Live Help Can Increase Sales & Build Customer Loyalty This Holiday Season

Just as a physical store agent can see shoppers, read their body languages and directly interact with them, agents responding to live help can benefit by leveraging shoppers’ real-time web context. Business rules can detect signs of online abandonment or trouble to proactively offer live help.

When shoppers accept the live help invitation, agents can “see” their browsing histories on the site and what pages they're on. They can also co-browse the site with shoppers to direct them to the right merchandise or forms, or even complete forms for them.

Data shows that live help can reduce shopping cart abandonment by as much as 40 percent in some cases. Moreover, shoppers who use click to call and click to chat convert sales at a rate of anywhere from five times to 20 times that of normal web visitors, and often buy 10 percent to 30 percent more because agents can cross-sell and upsell during interactions.

Live help provides other benefits, such as a reduction in returns. Just as a customer service rep in a store might convince a shopper to keep a product — or at least buy an alternative — live help can intercept customers before they try to make online returns. Calls that are taken via click to call from the web are also much shorter than standard calls, helping reduce the cost of customer service.

It’s not enough to have great products and an easy-to-navigate online store anymore. By adding just a single line of JavaScript to your online store this holiday season, you can inject live help into the online buying experience, arming call-center agents with the tools and information they need to convert more online sales and build brand loyalty.

Ryan Hoppe is director of marketing for ATG’s e-Commerce Optimization Services. For information, go to www.atg.com. You can reach Ryan at rhoppe@atg.com.