Can I drive business process improvement with what I’m learning in chat?
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.
- 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.
- 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.
