    From the release:

“CarsDirect has always excelled at connecting consumers shopping for new and used vehicles online with reputable dealers,” said Ken Potter, Vice President and General Manager of Automotive Sales and Industry Relations at CarsDirect. “Adding car dealer chat features to our rich portfolio of products and features makes it even more convenient for our users to ask questions and set appointments and as a result, we are delivering more qualified leads to our dealer partners.”

eMarketer recently published an article entitled “How Helpful is Live Chat?”.    It doesn’t contain any new or particulary exciting information, but it did inspire some thoughts worth sharing.  

The article references studies paid for by chat provider Bold Software and click-to-call provider eStara, respectively.

Not surprisingly, the chat study showed consumers that chat buy more stuff and shop online more often.

Also not suprisingly, the click-to-call study showed that consumers prefer click-to-call over chat especially when the topic of conversation is complicated or confidential.

As readers of this blog know, ContactAtOnce! supports both chat and click-to-call so we have a very qualified and authoritative take….why not offer your online visitors the choice?   Duh!

For those that are curious, our data shows that car shoppers are 20 times more likely to chat with a dealer than they are to initiate a click-to-call.  Could be that a consumer shopping for a car acts differently than one looking for a book or a new mp3 player, and that kind of leads to the final point…

Aren’t the same consumers that shop online for product or serivce X the same consumers that will be shopping online for product or service Y?  We know so.   The implication is that no matter what you are selling online, you need to offer chat and click-to-call as options on your website.  If you don’t, you are effectively locking some of the doors to your store and losing customers. 

So how do you choose the right chat and click-to-call provider?  There are many solution providers including Bold and eStara that do a great job of serving online retailers and their shopping cart applications, but we believe the online shopping experience is different for products and services that are researched online and ulimately purchased offline -  including cars, apartment leases, homes, insurance policies, etc.  That’s why we chose to focus ContactAtOnce! on those verticals, and that’s why our company is experiencing such great success - we understand that the online shopping experience for research-online-purchase-offline products and serivces is different and we’ve built a solution tailored accordingly.

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 their dealer chat solution, 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!