Live Help Can Increase Sales & Build Customer Loyalty This Holiday Season
We’ve all experienced it: It’s the weekend after Thanksgiving. You’re in a store, browsing gift ideas. You pick up a couple products and closely compare them. Frustrated by the lack of information provided by the manufacturers, you look up at the nearby store representative. She senses your frustration and asks, "Can I help you with something?"
You chat with her briefly and get an answer that helps you make your decision. You go to check out, wanting to use a holiday promotion you received in the mail. When it doesn’t work, the checkout associate takes the promotion and punches in the code manually. You get what you wanted at 20 percent off.
Now, imagine this scenario on the web. You’re comparing products, but there’s no one to ask for more information. What do you do?
Recent surveys show that a majority of online shoppers want the option of online chat and "click to call" to get immediate assistance when browsing online. Sometimes shoppers need help making purchase decisions and completing transactions online. Yet only a small, but still significant, portion of consumers have tried "click to call" or "click to chat" on the web.
Clearly there’s a gap between what consumers want and expect online, and what online retailers provide. (For more information on these survey results, click here.)
Live help services can be quick, easy and valuable solutions for retailers looking to drive conversion rates, reduce shopping cart abandonment and build customer loyalty this holiday season. Both click to call and click to chat are add-on web technologies that provide online shoppers with an immediate connection — either voice or text chat — to a live agent at the click of a button.
By avoiding dialing a toll-free number, being placed on hold or patched through to several different representatives, shoppers can get the same “just-in-time” assistance they'd find in a physical store to help them make online purchase decisions or overcome some problem or issue they might face when checking out online.
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.
- Companies:
- ATG
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- Ryan Hoppe