Live chat: an e-sales revolution
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By Neran Ashkenazi
Founder & CEO at HelpOnClick live chat. Find him at LinkedIn, Facebook |
Fran has some free time left from lunch hour. She enters a jewelry shop, and is greeted by the owner.
"Good morning. I'm Ida. How may I help you?"
"Just looking," says Fran.
"Is this for you, or is this a gift?"
...
Ida is on the way to turning Fran's visit into a profitable one for her shop.
That is the sort of interchange you can hear at any shop. Until now, it has been missing from e-shopping.
It makes the difference between visitors and buyers.
Online visitors who are "just browsing" may love the impersonality of e-shopping and the free information they get there,
but it means lost sales for vendors.
Online shoppers who are serious about buying, on the other hand, may be frustrated by FAQs that answer the questions that vendors wanted
shoppers to ask, rather than the question that they have.
Email interchanges are often slow, making customers lose interest or buy the same item elsewhere.
Now, however, e-vendors can reach their customers online while they shop, using live chat.
A live chat sales agent can greet Fran while she is browsing the jewelry store web site, find out that Fran likes jeweled gold pendants,
and offer her the very pendant she could not possibly resist.
Online vendors who have added live chat report a huge increase in sales per customer. With live chat, people come to look, but stay to buy.
Others, who came to buy but couldn't get answers to their questions previously, now become buyers.
What matters is not so much how many people come to your e-shop, but how many people actually buy something.
Research shows that only about 2% or less of e-shop web site visitors buy anything in a session.
Only about half of all web shoppers who put an item into a web shopping cart actually buy that item.
That represents a tremendous waste of advertising expenditure that could be recovered with the aid of live help.
Experts believe that the solution is to make online web sites more proactive and interactive,
allowing vendors to reach out to their customers through the web and add the personal touch, using live chat to provide live help and support.
Prospective customers should not be daunted by the task of searching a few thousand web pages to find what they need.
They should be getting live help from support personnel who can solve their problems and provide the personal touch.
Live chat can make one dollar of advertising expenditure do the work of seven.
Live chat services that provide live help and support are easy to implement and easy for customers to use.
The customer doesn't need to download any software. Usually, they just click a button, and the software does the rest in a new popup window.
If desired, conversations can be initiated by the live chat software with a popup invitation for live help,
if a visitor has been online for a while or gone through many pages.
A live chat service can be integrated with a knowledge base, so live chat support personnel have all the information at their fingertips.
Live chat can record transcripts of the interaction and allow personnel to add notes. Vendors can use the information gathered through
live chat to track sales personnel performance and learn from mistakes.
They can also analyze transcript records to find what new features and products customers need. If the same question comes up
repeatedly in live help sessions, it can be added to the online FAQ.
Vendors are finding that live chat converts visitors into live buyers. Satisfied vendors insist that live chat has boosted their sales
conversion ratios to as high as 15% of all visitors. Every conversation that is started makes the probability of a sale much greater.
Live chat works for vendors of Internet services, office furniture, mortgages, trips and just about anything else you can imagine.
Live chat makes the difference between "Can't find it" and "That's just what I wanted, I'll take it."
