If you are using proactive live chat, then be sure to customize your chat invitations to be specific to the user experience.
Whether you’re a live chat pro or whether you’re just beginning to implement your live chat programs, there are some basic best practices that you can use to make sure that you’re using Live Chat to enhance and improve your sales and customer service in an optimized way
Starting from Where Your Customers Abandon Your Website
A great way to begin a live chat program is to review your own website analytics firstly. Whether you use Google Analytics or another enterprise level solution, identify pages on your website that have a high bounce (exit) rate or where you need to improve conversions or sales. Those pages that are under-performing in your metrics reports are a great place to begin live chat to improve website performance.
Use Proactive Chat Instead of Reactive Chat
While any form of live chat technology used on a website will improve overall conversion and customer activity, using proactive live chat rather than reactive live chat can increase ROI to up to 105% according to a Forrester Research study. Reactive live chat is when you rely on interested customers to click your live chat button. Proactive live chat is when you actively extend invitation to users to begin a chat session based on various criteria.Comm100 offers both standard live chat Auto Invitation functionality and improved Intelligent Auto Invitation functionality to create the most customized invitations possible.
Customize Chat Content Based on Unique Criteria
If you are using proactive live chat, then be sure to customize your chat invitations to be specific to the user experience. If you’re using a standard live chat auto invitation feature, then you can set basic parameters such as customizing your chat invitations to reference the product that was featured on the page a user was viewing at the time. If you are using Comm100’s exclusive Intelligent Auto Invitation, then you can refine invitations using multiple criteria such as the user’s state, region and so on. This gives you the ultimate ability to craft a highly customized, high-converting chat invitation for optimal results.
Create Criteria Based on Your Business Sector
While some criteria can be universal, such as inviting a user to a chat session when on a shopping cart page, some may be specific to your industry. For example, let’s say that you run a website that sells automotive parts. If a user is on a page with a car stereo, your invitation message may be specific to that product line. You may want to initiate the Live chat invitation by saying, “Do you have any questions about whether this unit is compatible with your car, or what the technical specs are? We’re here to answer!”
Initiate Chats with New or Unproven Visitors
When selecting which users to proactively initiate chats with, focus on newer customers (often with fewer site visits). New customers are less likely to have a brand relationship with your company yet. Therefore, they are more likely to be responsive to a welcoming and helpful chat invitation.
Always Offer Chat in the Shopping Cart or Sign-Up Page
Your transactional pages, such as a shopping cart or sign-up page, are the most important pages on your website. Always proactively offer a chat option on these pages regardless of customer parameters.
Referral and Current Page URL Invitations are Highly Effective
If you have a website that sells products, your most effective Live chat invitations may be from the product pages themselves. Asking a customer if they have a question about a specific product that they have been viewing for ten seconds or more can often lead to a sale. Personalize each auto invitation to include the name of the product on the page. Referring URL can also create great conversion opportunities. If you know that a user came to you from a link on a site where you advertise a specific promotion, you can ask in the auto invitation if they have any questions about the promotional offer that they saw on the referring website.
Don’t Over Personalize Messages
You want users to feel a personal, welcoming sense from your message. However, you don’t want them to feel as though you’re spying on them! Avoid messages such as “We’ve noticed that you’ve been here many times on this same page. Can we answer a question for you?” Focus on personalizing based on information that wouldn’t make the user feel as though you know too much about them!
Grammar Counts!
In numerous studies, two factors mattered when creating a successful live chat program (including auto invitations). The first is grammar! Be sure to have somebody edit and check your auto invitation text for proper grammar and spelling.
Agent Skills Count!
The second factor that created optimized live chat programs was the skill set of the agent. Intelligent Auto Invitation for Live chat gives you the opportunity to send specific chats to the most qualified agent or group. Make sure to take advantage of that opportunity.
Using live chat as a marketing and customer communications channel isn’t significantly different from using other marketing and communications channels in terms of how you can best optimize it. You want to combine knowledge of your visitors’ behaviors with creating tailored messages that speak directly to them. This could be based on the customer’s demographic data, website location, or even referral data. The more targeted that you make your message, and the better your trained agents are, the better your response rate will be.
