April 9th, 2009
If you have yet to check out the April 2009 issue of Internet Retailer, be sure to take a look. This month’s cover story, Survivor: e-Retailer, features BoldChat customer, Appliance Zone, as one of several smart retailers that are finding opportunities to reach price-conscious consumers just when brick-and-mortar stores are scaling back on staff and inventory or closing their doors all together.
Don Davis, Internet Retailer’s Editor-in-Chief, spoke to Appliance Zone about how the rapidly growing e-retailer keeps customers happy by consistently delivering rock-bottom prices. One of the reasons they’re able to keep prices so low is by encouraging their customers to use live chat software at the website.
In addition to Appliance Zone, the article also covers online retail strategies from Staples, Blue Nile, Title Nine, Drugstore.com and Newegg.com. The story wraps with a list of “5 recession-beating tips for e-retailers.” We especially like #5: Promote the Use of Live Chat to Reduce Call Center Costs.
Congratulations to the team at Appliance Zone for their part in a great story!
March 30th, 2009
Thanks to products like the iPhone, Blackberry, and Google’s G1 Android-based phone, SMS communications and mobile email continue to be primary functions of a mobile device, rather than secondary functions. I’ve had an iPhone, Blackberry, and Palm Treo and, while call quality was a factor in my purchases, the main value these phones offered was easy access to other forms of communication. So it may seem like a natural progression for business-oriented live chat software to be compatible with mobile phones.
I disagree. I don’t think conducting live chat on a mobile device will help businesses with sales and customer support. In fact, I think it can harm them. Here’s why:
Read the rest of this entry »
March 24th, 2009
We’ve just completed the most recent and comprehensive primary research study on the effectiveness of live chat ever conducted. Why did we do it? Well, we already know that live chat can drive sales and reduce support costs – many of our customers have shared data with us showing the impact our technology has had on their businesses. But many internet retailers we speak with who don’t have live chat are skeptical about it.
We thought we would take a two pronged approach to delivering the highest quality information about the fact that live chat really works.
Read the rest of this entry »
January 27th, 2009
There might be a temptation to run some reports on your live chat implementation and hand those out, showing who has had the most conversions, who types the fastest, who took the most chats, etc. But quantity of interaction is only one of the benefits you can garner from using live chat.
You probably ignore that voice that says “calls may be recorded for quality purposes” – that’s because call centers have been working on quality for years. Live chat should be no different.
Creating a Chat Quality Assurance program isn’t hard or overly time-consuming. I’ve done it several times over the years. Done well, it not only improves the quality of your interactions with your customers, it can give you a chance to salute your high performers and use incentive systems to boost morale. It’s a win, win, win.
Read the rest of this entry »
January 13th, 2009
As the saying goes, “necessity is the mother of invention.” And with economic downturns, companies face that necessity and are driven to improve efficiency and reduce costs (hopefully without sacrificing their brands in the process.)
With that in mind, here are 5 technologies that may be helpful for your business in a tight economy:
5. Pitchengine: Pitchengine is a great way to publish your own press releases, for free, and have them indexed by search engines quickly. PR is valuable, but can be expensive and Pitchengine provides an inexpensive option for self-managed PR. If you have to make cuts to your PR budget, Pitchengine can help you keep PR alive during the downturn.
Read the rest of this entry »
January 8th, 2009
I remember attending a Ken Blanchard seminar a few years ago in which he equated focusing solely on features and benefits as the sound of a honking duck. “Quack, quack, quack” he would intone loudly to make sure we understood the potential irrelevance of spouting features and benefits. His point was that although the features were very interesting to you, they would be less interesting than the benefits to your customer and perhaps neither would be interesting at all. What mattered was making a real connection.
Chat gives you the capability to move from your visitor from reading static web pages of features and benefits into a conversation between two people. Engaging them in a chat can be key to take them from visitor to prospect to customer.
Read the rest of this entry »