TIM BARRIE: Tim Barrie from Holistic here. In this video, I’m going to talk about live
chat as a function on a client’s website and whether it’s worth implementing it,
and if you do, to what extent does it help and how can you use live chat in a smarter
way to make it work even better?
So, first thing to say is if you just generally do a little bit of research out there, if
you’ll search on something like this, you’ll find lots of information that will give you
a sense of the fact that live chat does increase sales and it will give you suggestions on, well,
how to use live chat to get a better conversion rate and in our experience, it makes a massive
difference. If anything from experience this is underrated, here’s a good example of
the kind of average conversion rate somebody can get.
In our experience, you can significantly increase over this conversion rate when you use live
chat in the right way. So what I really want to focus on is how do you get this kind
of result and even better result. What’s the right way to do that?
And I think the best way I can do that is to show some examples. First, I’m going
to do is I’m going to go to this site and I’m going to refresh the page and what we’re
going to do is we’re just going to take a look at the live chat function as it pops
out.
You can see here how we’ve got a picture of a individual, a name of a person, and
a specific message. This one’s not very good. It’s pretty generic and what you need
to understand with live chat is akin to when somebody walks in a retails store of some
kind, and a sales assistant comes up to them and says: “Need any help?,” “can
I help you?,” and while having sales people in the store will definitely increase sales
than having no sales people there, and having them greet people and initiate a conversation
does work, that kind of message is probably the least effective way of engaging with clients.
But this, let’s start with the basic. So, notice on this one how its open, it pops up,
it has got a person, a name, specific message, and a place to type your question.
Now, if I compare this to a live chat that’s implemented on another site, you’ll see,
well, it’s offline. That’s the first thing and down here. If you’ve got live chat and
you don’t man it all the time, you’re in a race but you’re not even starting the
race. That’s problem number one. When we’ve seen people implement live chat, we see this
a lot where they just won’t consistently make sure that it’s available all the time.
Another example here is the opposite case to that where it’s available but it’s
just a little message saying online: “Let’s chat online.” So this is not quite akin
to a sales person going up for somebody. It’s a salesperson standing at the back of the
store, waiting for some client to come up to them and initiate the conversation, and
certainly, that’s part of not having live chat, and it’s better than not having salespeople.
But of course, you can imagine if you’ve got a good salesperson that is actually approaching
the customers, your conversion rate is going to be much higher and it’s close, I mean,
it’s kind of cryptic, and compare that to the previous one where it was open, there’s
a picture of an individual,. Pictures of individual , we know, increase conversion rates, because
people get sense of somebody’s specific being there as against this more generic message.
All in all, this one. Let’s just refresh the page so it comes back up. This one is
better than what we’ve seen before. But there’s an even better way and more efficient
way of doing this. Now, what I’m going to do is I’m going to this page, I’m going
to go to in a new browser, so we can see what happens the first time I visit this page. So I’m
just going to put it into a browser and we’re just going to go there and see what happens. Now
there’s a delay. So, it gives somebody a chance to observe it.
Now, what you’ve got is a very specific message prompting somebody associated with.
If you’re looking at this, it’s some kind of message that’s specific to what
they’re looking at, and that’s it!
It’s again, a picture of an individual, different person in this case, different message.
It doesn’t matter if this person is real or not. They’re not going to know the difference but
it gives the perception that there’s somebody specific.
This is much more akin to a sales person coming up to somebody tat’s coming in the store,
they’ve not pounced on them, immediately they walk in the door, there’s a delay,
and then when they start looking at something specific, they then coming up with a message
that is specific to something that they’re looking at. It’s up, it’s open, and you
can have a chance to click on it here. You can get rid of it very easily. You can click
on the X, that’s no problem.
This is what makes all the difference. If you’re going to have live chat for goodness
sake, make sure that it’s running, don’t be offline, if you’re not in the position
to have live chat on your site, most of the time, don’t implement it. If you do have
live chat, another critical issue is, make sure that you’re able to respond very very quickly.
I’ve used live chat and I’ve seen something like this,. I’ve responded. I;ve asked a question and nobody
came back to me. My patience level was about 20 seconds when I didn’t get a response
for 20 seconds, I actually felt negatively towards the website that had the live chat.
From my point of view as a consumer, why have the live chat gave me message, “Oh great!
I’ve got a question. I’m desperately trying to answer a question. Does this product to
X? Does this service provide Y?
Here’s my chance to get a simple answer to that question, I clicked on it, typed a
question and there’s no response. That is annoying. So, if you have live chat, and
you don’t man it, you’re wasting your time. If have live chat and you don’t respond
and you’re not in a position to respond instantly, you actually have an opportunity
to increase your conversion rate and create a negative experience for the client.
Think of live chat as salespeople. This is a sales process, don’t outsource it to
marketing company. It is a sales process. It’s all about engaging with the client.
It’s very akin to a retail store of some kind and having sales people on the sales
floor. And it’s not just have you got salespeople somewhere in the store, and they’re standing
around not doing much.
How good are they? Are they actually effective approaching customers and saying something relevant to
what they’re doing and engaging that client in a conversation. Those are the things to
think about when you’re considering implementing live chat.