Posts Tagged live chat

By Don Davis

Knowing how and when to invite a customer to chat and which customers to chat with can turn live chat from a customer service convenience into a sales-generating tool.

Baffled as to what to buy her boyfriend, Annabel accepted an invitation to chat while browsing the web site of Ted Baker, a UK apparel retailer. She soon was typing messages back and forth with Dominique, who introduced herself as “one of Ted’s Personal Shopping Assistants.”

Dominique suggested a belt, pointing out it was 100% leather, or a wallet, which she noted had a coin pocket and space for nine plastic cards, used the live chat connection to send Annabel links to product pages and helped close the sale.

Exchanges like this one, which took place during the holiday season, are convincing a growing number of online retailers that live chat can boost conversion rates.

“Live chat has one of the highest conversion rates of all our channels,” says Brad Wolansky, vice president of e-commerce at Orvis, a multi-channel outdoor gear and apparel retailer. “Particularly when someone doesn’t know what they want, it has the highest conversion rate of anything.” He says customers who chat convert 15% to 20% of the time, roughly triple the rate of e-mail.

One reason for chat’s effectiveness is that a chat agent can use the live connection to a customer to send links to web pages, something a phone agent can’t do. 80% of the information customers are looking for is available on the retailer’s site, says David Lowy, director of best practices consulting at Talisma Corp., a provider of chat technology. In many cases, the customer just needs a little help to find it.

Chat can offer that help, and its use is increasing at a modest pace. In a recent survey of 100 top Internet retailers, 32% offered live chat, up from 29% in the previous year’s study by The E-Tailing Group. Once viewed primarily as a less expensive customer service alternative to the telephone—since a chat agent can handle more than one exchange at a time—increasingly retailers view it as a way to boost sales.

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