PR Announcements

CarsDirect.com Renews Relationship with Automotive Chat Provider Contact At Once! and Implements Advanced Consumer Engagement Model

Atlanta, GA – April 19, 2011 – Contact At Once!, LLC (www.autodealerchat.com), the leading provider of automotive chat software that moves online shoppers into live conversations with car dealerships, announced today that CarsDirect.com, a leading online automotive shopping service and lead provider has renewed its licensing agreement.

CarsDirect.com recently redesigned its flagship website incorporating live chat in accordance with Contact At Once! best practices, making the newly redesigned CarsDirect.com more interactive.

“A major goal of the CarsDirect.com redesign was to convert even more of our high-quality organic traffic into solid leads for our dealer partners,” said Curt Cozadd, VP of Online Marketing & Business Development at CarsDirect and the project lead for the redesign. “Incorporating Contact at Once! live chat features is one of several ways that we are raising dealer partners’ visibility on CarsDirect.com, and one we think consumers will find especially useful and intuitive.”

Car shoppers browsing the newly redesigned CarsDirect.com can more easily communicate with vehicle advertisers. Highly visible chat icons and proactive photo greetings invite shoppers to connect instantly with available dealership personnel. Interactive photo greetings displayed on vehicle listing pages include the actual name and photo of a dealership representative who is online and available to respond in real-time.  Allowing visitors to chat live with a member of the dealership results in an online engagement similar to the experience of walking into a dealership, shaking hands with a dealership representative and inquiring about their inventory.

“We are happy to continue our relationship with CarsDirect and encouraged by their commitment to improving the online car shopper experience,” said Marc Hayes, Founder and Executive Vice President of Contact At Once! “Understanding that most online car shopping begins on sites other than the dealership’s website, it’s important that dealers not only present their inventory to internet consumers, but offer them the ability to connect instantly and personally.”

Contact At Once! live chat is a feature available to all CarsDirect advertisers and is currently offered at no additional charge to CarsDirect Premium Used Listing customers.  Dealers who add chat to their CarsDirect listings can increase communication with prospective buyers by 20% or more, resulting in more showroom visits and cars sold.  To help dealers achieve the best possible results from live chat, CarsDirect is sponsoring a number of online self-paced training sessions hosted by Contact At Once! covering a range of topics from basic chat etiquette to proven chat techniques.

Dealers interested in adding live chat to their CarsDirect listings or registering for the online self-paced training should contact CarsDirect.com by email, [email protected] or call 1-888-895-1805.

About Contact At Once!

Contact At Once! is the leading provider of dealer chat software for automotive websites and operator of the industry’s only chat network, connecting over 7,500 car dealers to the websites that car shoppers visit most often.  Adding ContactAtOnce! auto dealer chat software to a website typically increases a dealership’s sales conversations by at least 25%. Contact At Once! is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information about the company’s auto dealer chat product, please visit: www.autodealerchat.com.

About CarsDirect

CarsDirect (www.carsdirect.com) is a leading multi-brand online car buying service and research portal, providing new and used automobiles and related products and services. As the pioneer of the direct online car buying model, CarsDirect has become the natural choice for consumers who demand objectivity, selection and upfront pricing, and for dealers who want to leverage the Internet for cost-effective incremental sales and revenue.

More information about CarsDirect’s range of products for dealers can be found at connect.carsdirect.com.

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