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Custom Live Chat Developments That Increase Online Sales

June 10, 2021
June 10, 2021

Live chat is a blooming magical tool for online sales.

Seriously. If the new Harry Potter doesn’t somehow involve buying a wand with the help of a live chat agent, we’ll be flabbergasted. No spoilers, we haven’t read it yet.

Live chat provides the ability to connect with visitors that want to convert, but need a little help in making that next step. You can deliver outstanding customer experiences that increase loyalty and qualify leads there and then. And with a sales through service technique you can even cross-sell and upsell more products and services.

Of course, like most digital marketing channels, there isn’t a magic spell for getting live chat set up and optimised perfectly. It takes a little work to be able to help more visitors to convert. And sadly, not everyone has the right know-how to optimise the channel or expertly handle chats.

But we’re here to guide you through and show you how you can start to use live chat better. And how to increase sales on your site with this magical tool.

We’re teaming up with our software provider, LiveChat, to explain how to optimise live chat to enable more sales on your website. This is just one article in a series of posts on sales enablement. Check out previous articles from this series on multi-channel marketing and using targeted live chat to drive more sales.

We use LiveChat to provide our customers with outsourcing services. And although the software has some fantastic features and integrations that help to increase sales, as experts we’ve occasionally needed a little something extra to push the possibilities of the tech even further.

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So it’s quite common for us to build the occasional, additional integration or feature for the benefit of our customers. We’ve got a trick or two up our sleeves – hence why we were the first company to be named a LiveChat Expert.

We’re going to highlight a few of our most useful features to you, with the aim of achieving three things:

  1. We’ll give you a glimpse of just how flexible the LiveChat software and API are (they really are awesome!)
  2. We’ll provide you with some ideas to steal and implement on your own site (to increase sales whilst delivering outstanding customer experience)
  3. We’ll show you how amazing we are, you’ll fall in love with our charm and we’ll get to call you one of our customers (maybe a little forward but let’s just see where this thing goes)

So gather around, shuffle in a little closer and I’ll show you some of our custom developments.

Exit intent proactive

To increase sales and lead generation on our customers’ websites, we want to interact with more of the right people at the right time, with the right message.

And we’re always looking for new ways to interact with more people in this way. We do this through optimisation of our targeting strategies (something we discussed in detail in our last post).

But even though our Account Managers optimise chat on a weekly basis, there can sometimes still be valuable, interested visitors slipping through the net. You know, potential customers that see your product, like it a lot but don’t think they are ready to buy just now. Or they just want to compare you to your competitors.

We’ve all done it before, searched a product on Google and opened half a dozen tabs or so to see how everyone compares. I usually still have trouble coming to a decision as no website stands out…and I just gradually end up closing every tab. Please tell me I’m not the only one.

Well this is where our exit intent proactive comes in. Live chat is a way to stand from the competition, connect with customers and help them to convert. Before they leave.

The Exit Intent Proactive uses a custom piece of JavaScript, that we created, in order to interact with website visitors that are about to exit the website. The long and short of the JavaScript is that it tracks the visitor’s rapid mouse movement up to the top taskbar. The coding sends a custom variable to live chat, where if the visitor’s behaviour meets other criteria set for that proactive, we can offer the visitor a friendly greeting from one of our live chat experts.

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This is a new way for us to make sure that valuable customers are not slipping through the proverbial net of our customer’s current sales enablement process.

This probably sounds a lot like the bounce tools you’ve seen before, but there’s two big differences: we’re not intrusive and ours is a human bounce tool.

We grab the visitor’s attention without blocking their whole screen with a big box that has a tiny “x” in the corner of it. You know the kind of thing I’m on about, marketers love them, you might even be using one yourself.

Instead, chat uses a small amount of screen real estate and the big “X” in the corner remains (just like on the rest of the site) so that those that actually don’t want to chat can easily close it.

And it’s a human bounce tool! That means instead of sending a generic message to everyone, the initial greeting can be personalised to the visitor’s website journey. Then they have a conversation that’s oozing with personality. A conversation that is helpful and encourages them to convert rather than leave.

If you want even more detail on this integration, head to the post we devoted to it. You’ll also be able to learn how we stack instructions in LiveChat for this proactive, so that we only invite the right people. And how this one proactive can increase leads by 22%+.

Knowledge base

I know I’ve pretty much said everything is important…but increasing online sales and making live chat do really great things does require a lot of hard work. And you do need to get a lot of important things right.

So another element that we consider important for increasing sales with live chat? Our customer knowledge bases.

Imagine a world where we offered a live chat outsourcing service but didn’t know anything about our customers’ businesses. We wouldn’t be able to provide the value that we do. We wouldn’t be in business. It would be goodbye, The Chat Shop.

And the same goes if in-house agents know nothing about you, your products and their benefits.

We don’t face this issue ourselves, of course. Instead, our experts complete thorough training on each customer (over 30 paid hours per customer) and are backed by a knowledge base with over 200 data points.

A knowledge base (KB) doesn’t sound like an exciting integration but it is the backbone resource of our services.

Having valuable company/product information and an EIM close to hand makes sure that our experts are able to provide stellar recommendations and advice that encourages more visitors to convert.

The KB also means that they can deliver speedy and accurate responses to create outstanding customer experiences. The kind of experiences that make your brand stand out and encourage customers to return and convert again.

Yes, it doesn’t sound very sexy but we have created some cool integrations so that our experts can access key KB information without having to even glance away from LiveChat.

Quickly jumping to another tab may seem like an easy task but it can slow down service. The quicker visitors are served, the less chance they have of abandoning and the more chance they have of converting.

Jumping between tabs when you are managing 2 or 3 chats at once also increases the probability of dropping the ball in some way. You don’t want that. Dropping the ball means lost customers and poor customer experience.

Here’s what a live chat agent usually sees when they are operating LiveChat:

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This includes some useful information about who is browsing the website and whether they have visited before. But we wanted to add a little more.

We pull information from the company’s unique KB and display it in a side panel next to chats for that company.

This gives agents information quickly without having to search or look elsewhere – which also prevents mistakes. It’s scrollable, so we can add a lot of detail when needed. And it updates in real time – we make a change to the KB and it immediately updates in the side panel, even if a chat is in progress.

The additional side panel is highlighted in the image below (that box to the right of the red line). We consult with our agents as to when to use the side panel and what other information, that was previously in that space, can be removed for a better interface.

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It’s a great way for you to make sure that your agents have all of the information that they need, to hand. So they can compare products for customers, make perfect recommendations and solve conversion problems fast.

And another bonus integration we use is that ‘escalate’ button. For lead generation customers we want to give some leads a high priority rating. This button pops out a form for the agent so that we can email the lead, with the full chat transcript and summary, straight to the sales team.

Want to know a little more about how to build an awesome knowledge base…for customer service or self-service? Check out this Complete Guide To Self-Service Materials from LiveChat that our Knowledge Manager, John McDonnell, contributed to.

Live chat form

Another integration to help you increase conversions and show you just how flexible LiveChat is!

We build important forms right into chat so that agents can click a button and out pops the form so that the customer can enter their details and convert.

Yep, you can now start thinking of the chat window as a Batmobile with lots of cool gadgets whizzing out at the flick of the button. Bat-form might not sound too exciting but gee willikers it certainly increases form completions and sales.

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There are many barriers to getting quality traffic to your website and there are even more when it comes to actually converting visitors into customers. Hence why learning more about your visitors (so you can personalise your offering) and getting their email addresses (so you can remarket and cross-sell via email) are extremely valuable.

But there’s even a barrier to collecting this visitor information. Besides the data collected from your website analytics, the really juicy information can come from form completions.

It’s always difficult to get quality information whilst also getting a high quantity of form completions though. Hence the stat that’s almost an old adage in marketing…form completions can be increased by almost 50% when the number of form fields are reduced from 4 to 3.

Why? It takes trust to complete a form. If I’m not ready to buy from you, why are you so sure I’m willing to provide you with my personal details. Even an email address can be a little too much without a little trust building – I get enough junk mail as it is!

So we use real conversations to build this trust and make sure that visitors are ready to complete your form, before they even see it.

Our live chat experts use empathy when chatting with visitors. Instead of just answering visitor questions they ask counter questions to learn about their needs. They seek to understand buyer needs whilst demonstrating how you can help them.

Then, instead of hoping that they’ll then go away and complete the form we open it right there in chat so that we reduce the barriers to form completion.

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Once the potential customer (or even existing customer) completes the form, the information gets whizzed straight to our customer’s CRM so that their marketing team (or automated process) can start moving them through the funnel.

Each form is custom to our customers’ needs and just pops out as and when needed.

Conclusion

The custom developments that we have created for LiveChat are designed to enhance its existing functionality. By creating a seamless experience for the customer, providing the tools for selling to our live chat experts and making their work more efficient, we’re able to dramatically increase sales on our customers’ websites.

Hopefully this blog post has achieved the 3 things that it set out to do. You’ve had a good glimpse at how flexible the LiveChat software and API are, you have a few ideas to steal for your own website and maybe we’ve shown how amazing and committed we are to sales success.

If we got a big tick for that last one in particular, find out more about our sales enablement programme now on get in touch to take advantage of our live chat outsourcing and live chat consulting services.

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