RSS Ray interviews Velaro Director of Marketing, Chad Ritchie, about how to use live chat for high conversion rates and eCommerce success.

RSS Ray recently sat down with Chad Ritchie, the Director of Marketing at Velaro, one of the leaders in live chat technology. Together they discussed how companies are using live chat to increase conversion rates, decrease shopping cart abandonment, and keep customers happy. Check it out:

What is live chat?

Live chat is a software as a service technology that allows companies to interact with website visitors via chat in real-time. These days consumers expect their online shopping experience to provide the same benefits as shopping in the store. If they have questions, eCommerce merchants need to have ability to chat with them immediately. If web site visitors need help with their shopping carts, online retailers must be able to provide real-time assistance.

How does live chat increase online sales?

Live chat allows sales agents to interact with website visitors at critical conversion points.  By chatting with potential customers, sales agents can answer questions, up-sell and cross-sell products and services right in the chat.  Ultimately keeping the visitor engaged, and focused on why they are visiting your site.  Once website visitors lose focus and start to look for contact information or cannot easily find an answer to a question you risk losing them.

What types of businesses benefit from using live chat?

Any business that spends money driving traffic to its website benefits from live chat.  Velaro’s customers range from large corporations such as LG, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, to small businesses looking to increase their online conversions.

What benefits can businesses expect from live chat solutions?

Three main benefits are: increased online sales, reduced shopping cart abandonment and improved customer satisfaction.

How are live chat options commonly presented to website visitors and how can you determine what is best for your business?

Live chat is made available via a live chat or a click-to-call button.  When a website visitor clicks the button on a website, a chat session is immediately started with a sales agent.  Depending on the volume of web traffic a site receives, website owners can opt to show the live chat button to every web site visitor, or only to web site visitors that meet certain criteria.  For example, some of our clients have hundreds of thousands of website visitors a month.  They only want to show the live chat and click-to-call buttons to visitors that meet certain rules in order to avoid inundating sales staff with too many chats. 

Where on websites is it prudent to offer the visitor a live chat option?

Critical conversion points on your website.  Be that the shopping cart page, the check out page, or a form page where you are trying to get the customer to interact with your website.  The rule of thumb is a web site visitor should never have to leave a critical page try and find answers to questions.  You want to keep them engaged and keep their visit as productive and simple as possible.

How can you offer live chat without scaring the customer or giving them the “big brother is watching” type feeling?

It should be an elective element of the website.  It’s there if people need it, but never pushed aggressively. You can also offer proactive chats to customers, inviting them to chat with your sales agents.  But use discretion.  Idle times are a good rule for offering proactive chat invitations.  You don’t want to bombard customers with a chat invite 10 seconds after being on a web page.  However, if they are idle for a minute, they may be having trouble.  An invitation to chat could keep them from getting frustrated and leaving the site altogether. 

How does offering live help decrease shopping cart abandonment?

It gives the customer an immediate response to their question or problem.  Not only can sales agents immediately respond to questions, they can co-browse with customers, push documents to customers in real-time, and assist the customer in filling out forms.  Or to put it another way, customers get the “in store” experience.  If a customer goes into a retail store at the mall, you wouldn’t expect them to fill out a form and come back tomorrow if they have a question.  But this is exactly what business owners are doing when they force people to use a standard Contact Page on their website.  Your customers want to buy, but they have questions.  Live chat enables companies to answer those questions and keep the customer shopping.

Is live chat offered to all website visitors or just those meeting a certain criteria?

Both.  Some of our small business clients like to interact with every customer who needs assistance.  Conversely, some of our larger clients only want live chat or click-to-call available for web site visitors who are on certain pages, or meet certain criteria.  Our service allows eCommerce merchants to set up simple rules for deciding if and when live chat is offered.

Can I measure the impacts of my live chat efforts and what kinds of things can I learn?

Absolutely.  Velaro is keenly aware that website owners want to be able to track their return on investment.  With our Progression Analytics tool we are the only live help company that offers the multi-step conversion tracking.  This is an industry first.  Progression Analytics allows you to track the path of every website visitor, which paths were successful and which paths were not.  So for example, you can easily determine that shoppers who initiated a live chat on a checkout page were 50% more likely to purchase.  And our analytics tool is not tied to just chats.  You can track multiple sequences of events to see which steps lead to more sales.

Can live help enable me to better track my online marketing campaigns?

Yes.  Real-time monitoring comes standard with live help.  It allows you to see, in real-time, visitors on your website.  It shows where they came from, which keywords they used, geo-location information and marketing campaign information.  For example, as the Director of Marketing, I do not take many chats, I leave that to our experience sales team, but I do have Velaro’s real-time monitoring running all day.  If I run an online advertisement I can see which of my visitors are coming in from that campaign and how many are buying.  I don’t have to wait 24 hours to pull data and sort through reports. Not only that, but I can choose to have our sales team offer proactive invitation to chat to website visitors from certain marketing campaigns and engage a visitor from that campaign.  The information is invaluable.  Instead of just waiting to see reports, I know who the visitor is, which company they work for, which campaign they are coming from and where they are going on my website.  This gives me the complete view into what was once an unknown. 

What is commonly done to a website to enable live chat?

Velaro is a completely hosted software solution.  It only requires one line of HTML to be placed on any page you want live chat.  Our technology uses no applets or plug-ins.  Companies can be up and running in as little as thirty minutes, but we encourage them to take advantage of free training and to customize the chat window to look like their brand.

What does the business need to do to support live chat?

You’ll want sales agents staffing the chats.  That’s it.  And even then, if a company does not have sales agents available to staff chats, we have global staffing firms available to assist web site owners if needed.

What are common mistakes companies make with their live help strategies or tactics?

Not taking the small amount of up front time needed to consider the best ways to make live help successful. Particularly in regard to where and how live help is offered on their websites.  And then not enforcing a proper staffing strategy to make sure people are available to answer questions.

What are the common costs a company can expect when offering live help options?

A lot of live help companies will charge set up fees, training fees and then the cost of the actual service.  As one of the original live help vendors, Velaro’s seen many live chat companies come and go with the idea it’s fine to charge eCommerce merchants for anything and everything.  Velaro uses a simple subscription model.  You pay per agent per month and you can cancel anytime.  That’s it.  No set up fees, training is always included and no support fees.   Our clients stay with us for years because they know they are getting a great return on their investment.

There are many companies offering live chat solutions. How can we separate the good from the bad?

There are only a few companies that have been around as long as we have, it’s pretty easy to tell which ones are good choices.  First look at the customer list.  Any company worth their salt is going to have a long list of recognizable businesses as clients.  Second, look at their press releases.  The live help market is growing even now in the tough economic climate, because businesses need now, more than ever, to increase their online sales.  A good live chat provider will be sending out press releases regularly to keep the media and eCommerce market up to speed.  Lastly, try their technology.  We offer a 10 day free trial and work with clients who want to try live chat.  You should be comfortable with the technology before you are ever asked for payment. 

How long does it take a typical company to see bottom line impacts from live chat efforts?

Three months maximum.  While live chat can be up and running in a day on your website there are some additional things you want to keep in mind.  You’ll want to brand the chat with your corporate look and feel – so website visitors have a seamless transition from your website to a chat.  You also want to train your admins and sales agents.  Again, while you can start chatting right away, we encourage all our clients to take advantage of the free training.  This helps companies learn best practices, and write up pre-made or canned responses to commonly asked questions. 

How does your company, Velaro, bring value to customers? 

We help our clients increase their conversions, and we do this by keeping their customers happy. Companies are paying thousands of dollars getting traffic to their website, but then what?  Some web site visitors buy, some don’t, and at the end of the day you’re left wondering why.  We answer that question and provide a solution to interact with web site visitors at critical conversion points on your website, leaving consumers feeling confident in your product offering.

What type of customers do you serve?

Anyone in eCommerce.  We have automotive clients, medical clients, retail clients, real-estate clients, travel clients, technology clients, and the government.  Anyone selling good or services online benefits from live chat.

Tell us one thing about your company that prospects NEVER ask about but you wish they would.

How does live help, help make their customers happier?

People always come to us looking for ways to increase their sales or reduce their support costs, but seldom realize that both of these benefits are usually a direct result of the fact that live help improves their customer satisfaction rates directly.  It has been shown in study after study that live help is consistently the best tool when compared to telephone and e-mail, and that your website visitors end up leaving your site after haven spoke to someone using a web based chat service like Velaro, with a better impression of the company.

Chad Ritchie is an expert in online conversion management. As Marketing Director for Velaro, Inc. Chad helps organizations increase online sales by educating them on the benefits of reaching customers at critical conversion points.