In order to stay afloat in the competitive car dealership industry, it is very important to keep up with current trends when it comes to marketing. Crafting a digital marketing strategy can be difficult and complicated, but it is vital to use digital marketing strategies to survive in the car dealership industry. The vast majority of small businesses use digital marketing to advertise their products or services. As of 2020, estimates indicated that approximately 50% of all marketing spending was invested into digital marketing avenues—including email marketing, social media marketing, digital advertising, content marketing, etc. Offering a chat feature to dealer websites can now offer huge benefits.
An important part of creating your digital marketing campaign is optimizing your dealership’s website. One of the current biggest trends in digital marketing is the use of artificial intelligence (AI). AI can take on many different roles in digital marketing, from providing customer support to collecting and analyzing data in order to predict buying trends among potential customers.
You can incorporate artificial intelligence into your website by adding a chatbot feature to your dealer website. Chatbots utilize artificial intelligence to provide customers with answers to their questions quickly and easily. Chatbots are able to provide customers with answers to a wide variety of questions, even though their intelligence is artificial and there is no live person behind the chat feature.
If you add a chat feature to your dealer website, it is beneficial to also give potential customers an opportunity to speak with a live representative as well if your chatbot is unable to answer the questions that the customer asks. However, not all car dealerships have the resources to devote to running a personalized live chat feature—and having a chatbot only is better than having no chat feature at all.
There are many benefits to adding a live chat feature to your dealer website. Keep reading to learn three reasons why you should add a live chat feature to your car dealership’s website.
1. Make Customer Service More Convenient
Having a live chat feature on your dealer website makes customer service more convenient for both your dealership’s employees and your potential customers. Live chat features allow customers to get answers to common questions almost instantaneously without having to send an email and wait for a response or call a customer support line and potentially have to leave a message or wait on hold for a representative to answer the phone.
Plus, having a live chat feature on your dealership’s website prevents your dealership’s employees from having to spend all day on the phone answering the same questions over and over again. Your chatbot can handle the most common questions and leave the parties on both sides of the interaction satisfied, leaving your dealership’s live representatives the time and energy to respond to more complicated inquiries that AI chatbots are unable to handle.
2. Earn Customers Over Your Competitors
Putting a live chat feature on your dealership’s website can help you earn customers over your competitors. If your competitors do not have a live chat feature on their websites, their potential customers will have to wait for their email or phone call to be returned if they have inquiries. Consumers are naturally not very patient. They want answers to their questions as quickly as possible, and many small car dealerships are not able to handle that demand.
If you have a live chat feature on your dealership’s website, potential customers do not have to wait to get answers to their questions. They can get answers to common questions right away through your website’s chat feature, which makes these customers more likely to choose to shop at your car dealership rather than wait for another car dealership to get back to them with answers to the questions they asked.
3. Get Customer Feedback
Many people use live chat features to offer feedback to businesses. Many customers who would not leave a public review are willing to give feedback to a business through that business’s live chat feature. Even if your website’s live chat feature is completely automated, you will be able to see a transcript of customers’ interactions with your website’s chatbot to view and follow up on any feedback customers offer while chatting.

Having a live chat feature also allows you to get feedback based only on the questions that customers ask through your dealership website’s live chat feature. If many potential customers continue asking the same questions over and over again, that is a good sign that you should add the answers to those questions to your website and place them prominently on your site to satisfy more customers’ curiosities in the future.
Curious to know more about adding a chat feature to dealer websites? We can help.