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Why Click-to-Chat, aka live chat, might be right for your site
Imagine a retail location with no sales clerks available to help people who have questions or can't find products. That's the state of an estimated three out of four e-commerce Websites that don't make service agents available to chat live with customers and prospects.
Is click-to-chat a wise option for every merchant? No, it's usually not for those who sell low-consideration, low-margin products. (But live-chat customer service does make sense for low-margin items if the customer is a high-value customer overall, or if the contact-center representative can cross-sell or upsell during the process.)
Click-to-chat is also not wise for merchants who don't intend to put the proper resources into it.
There are deployment best practices, and there are people best practices, says Kevin Kohn, executive vice president, marketing, for live-chat software provider LivePerson. One of our challenges is that we can have the best technology in the world, and if the companies we market into aren't investing in [chat customer-service representatives], then the experience is not going to be good.
But for companies that do invest in the proper resources, live chat has advantages no other channel offers, he adds. For example, chat allows customers to get service anonymously, so they're often willing to communicate with a contact-center agent earlier in the process than they would via telephone.
If they haven't made that decision yet, they might feel the questions they're asking aren't very sophisticated or they might be coming in from another country and aren't comfortable with English, he says.
EarthLink began using click-to-chat customer service in 2001, and by 2004 the Internet service provider was using it to handle 15% of its customer contacts.
This was really huge for us, because our chat agents handle three concurrent chats and, depending on call time, if we're handling the customer with chat as opposed to the phone, we're saving anywhere from $3 to $5 per contact, says Mike Murphy, senior manager, online support strategy, EarthLink. A couple million chats a year for support breaks down into huge cost savings for us.
Chat is also EarthLink's highest scoring channel in terms of customer satisfaction and is comparable to other channels in terms of issue-resolution percentages, says Murphy.
A chat agent can handle 80 to 100 contacts a day, and no topic, including service-cancellation-save attempts, is outside their scope, he notes.
Chat currently accounts for about 25% of EarthLink's customer contacts, Murphy says.
Naturally, chat customer service is especially well suited for companies that serve younger demographics. Alton Martin, CEO of customer service consulting firm COPC, notes that his children, who are in college, are much more accepting of chat transactions because they do it all the time. I've seen one of my kids with six chat windows open at once, he says.
Another advantage of chat customer service is that the agent can save the entire session and send a transcript electronically to the customer when it's over. This is especially useful in technical support, Martin says.
He adds that chat also offers call-center management a unique ability to read the transcripts and assess how well or not agents are interacting with customers and prospects.
Pushing the button
Kohn warns that Web marketers should display the click-to-chat buttons only when there is someone available. Don't promote the channel if you're not going to staff it, he says.
Kohn also stresses that merchants who make chat available to their customers should make clear what the click-to-chat button is and why it's there.
How the channel is introduced is almost as important as the experience itself, he said. It's almost like an ad banner, and it's amazing how much time people will spend on a banner or e-mail and how little time they'll spend on a button introducing a channel.
For example, the button should be contextual, or relevant to where the visitor is on the site. If they're on a service page, don't have a button saying, Hey, there's a great sale going on, he says. You just need to think about it from the standpoint of the user experience, just like you do everything else.
Click-to-chat buttons should appear on pages where critical decisions are likely to be made or breakdowns are most likely to happen, such as throughout the checkout process, he adds.
Another chat function merchants should consider is proactive chat, in which contact-center representatives reach out via a chat window to certain prime-target Website visitors without being asked. Once certain rules are set in place, Kohn says, 20% to 25% of people who are contacted proactively will make a purchase.
But isn't popping up in people's faces when they're on the Internet disconcerting?
It depends on whether it's done right or not, says Kohn. They'll love it if they just spent half an hour trying to configure a laptop on HP, they get a configuration error and have two choices: They've either got to start all over, or call the 800-number, which will have no visibility into what they just did.
But if a merchant layers in a proactive invitation that says: Hey, I see you're having trouble. Would you like to connect with me so I can help you complete this? Kohn says, they'll jump on it.
