In this episode of Dealer Talk with Jen Suzuki, she is joined by Bill Reidy, VP of Sales at ActivEngage, and Carol Marshall, COO of ActivEngage, as they dive into the evolving landscape of digital customer engagement in the automotive industry. In this segment, they discuss how automotive consumer expectations have shifted over time, with car buyers now seeking seamless, personalized, and flexible interactions when exploring dealerships online. Bill shares insights on the evolution of ActivEngage's tools, noting that while the company initially focused solely on live chat for car dealers, they’ve since expanded to offer automotive text messaging and other messaging tools enhanced with AI assistive support. This aids agents in providing accurate information quickly without eliminating the human touch, which remains central to building relationships with customers.
Carol and Bill emphasize that patience and relationship-building are critical to effective engagement, especially in an era where customers are cautious about sharing contact details. By nurturing longer, trust-based conversations, ActivEngage reports higher lead qualification and conversion rates, as agents build rapport and provide value, whether it's through addressing initial questions or assisting with service inquiries. They also discuss the importance of handling engagement across various channels, including after-hours support, which captures valuable opportunities dealerships might otherwise miss. Concluding, Jen and her guests reflect on how a customer-focused, empathetic approach to digital engagement can enhance a dealership's reputation, streamline the car-buying journey, and ultimately increase conversions and customer satisfaction.
00:06
Welcome back everyone to the Dealer Talk with Jen Suzuki podcast. I have a friend, colleague, and new friend and colleague with me today to talk a little about digital interactions and how we manage engagement in the sales cycle. I bring on long time friend Bill Reidy with me today. He is the vice president of sales at ActivEngage and his colleague, Carol Marshall, the chief operations officer.
00:34
to share some enlightening information about how we can engage consumers into conversions. I want to hear some relevant strategies and hear how some of the tools that have evolved out there have actually evolved and what we need to know to be present and relevant and attractive to customers today. This is a big buying journey and there's a lot of touch points that customers are going to engage in in order to find their location of where they're going to do business. So we want them to find you.
01:04
We'll welcome my friends. Thank you so much. Yeah. It's a pleasure to be with you. Um, I'll, I'll touch on the evolution part. I've been with the company over 16 years. So almost from the very start. And you're right. You know, 17 years ago, it was just chat and people would put in two words, like a Google search and not really know what was going to happen. And so.
01:28
You know, our staff is always hospitality trained. They know how to strike up a conversation and build that relationship. Well, through 17 years, we've moved far beyond that. And because we have our own software, our own development team, and we are our own biggest user, you know, when the evolution of all the social media messaging tools, SMS, all of this comes about, our team would tell us these conversations interact differently.
01:57
Yes, there's still a 10 to 12 minute conversation on the sales size, 17 or longer minutes on a service side, but a Facebook conversation could last over 17 hours. And so our development team takes that kind of feedback and develops our software differently, so that whether it's our team or the dealer's team interacting with that consumer, they can still do so in a very effective and efficient manner.
02:27
with all of these different tools at their fingertips. And that evolution continues today with the inclusion of AI, a backside AI tool to help the agent with that relevant information. But the AI is not touching the consumer. We still have that human touch. So our human agents are able to take the information, boil it down and give it to the consumer in a way it's meaningful to that consumer. Not just...
02:56
You know, the last thing you want is someone pulls up on your dealership lot and your salesman runs out and hands him a brochure. That's, that's not the way we train. I don't think that's the way you train. So no, and, and, and, you know, and Bill, Bill and I have known each other for some time and take us back to the original. I mean, I see ActivEngages, the OG in what you said is chat, but I don't see ActivEngages, just chat anymore.
03:23
I think that when we talk about digital interactions today, it's a gamut of components that, including text messaging, I mean, let's be real, that's how a lot of people want to engage. And I think that chat, back in the day, probably Bill, you could testify to this, that when I looked at chat, it was like, it was a bot. It was like a, it was cool because it had immediate interaction. The customers on your website, this is the lowest hanging fruit. And now...
03:50
You know, as to Carol's point, you've got humans behind the chat who are leveraging AI to help them with product knowledge, help them with responses, and it's become a much more robust tool today. Well, welcome, Bill. Thank you so much, Jen. It's great to visit with you again. I was really excited about doing this with you because I think the idea of what we're going to shape up today and the necessity for what we're going to talk about today really mirrors what you teach.
04:20
And it's interesting to me because if you look at kind of the output with regards to spend, right? And every dealer operates for the most part the same way, right? There's spend, and that spend can be 20,000 or 200,000, but all of that intention is to get them to the website and start them from top to bottom to top to middle to bottom funnel.
04:48
It's interesting to me because all of that is designed to get a personalized engagement going. Right. So we want to get a name, we want to get an email, we want to get a cell phone number, we want to get a lead form, we want to get a phone up, we want to get a walk-in. It's all pushed to getting that into that personalized touch environment. Right. Because we know, and you teach this, that's the beautiful thing, right? You teach skills to accentuate your ability to communicate with that customer and bring them further down the funnel and then ultimately
05:19
But when we look at our online engagements, there's opportunities to engage with a customer via chat or SMS or the like, right? We have a tendency in our industry to treat that differently, right? And we don't necessarily treat that opportunity with the same care and the same focus and the same kind of give to get mentality that we do in store or on a phone up or on a text message.
05:45
And I think that the evolution of both the shopper, how they engage in their ability to access information, and then also the evolution of people feeling more comfortable to engage via chat and messaging to bridge them to that next step. And that next step could be getting a question answered. That next step could be getting more comfortable with you as a dealer to build that trust that you need to get them to that next step.
06:12
Or it could be straight up, they just want to accelerate the process to get an appointment or even move into a digital retailing tool. You've got two avenues here. So you're just contacting, I'm a customer, I'm contacting, I want to get some questions, I've got some questions, I want to get them answered. I start responding to you, whether that's through SMS or it's through a chat, you would call this, this is, I'm actively engaged.
06:41
coming into the dealership, I want to take it further, I want to complete some paperwork, I want to do a remote deal. Now I'm gonna be fully engaged because I've got more, I'm more involved, I'm deeper into the sales process. I'm actively engaged, you know, we're ping ponging, you know, fully engaged, I'm like, we're doing this thing. Yeah, and I think Carol can speak to this because she mentioned a couple of stats that I think are important.
07:10
Right, our average chat, sales chat, and this is across thousands and thousands and thousands of chats, is 10 minutes. Right, so if you think about that, how do you get to a 10 minute conversation with a consumer online? And that 10 minute conversation is evolved by our relationship building and that consumer, right? Like oftentimes the first question they come in and ask isn't necessarily the information they're trying to garner. Right?
07:37
And you don't know necessarily where they are in that purchase cycle. But our process allows us to build that connection and that patience and ask the right questions that extend that chat to that length. And what it yields is very consistent metrics, right? So 80% of the time, we're gonna get a name and an email or a phone number. 75% of the time, we're gonna get a name and both pieces of contact information. And 25% of the time, we're gonna get an appointment. And it's due to the approach that we take and the access to information to answer
08:07
any question accurately against kind of the dealer's model. Extend that to service and oddly enough, the service chats are longer. Yeah. Right, they're 17 minutes because we have the ability to really understand who they are and look at past history and a bunch of other stuff. So the art of what we do is the engagement piece, but it fits against what the customer is trying to accomplish. Right, and that's why the yield is so much more robust.
08:35
And that's why we have the ability really to take that conversation to fruition. And I think two things happen, right? I mean, obviously your conversions go up and I, honest, I'm going to tell you, if you're using a bot or if you're using kind of a very kind of a quick approach to say, give me a name, give me an email. Not only you're hurting that stated, you're hurting your conversions because I mean, literally it's like, if you said a phone up, okay, well just give me your phone number and I'll call you back. You would, you would lose your mind. Yeah, no.
09:03
What you say is in case we get cut off, what's a good number I can call you back? You know that Bill. Yeah, of course, of course. And we don't, and that's not the approach, right? It's not the approach to build that honest relationship to make, look, we've been talking for less than 10 minutes. If you wanna consider how long a 10 minute conversation is. I mean- That's a good point. That's a really good point. It's a long conversation. And so-
09:30
We've structured these conversations to discover the undiscovered needs. Great. You want a fuel saver vehicle. Wonderful. Well, you're currently driving a truck. Have you even driven a car in the last three to five years? Do you know what that's going to feel like? You know, these are the kinds of questions you have to ask. We ask about trade. That is such a vitally important piece of information for dealers. It's a good way to get an appointment too. Yeah, absolutely. Like,
10:00
The dealer needs to know what is the trade I'm staring at. I'm getting excited about you're wanting to buy this new hybrid vehicle, but let's look at the trade and when that was purchased and what we have going on there. Our team is trained that for our clients who have a digital retailing tool in place, they will offer to save the customer, let me save you some time in dealership. If you wanna go ahead and fill out this credit application.
10:29
Great appraisal and then the link in that chat in that correspondence. Mm-hmm Only engaged is that shopper gonna go to another website and start over again I don't think so not if you can get them in that tool and plugging in payments and down and their trade information And moving further down in the funnel, which is why we see these as more qualifier qualified Opportunities because they're inputting more Yes
10:57
would sign indicate it's time. Yeah, I think that I think that's an important piece of the puzzle.
00:00
Right? Like if you look back and Jen, we've talked about this in the past. If you look back historically during COVID, the digital retailing piece of a dealer's business spiked dramatically, right? It was in the like 30 to 35% rate, right? It feels so much higher than that. But it was by necessity. That's the interesting part, right? The consumer gravitated there. Now it's dropped back down into the low teens or sub 10% for most people. And I think dealers want that back. Yes, we need to get it back. Yeah. I mean, think about just the efficiencies of that.
00:30
And we track this, right? So if we are in the, you know, kind of our approach is, is having the ability to move them into that digital retailing environment and then help them through depending on what the dealer's goals are, along with the consumer's goals, right? So 19% of the time, we're going to move a customer that's been landed on a vehicle into the digital retailing environment. Really? Yes. That's very high. When that happens, we measure this.
00:57
the close rate increases by north of 60%. So the close rate includes- Not surprised, but wow. And the speed to close, like the time it takes to get the deal done, increases by 47%. Wow. So efficiencies. Okay. The consumer has a pathway with information and the quality of the lead, the lead quality is so much higher, which is all the reason why the close rate is faster and you close at a higher rate because they're further down the funnel.
01:27
But it's about basically working with that consumer to get them there, not just getting a name and an email and then throwing them back into the BBC because that's the other inherent problem that you run into. And if I can pop this in here because there are so many parallels to engaging remotely the way that Carol and you are sharing with me, whether that's through chat or SMS.
01:54
The thing is, is it's very similar to an incoming sales call or an outbound call to an internet lead. You finally make contact. And the thing is with having a tool on the front of your website is that people hit the website, which I call the lowest hanging fruit, out of all leads out there. It really is because they picked a dealership. They picked a car. They're ready. They picked a brand. Exactly. Versus a third party company. They haven't even picked a brand yet. They haven't picked a dealership yet. That's why they're on that site. Anyway.
02:22
But so now here, their low is hanging fruit and they've got a tool where they can engage immediately and get questions answered right this second. It's just like calling the dealership, only it might even take longer for somebody to pick up the phone at the dealership. But anyway, so here they are and they've got a human that's responding to them. In the past, we saw a lot of bot activity, which turned a lot of people off. But to your point, a lot of times people, whether it's an incoming call or it's a chat, they want to get right to the contact information, which in this world, in this year,
02:50
Nobody likes that. Nobody wants a pushy salesperson. Nobody wants to be pressured into anything. They got options. And so that's an old strategy. Yeah, for sure. And it's not difficult to get contact. To be fair, anyone will drop their contact information because you know why? They see the value. Well, they're not afraid anymore because they chat on so many different sites. And they also understand how to use their phone, which
03:18
Thank God for my 17 year old son. He taught me three days ago how if I don't know the number, my phone doesn't even ring. It's like the greatest thing in the world. So are they afraid to give you a phone number? No, but will they answer the call when you call them? And what we know and what we tell our clients is when you're emailing, if you're responding via email or text, use the agent's name, because they have seen that agent's name for 10 minutes.
03:47
15 minutes. It's like a BBC rep. Correct. So now they know, oh, this is my conversation with Jen. This is the follow-up Jen told me I was going to get. I'm going to answer the phone. I'm going to answer the email. Yeah, it's a huge monumental difference. So. That's an inversion booster. That's a gross booster. I'm so sorry. I get so excited because that's actually one of the biggest challenges even in the dealership.
04:10
is when you, the first person who's building the relationship, they're doing needs assessment. They've got the trade information. They know why they're in the market. They collected all this information. I mean, that's why you have a 10 minute conversation, you know, because you're collecting everything that it's gonna take to put this thing together. But if you don't read the notes, you don't read the thread, and you don't bridge the gap, that customer is gonna feel like a reset. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Sorry, Bill. That's okay. I think the interesting part about this, and Carol said that for the first time.
04:40
I didn't think of that through the lens of it's not really hard to get contact information like it was before, right? But that basically means that if you're patient, right, and you have a conversation with them, that that contact information can come at any time. Sure. Right? I got to feel comfortable. But if you front load it, if you say, give me contact information. That's aggressive. It's aggressive. You didn't give them anything of value. No, and you're going to have chat abandonment problems. Totally.
05:08
A lot of people in the data says they will abandon the chat. But I think the secondary piece to that is, is that when you do that and you don't have a well-qualified lead, now that goes back into the BDC and the BDC is flooded with leads, right? I don't think dealers have a lead problem. I think they have a lead quality problem. All right. I do think that there's a lead quality problem. So now all of a sudden you're just, yeah, you're, you're essentially, you know, you're, you're exacerbating that lead quality problem when in all actuality, if you just were patient and you took your time.
05:37
and you had a real conversation with them exactly like you would do on a phone or in the store like you teach them, then not only would you get that contact information, but you probably would get a lot more details. And you know, kind of our process says is the 25% of the time or north thereof, you're actually getting an appointment. Right. But here's the problem. Right. The problem is, is that you don't have a lot of choices to solve this problem.
06:02
because most of the tools that are out there are designed for the short conversation, front loading the information and that process, right? And there's a multitude out there. There's just a million engagement tools are out there. Well, that's a distinguisher right there. Yeah. Right there. It is. You're willing to get to know the customer, which is what every sales manager wants their team to do, get to know your customer. Yeah, so I would recommend to a dealer, like if you really, really wanna maximize your spend,
06:31
and you want to take advantage of every engagement. And here's a stat for you, Jen. For every one person in your showroom, there's 71 online. If you just look at that in contrast, right? There's 71 opportunities of shoppers in the funnel online versus one that has actually made it to your showroom. Right? So that's a lot of low-hanging fruit there. So if you really want to, if you want to do this the way that's going to create efficiencies is you should do it yourself. You should absolutely staff your BDC.
06:59
to be able to engage those clients 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 300 and whatever days a year that you're open, right? But problematically, that is difficult for a dealer to do. It just is. For some people, they could probably man it, but in a lot of stores that I'm in right now, they're understaffed. Of course. So in...
07:24
In 1998, when I was in a dealership and the websites started rolling in and I got a corporate report that would show me 11 people. How exciting 11 people were in the virtual lot yesterday. And I was like, okay, well, who were they? What did they look at? Why were they there? Like, how do I talk to them? And so that was the premise of how we structured these conversations because we understand
07:51
what the dealers need to put the deal together. We understand how a consumer wants to be treated to feel at ease and feel attached and feel ready to proceed with that dealership. So yeah, I applaud those dealers who are large enough and have the talent to do this themselves, absolutely. But so many don't because it does require constant training and management and oversight to ensure that.
08:17
and the evolution of the market because customers change with the market. So conversations have to change. Well, regardless of whatever direction they go, they either do it themselves as Bill recommended is, you know, that's a great strategy. If you can do it yourself, you still have to have the tool, you know? And then it's nice to have a backup plan because, you know, personnel changes, uh, market changes, customers. I mean, are we place our focus changes in the dealership? Yeah. We're just all about change now.
08:45
And so it's nice to have a plan, a backup plan where you know, oh, there's a human squad that's got your back. That's going to be boom, boom, boom, boom. Cause let's face it. Most people who don't have a 24 hour, you know, crew, but you could also have a backup plan. So for after hours, cause I heard you guys, you guys validate this that, um, a lot of people want to do their car shopping after dealership hours. And we know this because we see internet leads come in at like two, three in the morning, but yeah.
09:14
Yeah, we have a stat on that, right? So one of the things, and I think, you know, Carol giving us some kind of understanding of the details of how we go about managing this environment, right, for success. We're maniacal about basically tracking chats, right? So one of the things I found interesting when I first came aboard is the highest amount of chats that we manage on a daily basis is on Monday. Monday. Go ahead and guess that one.
09:44
Right? Yeah. Lunch hours. Lunch hours, right? People chat during work. That's when they chat. Sure. Well, that's the glory of it. Yes, exactly. But the other thing is 21% of all of our chats across thousands of dealers happen after dealer business hours. So a fifth, one-fifth of your online engagement opportunities, which are finite, you only get so many based on the amount of website traffic that you have.
10:12
21% of those live outside of your normal business hours. So every dealer in the world, in my mind, in this market, is looking to get more out of their ad spend and higher yield in their conversion in their total sales, every one of them. And the market has changed so much that the competitiveness has come back in. Consumers are shopping for deals, not cars. So as you start to look at the microcosm of the areas of opportunity,
10:41
This is probably one of the biggest ones that can impact your yield against your current spend. Because if you look at every one of those engagement opportunities as an opportunity to engage that client and move them either further down the funnel or to a sale, they happen all day long every day. Every day, all day long. And I think that's the differentiation for us is because we are essentially the outsource of your team, including
11:10
what we call dealer notes, which is such a critical piece of our execution. And I think that's something, Carol, would you mind just talking a little bit about the process and the dealer notes and how we think about managing this process for a dealer like we are part of their team?
00:00
I mean, we have a great example, unfortunately, right now, with Hurricane Helen who came through. Our customer care team reached out to dealerships in the path and said, are you altering your operating hours? Let's get that in the dealer note so that our chat agents, as people are chatting in, they can give them a heads up. We're gonna close early or whatever that is. Now today, they're reaching back out to say, is everything okay? Have the hours altered again?
00:28
Is there any kind of community support we can lend? What do you have going on in your community that we can help you with? But whether it's a storm of some sort, I don't know who remembers the Boston Marathon bomber that was found in the back of a boat, because he's so bright. We had a whole collection of Harley Davidson dealers at that time and they had to shut down, because the police corded off like all of these blocks and all the businesses had to shut down.
00:58
And so when people chatted in because they wanted to pick up their bike, these dealers were close. We were there to explain to them what that situation is. So whether it's a new vehicle or a new model that's coming out and you have, you know, free gifts going on for a weekend or a month or whatever we can, whatever is particular to that dealer, we can relay that in the conversations. We have the technology to do it.
01:25
We have supervision and subject matter experts helping all of the agents all along the way as well. So, yeah.
01:34
Well, I, he never actually thought about all of those things, especially with the hurricane, you know, I mean, phone systems down. It's nice to always have an open communication platform that doesn't go down. It's always available. And for people like me, probably you, everybody wants instant information. And so I would say looking into the future, you're going to have more and more customers looking to do things more remote, where they can do their homework and they can engage.
02:02
you know, with a dealer. And here's the thing, I always tell dealers this, you guys are on a hit list. You don't think they're just gonna call you, do you? You know, they're gonna call four other people. So whoever's got the best process that can engage, right? That has the right questions, can make the connections with people, that's very focused on value-based conversations, relationships with people, asking the questions. So it's not just like, oh yeah, we have the car, when can you be here?
02:28
It's like, that's your dad, that's old, that's data that does not work anymore. That's a no-show right there. I love your philosophy in the way that you see that relationship as being significant to the conversion and being able to bring them, marry them together. Nobody wants like just to have all the information taken from them or, you know, pull out all of this like buying information. Are you paying cash, financing, leasing? Not important here. You know what I mean?
02:57
Yeah, yeah, things like this make people feel like yeah, they don't matter But yeah, some of the questions maybe Carol you could you could share that create a more actively engaged customer You know, what would you guys be? What's part of your philosophy? What works we always ask were there any other questions? So 99% of the time it's is it still available or what's the price? Great. Let me look into my system. What else were you wondering about?
03:23
Was it a one owner vehicle? If it's a used vehicle, was it in any recs? We have access to the Carfax reports, right? If it's a new vehicle, is it a plug-in hybrid or not? And we can look that up. And again, the AI assistant is there to help us with that as well. And then once we've talked about the vehicle, the most exciting part, I mean, this is the most exciting part of the journey is when the shopper is imagining the new vehicle, you know, we ask about,
03:51
Well, do you have a trade? Then we'll ask, you know, I'm sure you've made many wonderful memories in this trade. You know, we'll ask, do you still owe money on it? What's the mileage on it? Then we get into timeframe. How soon were you looking to make the purchase? You know, and if they say, well, I still have four months left on the lease. That is not a deterrent for us because we know- We need runway. Yeah, and there are dealers who will buy that out if they want that trade.
04:21
So yeah, we just proceed. And I think that's some of the natural not having automotive folks in these conversations. They're not identifying the obstacles. They're just asking the great juicy discovery type questions and providing that, serving it up to the dealer. So timeframe, trade, and then of course we always offer if they wanna.
04:48
if there's a DR tool, if they want to start that process. I love that. So here's the thing. It's just like mobile service for service departments. Well, a lot of times, the reps that are setting the appointments, if they don't offer it as a service, then nobody knows it exists. That's right. Very similar here, too. And on the service side, we talk about declined services.
05:13
Oh, I noticed last time you had your Corolla and you chose not to do X, Y, and Z. Would you like for us to do that this time? And so our average RO order is up $60 over the dealers because we're asking those questions. Plus our show rates are higher because they feel more committed to the appointment because they engage with somebody and had a detailed conversation about it. Right. So. And validation.
05:39
Yeah. Jen, it's really interesting because I think you can encapsulate this time to like one thought process. Like, if you, if to be fully engaged means that you treat every engagement opportunity with the same amount of focus and care and technique that you teach in store and on the phone. I mean, literally, just think about if you did that at scale. For every one that you're doing that on the showroom, right, there's 71. If you did that at scale consistently, what would happen?
06:08
to both your conversions, your quality of conversions, and your overall close rate and profitability on those conversions. Would they grow? And don't forget about CSI. Oh, no doubt. The Cox study shows us those that start online have a higher satisfaction. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. If you can be consistent about your messaging and your flow and the way your cadence and your attitude and your health.
06:37
you're willing to miss to help instead of sell, sell, sell. You know, that's a vibe and that is winning in my opinion. I do this every single week in dealerships that I can validate that that is the strategy right there. It is about, you know what? This is a customer experience and it's a touch point and you gotta open the doors for people. And I like that you guys have stayed so relevant. I would like to shift a little bit more into service because
07:04
You know, this is where I see one of the biggest opportunities for dealers now. For me, it's the heart of the dealership. Um, really I would say. Service BDC, which is very similar to this tool. I almost think they run parallel in, in expectations, performance, you know, and, and, and how they operate. But for me, I say service BDC is the heart because this is how we're fueling the service department. This is how we're getting appointments and customers are going to just like sales.
07:33
they're going to want to get answers from the website. Where do you think they got the phone number? The majority of the people are getting the phone number off the website. And we know this because they call into the dealership and every eight out of 10 calls is for service. Yeah. That number from the website. Yeah. Anyway. We have an amazing product called Flip to Text, especially because of the service. And we all know the crunch times for all the service calls, right? And so Flip to Text allows a consumer who's called in
08:03
to have the choice of do you want to continue to wait or would you always convert this call to a text? Okay. And so if it's converted to a text, it can come straight to our team and we can continue to help that. And so because you're never going to be able to staff for that early morning, those lunchtime calls, you know, is my car ready calls. So yeah.
08:25
Yeah, you know what? Again, I find this ironic, right? That our service chats last longer than our sales chats. 17 minutes, you said. Yeah, and our appointment set rate on sales is about 25%. On service, it's, Carol, I think it's in the high 80s. Yeah, in that neighborhood. I don't remember the exact metric on it. But there's a reason for that, because people need information, right?
08:51
their schedules need to be coordinated. They need to understand what they need to get done. No different than if they picked up the phone and called. And what I think is really, really relevant now is what's happening with regards specifically on the SMS side. The market is gravitating to communicating that way. My kids don't pick up the, if I leave my kids a voicemail, they don't listen to it. No. Yeah. I had to learn that, right? I'm like, hey, I left your voicemail.
09:17
So the market place is shifting there. I will tell you they're saving them though. So when we pass away, they still have the voice to listen to. That makes you feel better? That does make me feel a little better. I have done that. That makes me feel a little better. That's so wild you said that. Yeah. So I think if you really want to think about what now and next year and the year after looks like, you have to understand where the market's going. Yeah. Right.
09:47
and you have to understand how to fulfill the way the customer wants to buy. Yes. Right. And I think the most relevant thing that we saw is the impact of digital retailing when COVID hit. Like every dealer in the world wanted digital retail more, but the marketplace conditions didn't support that. Now they do. Right. Now they do. So, you know, the thing that you said that I think is the most intriguing is change, right. And your ability to adapt to the marketplace.
10:15
to essentially continue to be profitable but not have to spend more. And that's the conundrum I think dealers are in right now is that they're sort of like, I need more, do I have to spend more to get more? And I don't know necessarily if that's the case.
00:00
Yeah. Well, they've driven them to the site, whether that's for service or their sales. And there has to be a touch point here, a door open, which I love that you said we need to set it up to explore more digital retailing and the sales part of it. But at the same time with service, it's like, this is such a big avenue. A lot of people don't think about it.
00:21
But if I'm a customer and I'm at work and I can't get through on the phone, I might, you know, or I've got the phone number and I see, oh, there's a chat option. I'm going to probably go down that road. And it's nice if you've given me a prompt to start texting, I'm going to probably take that direction. And your rates, your conversions, they're so extremely high. People have to be aware of this because you can't shelf it. You have to really pay attention to what customers want today. And if we all...
00:47
You know sat here and thought about it texting is our main form of contact for anybody in our life Yeah, and and that's the future. But anyway, I just 97% of consumers prefer to text And they respond faster and anyways that moves things forward and I'm a fan of it and I like what you're saying was service because so many people could set up the set appointments this way as One great way for a dealership to set appointments and to avoid the phones ringing so much which you know We I hate to even say that
01:17
we would want that, but we do, because service is busy in the morning, and all day, and all day. They've got to do their status updates, and they've got to do their declines, and they've got a lot of other initiatives. And if we could free up some of that time for a system that's got your back to be able to respond and communicate and really showcase your brand in the most equitable way, well, let's go. And not to mention...
01:42
It's not probably just for setting appointments for service, but I imagine through texting, there's a lot of different ways that you can engage customers at a service too. I'm big on declines. I'm big on missed appointments. I'm big on all of these recalls, special order parts. I mean, it's endless to drive traffic. Yes. Safe to consumer time. They can deliver the message they need delivered to the dealer and allow the dealer to...
02:09
to get back to them with that information when they have it. So yeah, service is a big, and when the recent CDK issues were happening, we have so many customers that use that service scheduling tool. And so we worked out with our dealer partners, how do you want us to handle? Do you want us to take an appointment?
02:35
preference time from the consumer? Do you want us to give them a window and take the day? Whatever it was that dealer partner wanted from us, that's what our agents did. And then we sent that on. We had plain text leads, obviously going to email addresses and we had set up a different lead delivery system for sales and service, but on the service scheduling, that really saved them from missing out on that valuable, valuable revenue, as we know.
03:04
you know, in most dealerships, service is what's keeping the lights on. So that's it. It's a fact. Is there anything that you both would like to share that maybe is advice or something that could help our listeners today with their engagement approach in their sales cycle and really help them just really think about that next initiative for the organization and dialing into.
03:33
opening this door a little bit wider for their organization to not only brand themselves, but to engage consumers in the both avenues that we talked about today, which is actively, you know, ping-ponging and then fully let's do this thing, moving this whole deal forward or getting more into that visit space. Yeah. So, I think there's a couple things. I think that one thing that you have to do, and we're very good at this.
04:03
is looking at where you're giving your consumer the opportunity to engage with you on your website. Yeah. Okay. So I think that there is more opportunity there. One of the things that we promote is what we call inline chat. So giving the customer the ability to chat or engage at the VDP level, because it would make sense when they've landed on a car, that you have the opportunity to take that next step with them.
04:31
Yeah, but there's a multitude of things that we look at specifically to drive more engagements. Right, because again, if you get 10,000 visitors on your site and you're converting 2% to 3% of those to leads, right, there's engagement opportunities that sit there just all day long, every single day. Right, so you got to make sure that the UX UI on your site, you know, enables that ability for that customer to do that. That's part one. Part two is whether you use
05:00
ActivEngage as your partner to do this, or you do it yourself. Right? You have to think about what that process looks like and how to build it. Right? And you can't shortcut it. You can't go, well, they'll handle chats and they'll handle four other things, because it won't work. It won't. You have to have the ability to have people that are in, in the spot to engage with that customer as long as they need to.
05:29
to essentially get that customer to that next step. Because honestly, we can talk a lot about kind of how we answer the questions and the process that we go through. But at the end of the day, a dealer and us and anybody else that's engaging with a customer is building trust, right? And they're building that confidence for that customer to come in. And it's sales 101. Sales 101 is people wanna be seen and they wanna be heard. Yeah. That's how you engage with the consumer.
06:00
Right, so if you develop a process internally, you have to have the dedicated resources for people to have the time to engage with their customers so they can be seen and heard. If you shortcut it, it's not gonna work, right? Those are the two things that I probably would look through for the lens if I was either doing it myself or if I was partnering with somebody like ActivEngage to do it. Yeah, that's great advice. I mean, I can just run a parallel to like calls. I'm always like five minutes in your sweet spot, not that we wanna get rid of them in five minutes, but people burn out on a call.
06:28
Whereas on a chat or SMS, you can take your time, which is ideal. Jen, this is so interesting. As the markets move more to the SMS version, those conversations for us, and Carol referenced this before, they can extend for days and weeks sometimes. But think about that. Lead goes into the dealer.
06:55
We have a name, we have an email, we have a phone number, but let's say we did not set an appointment. Dealer is now trying to get a hold of that customer on their own, and the customer is not accessible to you just because you want them to be. It just doesn't work that way. You can call them, you can email them, but they'll look when they wanna look. But when, now they know an agent, the agent is a representative of the dealership, we continue to get them coming back in, and then we essentially continue to...
07:21
further qualify that lead, provide more information, and build that bridge to that next level of contact. That is consistent because of the consumer's behavior, not because necessarily our process, right? So that engagement isn't just kind of siloed in that one point, it's that engagement that you build a pathway back for that consumer to kind of get to that next step on their own, because just because they chat, it doesn't mean they're ready today, right? They could be ready two weeks from now.
07:48
Right. So I think that there's a lot of nuance in this with regards to the lines of communication and how you manage them across the spectrum. Yeah. You've given us a lot to think about. Carol? Yeah. I, they could be ready. I was just thinking they could be ready today. And if they set an appointment within the next hour, our customer care team is going to call the dealer and say, Hey, we just set an appointment for you for the next hour. So just to make sure that you're ready. So, and that does happen. But I think my advice to dealers,
08:17
is pay attention. You spend so much money advertising, driving people to your site. You spend so much money on the site. You know, we are not just another button and we are your lifeline to that consumer. We are the way you will know exactly who they are, what they're looking for, why they're looking, you know.
08:46
hit into what that experience, it is a customer experience. Definitely. When they click in, like we have so many qualitative reporting. We measure how many times someone says the word bot. And the fact is they say it up at the front to say, are you a bot? And I love reading our team's responses because they're very creative to that.
09:12
You know, the latest one I saw was I am not a bot though. I feel like one most nights after I've said no to my child so many times. So yeah, just pay attention. You're spending all the money you're doing all that you may have. Every door in the store, but if that customer experience right from the start is a something other than.
09:39
you know, a friendly human, then what message are you delivering? Yeah. I think it's a great representation of the brand, the organization, the team. These are hardworking people in the dealerships working very long hours. And it always like bothers me when customers like car salespeople, but you know, you have an opportunity to change that reputation through opening this door and providing a more streamlined, efficient car buying experience and meeting.
10:06
customers where they want to be met is something people used to say over COVID. I haven't said it since then, but it just came to my mind because it's true. I mean, if you don't have the door open, how will you know? You'll never know what you can do unless you open the door. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you guys so much for your expertise and the education on this pathway to purchase, and I really appreciate.
10:30
You guys just sharing so much. It was a great team effort there. I just really enjoyed that. This is my wheelhouse. This is my love. And I love things that can help make things more efficient for people. And here we go, ActivEngage the OG. Yeah. Continues to smash it. I love that. Thank you all. All right, thank you, Jen. This was great. Appreciate it.
