Live chat is becoming more accepted as an integral part of the sales process regardless of what the company sells. The public embraces the concept more every day and many companies have begun to migrate away from the robotic chatbots and replaced it with live chat. Now, the question becomes: what if you decide to make your live chat proactive in a sales force kind of way? What will it do to your conversions and your ROI?
- If you are deciding to turn your chatbots into proactive live chat then your people need to be properly trained in the skills of a sales rep. They will be beyond customer service, which has become much maligned of late, and will be morphing into proactive sales people just like your outside sales staff or your in store sales staff. It will be the future of your customer service. If you can’t teach them what they need to know, then find people who can or otherwise don’t bother.
- Too many small businesses suffer from the delusion that you just can’t be that proactive with ecommerce. This deluded thinking is starting to change among the most successful companies. Even from the beginning you can gather initial data from which the eventual chat will go forward. One of the reasons customers are finding live chat preferable to sitting on the phone and waiting is that it allows them to do one of their most cherished things – multitask. This can be a challenge as your chatters must keep drawing them in and leading them to the conversion.
- Another advantage over traditional customer service is that the live chat operators can generally handle more than one chat call at a time which makes things far more efficient and leads to more sales. Training must include the skills of the veteran sales rep as well as, perhaps, having some scripted responses available if the operator believes those will be just as helpful in getting the customer to the checkout. Your planning and execution must be precise and well thought out.
- It is all about solving the customer’s problem and moving them forward. Even for those companies that have integrated live chat along with their live customer service operators, they have found that many basic and simple questions can be handed off to their live chat thus, again, increasing efficiency. The live chat component also gives ecommerce companies that ability to not only sell but to cross sell and up sell. It can bring an entirely new level to your online sales, increase workforce efficiency, increase your overall conversions and, of course, boost your ROI.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer