I was on the phone this morning talking to a company that I have been providing friendly (read: free) half geek advice to. I have been helping the company in question with setting up additional contact channels on their site, more specifically live chat.
I am a great believer in the Live Person software offered by Timpani. If you are a BDM or salesperson who dreams of the day that you can make all the deals that you need from the comfort of your sofa - liveperson is something that you should look into. One of the cool things about live person is the ability that it has to deliver key metrics about the performance of the chat channel.
The company that I have been helping are asking me, "What can we expect in terms of a conversion rate from chat button clicks through to actual live chats?". Unfortunately the software that they have chosen (a free offering) does not offer any analytics in this area. The also asked, "How can we improve our chat click to actual chat conversion."
The outcome of our conversation has lead to this post about how important it is to create minimalist, simple and un-daunting forms (surveys, questionares etc...) on your website. Forms that are too long and require loads of text could be having more of an impact on your conversion rate than you might think.
Most chat functions offered by e-commerce or e-business websites begin with the user having to fill out a basic (or not so basic as the case may be) survey. The survey may be simply asking for their email address but could be more detailed, going as far as actually pre-qualifying the potential customer with more leading questions.
In my experience I have found that the quality of your chat click to actual chat conversion can be in a large part related to this 'pre-chat survey' form and more specifically the level of detail it requires a potential customer to give. Why not have no form you ask? I have found that having no pre-chat survey can often spawn a number of unwanted chats which are costly and annoying to say the least - especially if you have a site that generates a significant amount of traffic.
What's required is enough information from the customer to:
a) establish that they are a genuine prospect
b) give you the opportunity to re-contact them if needs be (chat fails etc....)
C) determine if they are a returning customer or a new customer
With these key points in mind I have recently been utilising a pre-chat survey form that has two simple fields for the customer to complete:
1 - Email address
2 - Drop down box containing options for what the nature of the enquiry is limiting the options to three or four at the most.
I have found that this recipe has worked well. For more info on friendly forms check out this post which asks the question, "How friendly are your forms?". Thanks once again to ewhisper
Comments