Web : Breaking the Chat Ice

Who loves live chat and how marketers can reach them

Live chat has some skeletons in its closet. Historically, live chat was seen primarily as a way to avoid talking to customers. Contact centers employed chat as a call avoidance technology because it enables agents to assist multiple customers at once, so driving a consumer into a live chat is instantly cheaper than picking up the phone. However, the underlying philosophy that drove live chat's adoption is today's albatross around its neck. The real value in live chat comes not in cost cutting, but from its ability to cause more customer interactions.

To better understand the impact and value of live chat to both consumers and e-tailers, Bold Software and the e-tailing group recently surveyed more than 1,000 regular Internet shoppers in the third annual study, "The Effectiveness of Live Chat Technology." We wanted to uncover consumers' perceptions of and experiences with live chat—and its influence on their opinions of retailers and desire to purchase.

The most intriguing finding was that one in five shoppers selected live chat as their preferred method of communication with a retailer. Because 20 percent of the survey population picked live chat, we were able to effectively profile this consumer, this "live chat fan."

The research revealed that the live chat fan is aged 31 to 50, has considerably higher household income than the average shopper (more than $50,000 a year), is more likely to be college-educated, shops daily or weekly, and spends more money online per year than other groups of shoppers. In addition, live chat fans:

• have a significantly higher positive attitude about the technology's presence on a website;
• are more likely to trust websites that have live chat; and
• are more likely to buy just because of its presence.

Breaking the Ice
Clearly, the live chat proponent is an attractive prospect for online retailers. So, how can your business reach them? The most obvious answer is simply to make sure you have live chat available on your website. If you deploy it, they will click.

However, you can also be more proactive with live chat. In "proactive chat," the site automatically issues invitation images, forms or other messages to target and engage website visitors with an offer to chat at the precise time they are interested in your business. The live chat fan is more receptive to being invited to chat. While 62 percent of the entire shopping population is welcoming of the practice, 72 percent of live chat fans are.

Proactive chat, done well, can prove highly valuable. However, it requires careful preparation and ongoing management in order to ensure success. While the research shows that a majority of shoppers are welcoming, a significant percent of those surveyed (20 percent) indicated that they had actually left websites because of poor invitation practices.

Here are two critical considerations to take into account:

1. Don't Force It. Some proactive chats force the visitor to acknowledge the invitation before they can regain control over the Web page. The visitor must accept the invite or decline it. But, during that time, they can't do anything else. This was cited as the No. 1 reason among those who had left a site due to proactive chat invitations.

2. Timing Is Critical. A variety of time-related factors can have tremendous impact on your invitation acceptance rate. Timing, in our experience, is in fact the most powerful variable when optimizing proactive chat. There are many factors involved, including:

• The total page views of the visitor;
• The total time on site of the visitor; and
• The total time on the current invite/target page.

One way to set the last variable mentioned is to use website analytics data. At first, try setting the invite time just below the average time-on-page metric for the target. After a predetermined "sufficient" number of invites have been accepted, try setting the time beyond the average time on page and see what impact it has on conversions. One school of thought is that those who stay beyond the average time might be more valuable.

If your firm approaches live chat strictly as part of a cost-reduction strategy aimed at driving customers into a less expensive contact channel, you could be leaving money on the table. You could also be ignoring a very attractive segment of the Internet shopping population that, above all else, wants to chat with you.

Ross Haskell is vice president of marketing at Wichita, Kan.-based online communication software provider Bold Software. He can be reached at ross@boldsoftware.com.

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