Better
customer interaction experience can be ensured through the use of proactive
Chat. Businesses can provide a right customer service as well as achieve their business
objectives, sales goals, and improve customer satisfaction using Proactive Chat.
While Live Chat has been conventionally used to provide customer support or
technical support to the customers, Proactive Chat proves useful in offering
dedicated services to high-value customers who exhibit greater tendency to make
a purchase when provided with assistance.
Proactive
chat involves inviting potential customer or visitors into a chat engagement
session through use of invitations in the form of images, text input fields, or
any other multimedia mechanism that can be triggered manually, by specific
pre-defined rules or website visitor behavior metrics.
Impact of Proactive Chat on Chat Volume and
Conversions
Proactive
Chat is found to have significant effect on the chat volume and conversions on
the business website. Companies that offered proactive chat at crucial points
have witnessed higher conversion rates, revenue figures, and average order
values. According to Bold Software’s Live Chat Performance Benchmarking report,
potential customers who have got engaged through proactive chat are 6.3 times
more likely to purchase from the website than visitor’s who do not chat. It is
also found to increase the overall chat volume between 40% and 100%.
Higher
conversions are also witnessed as proactive chat helps reduce the cart abandonment
rates significantly thus capturing those crucial customers. Proactive chat also
helps in higher revenue realization as calls are deflected from contact centers
to the chat agents who can handle more than 3 customers at a time thereby reducing
the cost.
Growing Receptiveness towards
Proactive Chat
Due
to adherence to some of the best practices in implementing Proactive Chat, the website
visitors are showing greater receptiveness towards Proactive Chat invitations.
According the Live Chat Effectiveness Report 2012 by Bold Chat, as many as 66%
of the entire online shoppers said they have been proactively invited into a
chat session at one point of time or the other (1). A large
number of respondents also rated their opinion on being proactively invited to
chat as receptive.
According to North American
Technographics Customer Experience Online Survey conducted in 2009 Q4, 57 % of
US online consumers are likely to abandon their online purchase if they cannot
find an answer to their queries. (2)
Does Overuse of Proactive Chat Dent
Customer Satisfaction?
There
has been wide scale skepticism that excessive use of proactive chat can cause
annoyance to the customers and sink the customer satisfaction to lower levels. But
it actually depends on the way businesses use proactive chat to engage
customers. A well-managed and well-executed proactive chat program can improve
sales and customer satisfaction while a poorly crafted strategy can seriously
harm the image of the business. Repeated invitations, interruptions during
browsing and more can lead to driving away the customers. While well-informed
and timely invitations that are presented at right time and at right place to
the customer can greatly improve customer experience of shopping.
Enterprises
should remember to select a robust chat software solution that enables them to
control key components of proactive chat like sending invitations, controlling pre-defined
rules etc.
Right Staffing
Having
a right balance of staff is crucial for successful Proactive Chat
implementation. It is necessary to strike a right balance between acceptance
rates with staffing. Properly skilled staff that can quickly answer to customer
queries is required to efficiently serve the customers. An agent can handle 2-3
concurrent chats at one instance but the responses can get slower if the limit
is increased further. Delayed responses can annoy the customers that can result
in chat abandonment. Businesses should ensure that the agents are properly
trained, have rights skills and knowledge to handle chat operations.
Rules
must be set to trigger chat invitations that comply with the chat goals of the
organization. Setting triggers at pages with high abandonment rates,
abandonment points during checkout process or long session inactivity period can
help avoid loss of sale. Opportunistic triggers can also be set to initiate
chat invitations where there is a chance of cross-selling or up-selling.
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