It’s hard to believe that we’re this close to the holiday shopping season already, but we are.  All this talk of Black Fridays, Cyber Mondays, and selling, selling, and more selling has made us reflect on the true meaning of the season.  In the spirit of giving then, Bold Software humbly makes available these chat button images in the hopes that internet storefronts the world over will have that special glow that only comes once a year.  If you’re a Bold Software customer, instructions for using the buttons immediately follow.

Static Buttons (13 available)

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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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How quickly do you respond to sales inquiries that arrive via email? How about support issues? Stop for a minute and really think about your answer to these questions. Can you quantify them? If phrases like, “pretty fast” and “we’re not so bad” are the best you can do, then you’re like most companies.

In fact, you might be better than most. A study of small and medium-sized North American companies revealed that 51% of businesses never responded to emails with high-value purchase intent. A more recent study by Hornstein Associates shows a steady decline in customer service response rates since 2002. In 2007, only 33% of companies responded to emails sent to customer service within 24 hours, down almost half from a high of 63% in 2002.

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Here’s the link. Go ahead – click it. I know you want to. C’mon – click it.

When you click this link, the BoldChat system records your action as a specific type of conversion which we’ve set up called, “Clicked Blog Link”. Our live chat software allows us to report on these conversions in aggregate, or to browse them one by one as you can see below.

To be honest, the aggregate reporting is more useful for business decision making but as it’s not as cool looking, I didn’t include it here.

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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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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:

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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.

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We’re often asked this, or some variant of this question. While we certainly have our own opinions about it, I decided to seek the advice of an expert. I turned to Chris Moschella, President of A Live Answer and here are the results of our conversation:

Steve: I’m sure your answer to the question above (Can you really move sales chat offshore) would be, “it depends.” So, what does it depend on?

Chris: The most important factor is the level of American culture involved in your product or service; some things can be taught, some can’t. Heavily commoditized items like cellular phones and long distance service could be easily off-shored from just about any country. However, products that require some knowledge of current events or in-country sensitivities like weight loss products or specialized brands, on the other hand, might be a challenge.

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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.

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