If you're wondering where to offer sales chat on your website, you are asking the wrong question.
The Challenge: too much of a good thing can hopelessly flood your sales chat queue
Chat is everywhere. Research shows that 61% of companies are adopting chat primarily for increasing sales and conversions. At the same time, customers themselves are happily adopting -- and actively using -- chat but in a much wider variety of ways than marketers had planned: 32% seek answers to questions, 29% look for details, 27% want to solve a problem, 27% use chat for general customer service, and 23% pay bills by bot.
As a result, lost in the mix are those web visitors representing actual sales opportunities who need to connect with live sales agents fast. This gives rise to two new and unexpected problems:
- Live chat sales agents trying to manage an avalanche of chat conversations, who now become frustrated by non-sales chats in their queue
- Frustrated web visitors who don’t get the right type of assistance for their need or have to wait too long to get it
In the end, web visitors get an overall poor customer experience, websites get lower sales conversion rates, and the brand weakens
How most websites today manage it: the ‘page-based’ strategy
The most common way for companies to cope with the avalanche of live chat requests is to decide where to place (or hide) chat for sales, so they can slow -- or even stop altogether -- the flow of requests. This method is referred to as the ‘page-based’ strategy.
In the page-based strategy, marketers simply pick specific web pages on the site where chat is going to be offered, like a pricing page, and ‘hide’ chat on all other pages.
A more drastic approach is to give up on chat altogether and just take chat down, at least until the surge in traffic drops.
Of course placing it only on a few pages does cut costs and reduces non-sales interactions with live sales agents. But obviously, it also keeps the company from meeting its sales revenue potential.
How sales and marketing leaders manage it: the ‘visitor-based’ strategy
A well-known global ecommerce provider of Cyber-security consumer software, anticipated this very same problem: more requests to chat with live sales agents than agents available to chat.
This ecommerce leader, averaging over 670,000 unique monthly visitors with an average order value of $80, engaged a live sales agent outsourcing company to manage its live chat for sales with live chat for sales agent coverage 18/7.
At first, in order to maximize chat conversions and revenue, consultants deployed chat widely across the website using a page-based strategy, and focusing on four key web pages: product pages, shopping cart, renewal pages, and landing pages.
By applying this page-based strategy, they were able to reduce the number of unproductive chats and significantly improve on the ecommerce live chat sales conversion rate, delivering optimized results for this client.
But doing this was not good enough for them. They rightfully assumed this page-based strategy could be missing visitors with a high-propensity to buy.
To resolve this, they brought in Lift AI to help them implement a visitor-based strategy to placing chat on the website.
Lift AI is an Artificial Intelligence application that...
- Scores each and every website visitor (including anonymous ones), then...
- Predicts in real time their conversion potential (High, Medium, Low), regardless of which page they are on the website, then...
- Triggers the best chat experience for each website visitor (live agents, bot-assisted or bot-only)
The opportunity missed that Lift AI identified was remarkable. Lift AI revealed that the page-based strategy had been surfacing chat to only 49% of visitors who scored as High potential. In other words, they were NOT presenting chat to 51% of the best sales opportunities available to the company. Simply, they were missing high-value visitors because they were not visiting the web pages that had been selected under the ‘page-based’ strategy.
Optimized results: over $58K/month in incremental revenue found
Proactively engaging twice the number of high-intent visitors translated into over $58,000 per month in incremental revenue from the very same website traffic and the same number of live chat sales agents available.
Through Lift AI’s machine-learning and ability to process more data faster than humans ever could, our client was able to recognize all the signals that identify potential buyers - even if they come from hundreds of one-off behaviors.
The most important question is no longer “where on the website should I place chat” but “which web visitors should I be targeting with chat, regardless of where they are on the website”.
By deploying Lift AI, marketers can set the targeting based on individual visitors’ conversion potential score (High, Medium, Low) and only surface live chat for sales to those visitors with High intent, regardless of where they are on the site. Customers, prospects and sales agents can now all get what they need.
ABOUT LIFT AI
Lift AI is an an artificial Intelligence application that predicts the conversion potential of each website visitor and then, in real time, triggers the best experience in your chat application.
With the help of machine learning and AI, Lift AI leverages its vast experience with millions of website visitors profiled and scored, website visitors influenced and live sales engagements, to maximize revenue and profitability, and skyrockets salesforce profitability.
Today, Lift AI’s expertise is open to all digital marketers who need to improve the performance of their chat solutions and generate significant incremental revenue from the traffic already on their website.
Request a demo at: https://www.lift-ai.com/
