How to Optimize Your Chat Widget for Dealership Websites

Let's be honest with ourselves.

Sometimes, car dealership websites can be a mess.

Between pop-ups, endless special offers graphics, and any other doodads us automotive industry vendors come up with, there is a lot of information your car dealerships online visitors have to process.

So, when it comes to implementing a chat widget, wouldn't it be nice if auto dealers could work with a chat service support team who can help optimize its presence when it comes to coloring, size, and placement?

Luckily, ActivEngage has a dedicated support team that helps integrate a live chat system and its accompanying widgets in ways to push chats that work best for your car dealerships and website visitors alike.

Setting Up a Chat Widget for Car Dealers

So, you just signed up for live chat software and are ready to turn the chat tool on. Have you considered just what that means for your prospective customers? How do they navigate your website, and what most of them are looking for? What do they think about a widget for live chats occupying your car dealership website real estate?

Utilizing live chat is a positive and strategic tool that helps engage more customers visiting your website, but there still needs to be some thought put into the customer experience when it comes to scrolling through your dealership desktop site or dealership mobile chat. According to Freshworks: "over 41% of the customers expect a live chat widget on websites."

Optimize the Experience for Website Visitors

Keep the customer experience in mind; it does matter!

Once you onboard, take some time to see what sort of tools your marketing department has that help monitor and track your website visitors' actions and behaviors.

If they have a site heat map, like Hotjar, this should be fairly easy. You can then see what click path the majority of car buyers go down, and can see where a chat widget would best be suited on the page.

3 Ways We Help Optimize a Chat Widget for a Car Dealership

There are many ways we optimize and customize the widgets for our live chat software, but here are three general approaches we must think about and implement to provide customers - and you, the car dealers - the features needed to improve the customer experience, prime your sales team for success, and help you increase sales.

Follow OEM guidelines and compliance.

First things first: you've got to be compliant, right? The automotive industry is filled with a variety of brands, and you need to represent your OEM to their distinct standards. Our support team can create customized widgets that not only are effective at engaging website visitors, but satisfy OEM standards and branding guidelines.

Whether you represent Mitsubishi or Maserati, we ensure that your chat widget is up to standards, aesthetically and otherwise!
Size (and placement) matters.

If you're like anyone who has ever lived and visited a website, you don't like intrusive and obnoxious popups. That's why we assess your website to make sure what is noticeable enough, but not too aggressive to customers regarding the chat widget.

When you integrate live chat, it's essential that we note the current complexity of your website, and craft the widget size and placement from there.

If your website is already quite busy, we will recommend ramping up the size of the widget to be more noticeable. If you already have a fair amount of free space and website real estate open, then we'll opt for a neater and smaller - but still noticeable - widget for our live chat software to engage your website visitors best.

There may also be other things to consider, such as if you have an ADA (American Disability Act) button on your website (which is definitely recommended). In this case, we would need to alter the side of the page on which the chat widget will live.
Inline Chat; we highly recommend it!

What is Inline Chat, you ask? It's a chat option right on your VDPs (Vehicle Detail Pages). Think of our chat widget as a lifesaver for car buyers in need.

No matter where they are in the sales pipeline or sales funnel, an Inline Chat option right on the VDP can give customers instant support if they are seeking availability, or just have any other clarifying questions on features. These live instant messages give potential buyers peace of mind in a crucial moment of the process where they need someone to instantly respond, and answer questions then and there.

Remember, in this digital age, many customers are hopping from site to site to test the waters with different car dealerships. Many customers are fleeting when it comes to this, so well-placed engagement is crucial to building trust and priming your sales team for a smooth sale. A reliable and well-made chat widget helps accomplish this and gets you more qualified leads!

ActivEngage Perfects the Chat Widget for Dealership Websites with A Leading Live Chat System

Because our chat agents handle conversations for over 14,000 dealerships, we know what it takes to make a live chat widget as optimal as possible for car dealerships.

Behind these chat widgets is a live chat software, built by auto industry pros and veterans, that has what it takes to help you get more quality leads, and more sales, and to enhance the customer experience to its greatest potential.

In addition to our automotive live chat, messaging, and cell phone text capabilities, we also have a varied suite of engagement solutions that makes sure you and your sales team never miss another opportunity: