While you’re at ICSA, be sure to catch Rick Trefzger, COO of IS3/STOPzilla and Steve Castro-Miller, CEO of Bold Software as they present “CHATzilla: Live Chat’s Power over the Support Beast – A Success Story from iS3″ on September 20, at 10:30 a.m.

During this presentation you’ll understand how iS3, makers of STOPzilla, differentiated themselves in the fast-paced battle to stay ahead of malicious spyware programmers while their front line support personnel faced intense, day-to-day demands. Within this hyper-competitive market, iS3 had to differentiate themselves by providing a superior customer experience. Live chat has powered-up the company’s care organization while simultaneously reducing costs. In just 45 days the company was delighting thousands of customers a week by responding in real time to support issues via the live chat channel. After this case study, bolstered by leading industry research, you’ll be ready to determine if live chat is a good solution for your company and what steps are required to provide it and start delivering great service.

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.

For these reasons, and others, we have enacted the following:

1. We’ve changed the name of our company to Bold Software, LLC and launched a corporate website at www.BoldSoft.com.   Our new name is descriptive at the same time it pays homage to the heritage of our flagship brand.  Bold Software has a clean aesthetic and this blog now wears its look.
2. We announced a new BoldChat product called BoldChat Premier.  This offering is our most robust chat-only product and is tailor made for businesses that intend a significant live chat operation.
3. We launched BoldCCM for enterprises that require a consolidated suite of website communication tools.  From one interface, companies can manage live chat, click to call, inbound email management, and more.  Two new suites are sold under the BoldCCM name and the Enterprise version includes a new remote control capability.

The changes we’ve made mark an important milestone for Bold Software.  As ambassadors of live chat, click to call, and other website communication technologies, we now have a corporate, brand, and product architecture that allows us to advance a mission begun more than six years ago.  We create software that empowers websites to optimize their performance and we offer it for the greatest value in the industry.

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.

1. Answering the same questions over and over is a sign that something is wrong. Most live chat software includes a canned messaging capability making it easy for chat operators to respond to common questions. And even though this functionality reduces the time it takes to answer a chatter’s inquiry, answering the same questions repeatedly from different website visitors is a strong sign that your site isn’t preemptively providing the information that people are looking for.
    
2. Good selling can be taught – but identifying the teacher is important. If you are using live chat for sales (and you should be – see the live chat software research report post), then you will have the ability to tie conversions to chat interactions. BoldChat accomplishes this through proprietary conversion code, which enables us to see – for example – that I am a terrible salesperson.
   During the reporting period, I achieved 3 conversions – only one of which occurred during the same session in which I chatted with the visitor. Apparently, I need some training and it is quite clear formthis report that my training should come from Shea. She achieved 20 conversions, 16 of them coming during the same sessions in which she chatted with visitors. That’s an 80% same visit conversion rate and replicating that will clearly improve our business.
    

Using proactive invitations as a research tool. While our independent research shows that live chat proactive invitations are an exceptional selling tool, they can also be used to engage visitors in conversations about other topics. For the past several days, we’ve been doing this on the BoldChat website. I set up a special invitation (including an offer) to talk to people about our website:

 
I’ve talked with a bunch of folks and learned a lot about what people like and don’t like about our site. Based on one user’s feedback, we made a change to our homepage imagery.

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1. If your product can be used a particular way, but really shouldn’t be. Our BoldMail solution is extremely powerful and our customers use it with tangible benefits to their business. However, it is a tool intended for the management of inbound emails. We turn away prospects who want to use it as an outbound email marketing solution. It can be used this way, but because it wasn’t designed to be, it would ultimately fail to satisfy them. To see how BoldMail works, check out this short video.
    
2. If the customer needs something you don’t have. If your product or services simply will not fulfill the needs of the prospect, don’t sell it to them. Instead, refer them in the hopes that when a new need arises that does match what you do, they’ll come back. We often refer clients who are looking for outsourcing options. We sell the software that enables live chat, but we don’t offer a staffed chat solution.
3. If servicing the customer will not be profitable. Some companies are not set up to deal with the demands of certain customers. In BoldChat’s case, for instance, we often refer customers who only want to utilize our Visitor Monitoring capability on extremely high traffic websites which don’t facilitate live chat interactions. While our server infrastructure can handle the volume, it doesn’t fit into our normal back-end monitoring processes. As such, we would need to incur more cost to have parallel processing. In short, it’s simply better to refer the customer elsewhere.

This 11-word question has a 1-word answer – data.

Management-types have a strange affinity for numbers. Raw data makes them smile, spreadsheets can warm their hearts, and graphs make them downright giddy. It is said that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Well, the way to management’s top-of-mind is through data.

Sort of.

In today’s world, we all have access to piles of statistics about our websites. We know about time-on-page, bounce rates, and conversions by keyword. We know about geo-IP, referring URLs and other sophisticated visitor monitoring information. Emailing daily reams of data to management with may seem like a good idea, but 

is likely to get you nowhere fast. Yes, management likes data. But what really gets them excited is data-driven analysis.

Here’s a five step plan for using data to get management’s attention regarding your website:

Step #1: Keep quiet until you’ve got the data

“Our website needs to integrate insert-latest-technology-here because our competitor’s websites have it,” isn’t a solution to a problem – it’s a data-less recommendation. Maybe your company is smart to keep things simple. Maybe they aren’t. Long story short, if you start the conversation this way, you’re stumbling into a deep hole.

Step #2: Seek secondary data

Let’s continue with our example begun above. If you notice competitive sites implementing a certain kind of technology, do some secondary research on it. You’ll probably find whitepapers, studies, and other third party materials regaling the benefits of the latest whiz-bang whatchamacallit.

Step #3: Augment the secondary research with your own targeted data

Another reason to do secondary research is that it helps you to identify specific areas where a deeper internal analysis would be beneficial. If, for example, one of the whitepapers you downloaded in step #2 said that the latest technology is particularly good at increasing conversions in later stages of the sales funnel, you now know that you’ll need to pull your own data from those particular stages.

Step #4: Use the data to tell a story

Cutting and pasting targeted data from your analytics tools into a document or email is better than where we started, but it isn’t great – yet. Instead, take the time to craft a narrative around your goals and simply use the data for punctuation and power. You can present the narrative in written form, slide ware or even in conversation.

We noticed several of our competitors were implementing xyz technology on their sites. We’ve considered it in the past and given these developments, we had a closer look. Some reputable research is available out there and we spent a few days digging through it. A good whitepaper by John T. Expert showed that several firms were able to increase conversion rates when they implemented the technology in late-stages of their sales funnels. We have X people each day exit those stages of our funnels and in the past quarter, it’s increased by Y%…

Step #5:Always include measurement systems

Somehow, data begets data. Don’t fight it – embrace it. If you’re going to recommend changes, always recommend one or more ways to measure the impact of those changes. You’ll not only get management’s attention – you’ll keep it.

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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.

The best part about implementing a program is how much easier it is with live chat than in a call center. In a call center you either have to listen realtime and score the call or you have to have recording and playback capability. Then, if you provide feedback, if you don’t have the call recorded, it can easily be a he-said/she-said about what happened on the call. In live chat the entire interaction is all there and you can coach on tone, timing, inquisitiveness, accuracy, professionalism, closing skills – or any other elements critical to organization. You will find that providing feedback to your agents on their chat performance is faster, easier, more accurate, and less prone to misinterpretation.

To get started, follow these easy steps.

1. Create a matrix of the 10-20 elements you really want your agents to get right. Include some simple-yet-essential elements such as greeting and closing as well as some subjective elements that will help you mold the voice your want your agents to represent you with.
2. Assign a number of points possible for each element. (Hint: if you make the total equal 100, the paradigm will be easier for agents to connect to).
3. Decide how many chats you will review per agent and how frequently you will review them. (Hint: 2-3 chats per day is not too much feedback; 2-3 per month isn’t really a program – shoot for something in the middle).
4. Create a simple recognition program in which everyone one who achieves gets rewarded. You want all your customers to have a great experience, so don’t dis-incent all the non-top-agent by only rewarding one prize.
5. Make the incentives fun, inexpensive, and quickly rewarded. Certificates, coupons, mugs, food, etc.
6. Review the program with the agents so they understand how the program works and what matters to you.
7. Salute excellence weekly or monthly for all who qualify and also with a quarterly award that gets lunch paid for by the boss. You can also try to get an executive to agree to take your annual star to lunch. One of the best ways I ever got the corner office to understand the value of what agents were doing was when they took one to lunch!

Quality was important years ago when call centers started recording and scoring calls for training – in today’s ecommerce world of many available options, quality can be the single biggest difference and the one you have the most control over.

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Make sure your live chat tool keeps chat histories and allows your supervisors to make notes to the agent about them within the chat record – enabling you to focus on the quality critical to your success with your customers and prospects.

Get started now, it will only take a couple of hours to craft and short period of time each day or week.

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.

4. GoToMeeting: GoToMeeting is a low-cost alternative to Webex, and is a no-brainer for any firm looking to reduce expenses.  Does EVERY meeting need to be face-to-face?  Is it really the best option to leave tomorrow for a same-day trip?  If you can, schedule meetings via web/teleconference using GotoMeeting.  It’s near impossible to find a flight for $49- GotoMeeting’s per month rate for 1 license.

3. LinkedIn: LinkedIn helps keep you connected until the next conference or tradeshow.  Get involved in groups, build your own group, request introductions through existing contacts.  Linkedin offers a free version with huge value to sales/marketing teams looking for ways to grow their network and find prospects.  Most importantly, it keeps you connected with contacts you’ve already made in between those face-to-face encounters. Get further involved for more top-of-mind awareness. Being more active and involved on LinkedIn will generate results.

2. Email management software: Ignore the obvious bias; adding this technology will improve your business- I guarantee it.  You will improve the response time on emails for sales and support, you will have better accountability and reporting and it’s simply more efficient than any other method we’ve seen.  BoldMail solves a real business problem and in a tight economy provides the big three – low cost, high efficiency, increased productivity.

1. Live Chat: Here’s the obvious point – you can have many quality chat interactions at one time and only one call.  No matter how you slice it, chat is inexpensive and helps you connect with more potential sales with less resources.  In this type of economic environment, if you want to capture more sales online, there is no faster way to do it than to add live chat to your website. Live chat improves conversion rates, helps reduce shopping cart abandonment, and will positively impact customer satisfaction.  Name 1 other technology that you can implement in minutes that will do all of that.