For months now, the economy has challenged businesses of all sizes to pull out every cliché they can muster. It seems every marketing department is chasing “low-hanging fruit” while business development professionals are busy with “synergistic win-win relationships.”

Meanwhile, IT departments are looking for “best practices” that will “increase efficiency” while executive teams are encouraging “paradigm shifting organizational changes.”

Though it may be counterintuitive, we think that enterprise-sized e-tailers can save money by thinking inside the box. Here’s what we mean:

Consolidate Communications: We know from our own proprietary research that a website visitor’s communication technology preference is dependent upon where they are in the buying process. In a given moment then, there are people on your site who want to chat with you, initiate a click to call with you, email you, be actively assisted, or have no communication with you at all. Putting each of these communication methods into its own box and under its own management is wasteful. Enterprises should consolidate all of these methods under one umbrella with the same interface and staff. We recently launched an integrated suite to accomplish just that. Learn more about BoldCCM.

Get in the Driver’s Seat: Taking control over your own live chat, click-to-call and email management solution is valuable to an enterprise for two reasons. First, it saves money in the short-run because it avoids costly fees associated with ongoing professional services engagements. Secondly, it enables companies to build intellectual capital around an increasingly important competency. We recommend, at least, that firms develop a working knowledge of live chat reporting metrics and proactive invitation logic.

One Chat Resolution: Many enterprises who utilize live chat for support should consider an active co-browsing or full remote control capability. If your product line is complicated or if you sell computer-related items, the ability to actively view and interact with a target customer’s PC could allow you to resolve their buying or support issue in one session. This not only provides a positive experience for the customer, but avoids costly escalations.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal pointed to live chat technology as one of the “Three Best Ways to Convert Web Traffic into Sales.” (read it)  The article discussed a few tools to help businesses capture and accelerate the pace with which visitors moved through the sales cycle.

The topic clearly struck a chord for business owners evidenced by several days of the story being tweeted and retweeted. While we’d like to believe that it was a fascination with live chat technology that drove the excitement, we understand that the story’s real appeal was its unspoken message.  The idea that website owners aren’t simply beholden to the whims of their visitors but, instead, can effectively exert influence over the buying cycle is a powerful message.  Another recently published article discusses this as well.

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We’re thrilled to see one of the largest and most influential mainstream business publications report on After Click Marketing.  While the reporter, Raymund Flandez doesn’t use that term, the article’s introduction is its very definition; “These days, the tech-savvy small business is using search engine optimization to steer customers to its home page. But once those online visitors land, how do you get them to buy?”

This simple question, we believe, is giving birth to a new discipline (or at least a new vocabulary) associated with what website owners can do to drive visitors into the sales cycle. After click marketing concerns itself with an engagement action we want the visitor to take.  In fact, after click marketing is really about the optimization of those engagements.  Today’s Wall Street Journal article clearly defines three such actions which ultimately drive conversions.

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Almost all providers include a gallery of images for use on your website when you decide to offer live chat.  Many of these images are quite nice.  The one to the left is from our gallery and I like it a lot.

We have over 25 button styles, 4 text options, 8 color options, and 2 background choices which means there are over 1,600 combinations.  Wow, that’s a bunch of buttons.  But, here’s the thing; none of these might be right for your website.  Luckily, most systems like BoldChat and BoldCCM enable you to customize the button.  Here are 4 situations that definitely warrant a custom chat button:

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Live chat helps convert browsers into repeat online buyers, according to an article published today in eMarketer, a leading technology research website.

Using proprietary research from Bold Software, eMarketer found live chat “very helpful” for e-commerce sites. In fact, live chat was the preferred customer service option for questions about order status, promotions, shipping or cheaper services, the article said.

Live chat is valuable for “inducing shoppers to make a purchase and getting those purchasers to return to the site,” eMarketer noted.

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With our recent research report on the effectiveness of live chat, we paid special attention to the survey respondent’s feedback from about proactive chat. We learned that consumers with the highest likelihood to make an online purchase are also the most likely to accept a proactive chat invitation.  But as Bold Software’s Director of Sales, I find that when I talk to business decision makers at B2C companies, they widely believe that proactive chat will scare away customers.

So, the most valuable consumers respond, very few offer negative feedback about proactive chat, and yet businesses still think consumers will run away screaming.

Are these perceptions from businesses left over from brick/mortar retail? Was there research earlier in live chat’s lifespan that indicated a negative response from proactive chat? Considering proactive chat is far less Orwellian than robust analytics, what is it that people were ever afraid of?

The more I try to understand the fear about proactive chat, the sillier the questions get. It makes me wonder if this whole negative perception is based on assumptions rather than actual data.

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We’ve recently made some changes to our corporate branding, product naming, and available features that we’d like to share with both our existing and prospective customers.  Before we jump in to the individual changes, it will be helpful to explain why we made them in the first place.  There are several reasons, though two come to the fore.

First, despite the economy that surrounds us, we’re growing.  And, as we continue to grow, continue to win business from large preeminent brands, and continue to be relied on by media and analysts as experts in our field, we needed to establish a corporate presence beyond the brand names of the products we sell. Though many know us as “BoldChat”, that is simply one of the brands we manage.

Secondly, our growth has been fueled by two types of customers – small to mid-sized entrepreneurial businesses and significant enterprise engagements.  As such, the feature sets each of these customers require has changed over time.  We needed to react and build offerings appropriate for each.

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In a recent Internet Retailer story, BoldChat’s Director of Sales, Matt Tharp, gave five suggestions for improving and personalizing your live chat offering.

Here are the highlights:

1. Add operator photos to your proactive chat invitations. 
2. Greet your visitors warmly. 
3. Design the chat window to compliment your website. 
4. Make the chat window a managable size. 
5. Make the chat button easy to find. 

In certain marketing circles it’s considered sacrilege to use your competitor’s name in your own communications. “Why use your money to promote their brand” – or so the thinking goes. While I admit it’s not terrible advice, it’s not always the right advice either. There are certain situations when explicit mentions of direct competitors are not only appropriate, but encouraged.

When the industry in which you compete has not yet ‘gone mainstream’, a decent portion of your marketing effort is needed for education. This is true, in fact, for all the players in the space. In burgeoning markets then, a chunk of the collective marketing executed by all the competitors is being used for ‘category building.’ While marketing-types would like to use 100% of their budgets for brand building, it’s simply not possible until there is a robust market from which competitors can carve out a lasting position.

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I’ve struggled with this post because there are so many ways in which learnings from live chat can impact a business that it was hard to know where to start. Perhaps you can identify with my conundrum if the question were re-worded. “Can I improve my business by talking to my customers and prospective customers?”

You see my point – it’s about as wide open as the Atlantic. In the interest of brevity, and as a way to organize things, I’m going to talk about 3 distinct ways in which live chat interactions can drive improvement in organizations. There’s at least ten times that many, but “3 ways that live chat can impact your bottom line” is as pithy as it is relevant.

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