Better Communication Needed on Car Dealer Websites

Compared to the ones used in similar industries, car dealer websites are better built and offer a better user experience. The inventory portions of most websites are engineered better than most others outside of the industry and their ability to give information through proper navigation is very strong. There is a problem with them, though. Communication is often lacking.

Perhaps “lacking” isn’t the right word. It’s jumbled. Many of the dealer websites we visit have too many ways for people to be able to reach out to the dealer. They can be confusing and often serve no purpose. In one example from a high-volume dealership’s website in the Atlanta area, we counted over 20 buttons leading to contact forms on a single vehicle page. What made it worse is that many of them were redundant and appeared to be requesting the same information from dealers, only with different labels. The “Quick Quote” button was leading to the same page as the “Check Availability” button. Some of the buttons didn’t seem to work at all.

Here are some ways that dealers can improve on their website performance when it comes to communicating with their customers:

Consolidate the Buttons

There seems to have been an explosion of “calls to action” in recent years. The thinking seems to be that more is better. This simply isn’t the case and it only takes an ounce of common sense to prove that redundancy in buttons is silly.

Most people go to dealer websites to look at live inventory of vehicles they want to consider purchasing. It doesn’t matter how many calls to action you put on the vehicle details pages. If they don’t like the vehicle, extra calls to action will not make them act. Conversely, if they find a vehicle they like and want to learn more about it, they will find a way to contact you. Rather than confuse the issue with so many calls to action, consolidate them down to one or two types of contact that each have a unique purpose.

Ask for Needed Information Only

One of the most appalling communication faux pas that we found was the “nosey contact form”. This is where a contact form to inquire about something simple like the availability of a vehicle is overpopulated with required fields. One should not need to submit their physical address on a contact form just to find out if a vehicle is available.

Imagine if a customer called to find out the same information.

Customer: “Hi, do you have stock #1234a on the lot still?”

Dealer: “I’ll be happy to check on that. Before I do, I need to get some information about where you live, not for any other reason but that the information will help me to bug you later in case you don’t buy this one today.”

Have Your Chat Available at All Times

Turning your chat off at any time is inexcusable. This means that having someone monitor it part time or doing other things simply will not work. This is the only industry that we’ve seen where this is common. On most websites, when you try to chat with someone on the other side, someone is there to answer questions. On car dealer websites, it seems to be optional. That’s because there are employees monitoring chat on the side while doing other things such as selling cars.

Perhaps worse is the after-hours lack of chat. Many people do their important research about this huge type of purchase at night after work is done, relaxing is done, and the time has come to buckle down and find a car to buy. Unless you have an answering service that allows people to ask questions through the phone 24-hours per day, there is no reason to keep people in the dark until business hours by turning chat off at any time. The idea is that chat is supposed to be available as a safe and secure way to get information “in the moment” when customers often need the information the most.

Build it for Mobile First

Click-to-call. Click-to-text. Responsive design or mobile websites. These are just some of the things that are necessary for finding success with mobile.

It’s the trend. This is not only the future. It’s happening today. A good chunk of people do the majority of their digital research on mobile devices and the numbers are rising every day. When a website is not built specifically to handle mobile, there are customers getting turned off on a regular basis.