Live Chat Hard at Work
Our preferred Live Chat application, LivePerson, released a case study today stating that one of their online retailer clients experienced a 46% increase in sales over the holiday season due to live chat. http://solutions.liveperson.com/docs/casestudies/smb/SMB_Canvas_CS0209.pdf
We have experienced similar results. One of our tourism vacation clients, www.BlackHillsVacations.com, had 234 completed transactions in the second half of last year due to live chat, accounting for significant revenue – in fact a 112% return on investment on the cost of live chat. They were able to convert lookers into bookers by delivering customer service and sales assistance in the most convenient location for the web visitor.
We’re implementing live chat for many of our clients. And I can say that when I’m browsing a web site and have questions, live chat is the first point of contact that I utilize. It allows you to connect with experts for advice or assistance in real time and it continuously impresses me how responsive customer service agents are to live chat.
From a business standpoint, your customer service agents can only talk to one person at a time on the phone whereas they can chat with multiple people simultaneously via live chat and still deliver outstanding service. Using live chat, an agent can see the exact web page that the web visitor clicked from to enable live chat, where the visitor is located geographically and a web page history to alert the call center agent of up sell opportunities. And that’s just a few of the benefits.
They’re browsing their site; they’re often ready to buy. Are you there to close the sale?
Conveniently chatting,
Robin
April 6th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
This sounds like a great tool for businesses with good traffic on their website. As you mentioned, it increases the always important convenience of making a purchase and helps employees work more efficiently. In addition to these benefits, there’s also the value of the comfort level that many people have with chatting. Many people are more comfortable communicating through the written word, and chat is a relatively simple web tool for this; it’s time to take advantage of it.