Orlando, FL (Vocus/PRWEB) December 09, 2010

Most organizations implement web chat and focus on passive live chat requests initiated by visitors. If the software allows for pro-active live chat invitations, a huge opportunity is being missed. In fact, the value in pro-active live chatis vastly greater than passive live chat. Considerable time and funds have been invested in driving traffic to the website. It only makes sense to engage those site visitors. Follow these steps to generate a new stream of income through web chat invites.

1. Overcome your fear of it

It’s a common misconception that live chat invitations annoy site visitors. In fact, in response to the question “I like having an instant messaging/online live chat box appear and ask if I need help with my online research or purchase” 27% of respondents agreed. A second statistic is even more telling. In response to “I am very likely to abandon my online purchase if I cannot find a quick answer to my questions” 57% of respondents agreed.

Little interpretation is needed: add pro-active live chat and meet your customers’ needs. Other fears to overcome include having adequate staff available to handle live chat responses. If you’re a smaller organization you may need to shift duties to other staff to ensure that staff assigned to live chat have the bandwidth needed. Retailers and firms with heavy site traffic should be able to do a simple calculation to justify employing additional staff solely to handle live chat and calculate the additional revenues created by pro-active invites.

One fact that should allay any fears is that if you try pro-active web chat and find it isn’t for you, simply discontinue.

2. Start with manual, then automate

Initially, it isn’t necessary to create an entire campaign around pro-active live chat. Live chat invitations can be sent manually, one by one to site visitors. This will help gauge the response and allow a reasonable quantity of live chats. Once you are comfortable with with manual live chat invites you can begin to develop automated invites. These are rule based triggers which prompts the software to send an invite. Rule-based invites can be designed with some real complexity, making use of criteria such as pages visited, time spent, number of visits, forms completed, geography and altering the invite based on these rules.

Look out for a future article “Developing Pro-active Chat Triggers.”

3. Use the right people
Selecting the right live chat agent is far more important than you think. Short text communication requires someone who chooses their words carefully and conveys a tone that is professional yet friendly, see our article Top10 Live Chat Tips. The choice of wording can have a huge impact on the tone. As an example: “Can I help you?” versus “May I help you?” A polite agent with a grasp of language is great, and if they have imagination that’s even better. Why? Because they need to understand what the consumer goes through during the journey through the website. Where do they get stuck? What uncommon questions might they have? An agent who is empathetic will tend to be a customer advocate and resist becoming jaded and eventually unnecessarily coarse with customers.

The live chat agent has possibly the most customer interaction of all staff; they have a captive audience that is not pressed for time and likely to give site feedback which can be communicated up the chain for site improvement. Don’t rush to hire the first candidate, and be sure to invest in training.

4. For better results, customize
It’s common for live web chat software to come with a few pre-set live chat invites such as “Can we help?” or “Bonus offer.” If available, custom text invites will have a far superior success rate. Sending pro-active invites manually means that the agent has the ability to deeply customize the text in the invite for each visitor. An agent who understands that they can use visit data to create an invite is what you’re looking for. Furthermore, they ideally will understand how to word the invite in a way that:

• doesn’t feel invasive
• creates a bond
• is humorous

Some examples:

The website sells clothing and the visitor has been browsing the sweater category for 10 minutes.
Live Chat Agent: Hi! I see you like the sweaters with cabling at the neck. I have two of those myself. Which one is your favourite so far?

This is personal and invites a response. It borders on invasive with “I see”, but then disarms and bonds with “I have.” The visitor may even feel that ignoring the message might be considered rude, resulting in a dialogue.

The IP address shows that the visitor is from Green Bay, WI.

Live Chat Agent: Go Packers!
Believe it or not, this is a real life example that resulted in a sale from our site. It’s not highly personal, but draws on a bond created by football fans in America.

Visitor has products in the cart but seems to be spending a lot of time on the payment page.

live Chat Agent: Is there something on the payment page troubling you? or
Since you’re a first time customer, I can offer you a coupon code to complete your order today?

The first invite provides an opportunity to solve a problem. The second is a small one-time monetary incentive to complete an order that is 95% done and is a sure-fire way to drastically reduce cart abandonment and can be modified for repeat customers, high value customers, international customers...

5. Start tracking results

It’s important to categorize your ‘library’ of live chat invitations. Categories such as ‘visitor’s country,’ ‘items or categories viewed,’ or ‘checkout hesitation.’ Doing so will allow you to then track the results of various invites. Play with the wording to refine each one and develop invites with high success rates. This data will be the basis for the triggers when configuring automated invitations, which is you can read about in our next article.

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