The online chat role continues to evolve in its importance of customizing the sales experience for online shoppers. According to the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI), 83 percent of online customers used live chat. But what does that mean, really?
Through careful deployment of proactive chat rules, you can reach a customer who’s about to abandon a shopping cart due to some uncertainty at the purchasing level. You can also intervene at an appropriate time after a customer triggers a specified number of page searches so that you can guide them to another destination.
Why is that so effective? Simple: It enhances the customer’s overall experience on your company’s website. And, in today’s online shopping world, that helps ensure customer satisfaction and retention.
A formidable trend within chat that helps boost customer satisfaction is the integration of chat platforms within a company’s customer relationship management (CRM) system. Why? Because the CRM system enables a two-pronged approach to gathering knowledge.
The first prong in using the CRM system connected to chat gives your chatting employees a stronger background on a returning customer, providing more effective conversion opportunities through your website. It is advantageous when employees can quickly retrieve previous conversations about purchasing habits or when they can learn that the customer has been on the website the day before asking questions about a specific product, which will help anticipate a customer’s needs. Those are highly effective tools in the quick-paced conversations that are a result of chat engagement.
At the same time, you can focus on the second prong of a CRM system, which is the integrated retention of a new or existing customer’s desires, wants or needs, enabling you to more effectively position products. With the system connected to your chat service, you can record conversations to learn more touch points, collect relevant information toward the customer’s buying habits to learn why the customer is on your website to make the purchase, and analyze how your company can best enhance the overall customer-buying experience.
The CRM integration is a great tool for learning about your customer and building an exceptional website user experience. There are still some skeptics about integration though. A study by Gartner estimates that 42 percent of CRM systems are still not integrated with a company’s live-chat platform to capture highly touted data. With the next big trend of social media chat button placements, there is nearly limitless information that can be gathered when communicating with a customer engaged through their social profile.
This brings me to one of the most popular trends when it comes to a company’s chat platform. Yes, you guessed it: social media integrated chat service through a company’s Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn page. A study by Live Admin in 2013 showed a 28 percent increase in sales for companies tapping into their Facebook profiles to get one-on-one time with customers. What better way is there to gain strategic knowledge of your customer than by connecting with them through personal or professional online profiles.
At Global Knowledge, our sales team has already begun tapping into this potential through LinkedIn profiles. The statistical data on how this new communication medium is affecting sales is still unclear, but from what I have heard, the ability for a sales associate to reach a client in a more personable way has an impactful effect on the customer — not only by building business, but also by increasing a customer’s willingness to communicate more freely and comfortably. Combine that tool with chat and you’ll have the ability to talk to people who may be only looking at your site because of a picture they saw posted in their news feed and wanted to ask some quick questions.
Given all the advantages, why wouldn’t you be working toward those kinds of customer-facing trends?