The Chatonomics Blog

It’s been a week since London’s legendary Roundhouse theatre threw open its doors to host LivePerson’s annual Aspire conference here in the UK. Back in the sixties and seventies you could catch the likes of Jimi Hendrix and The Who at the Roundhouse and it proved to be an inspiring venue for an event that always tries to offer something a bit special to the marketers and digital professionals who make time in their schedules to attend.

Aspire events are all about connection. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that providing businesses with a means to “meaningfully” connect with their online customers is at the heart of the LivePerson offering. But the conference also gave attendees a chance to connect with and learn from each other.

And that’s one of the reasons I get excited about Aspire. Each year we see increasing numbers of people attending the conference and they all have at least one thing in common. Put simply, they all want to improve the performance of their websites and mobile apps. Put these people in a room together and over the course of the day you can hear the creative juices begin to flow as they share ideas and experiences.

Ideas flowed from the stage as well. Over the course of the day we heard not only from key members the LivePerson global team but also from businesses such as Snapfish, Royal Bank of Scotland, O2, and BskyB. All had their own story to tell about the importance of connecting with customers through live engagement. Continue reading

What do you know about your customers?

Well, thanks to the vast armoury of available tracking and analysis tools you probably know a lot. Certainly you’ll have the all the key metrics – bounce, conversion, dwell time, etc – at your finger-tips, and thanks to cookies you’ll be able to drill down to individual visitors in terms of where they go on the site, how often they return and their transactional records. Thus, you can personalise their experience and as you gather more information that personalisation becomes more accurate.

But do you know what your customers think? That’s a trickier one. Yes, you know the percentage of bounces for the home page and abandoned shopping carts, but that’s not the same as knowing why your customers are behaving in a certain way. And if you don’t know that, how can you make improvements?

Smart businesses look beyond the raw statistics and listen to what the customer is actually saying. Live engagement tools, such as chat provide an excellent means to gather real insights into the consumer’s experience of the brand. Continue reading

It’s one of the great frustrations of modern life. You pick up the phone, dial a contact number and rightly expect to speak to a helpful agent who will address any query quickly and efficiently. Instead – if the company we’re ringing is of any size – you’re probably faced with a string of menu options that can take several minutes to work through.

Now in theory, the menu system is not a bad a thing. Rather than frustrating us, they’re actually there to help. Let’s take an energy company as an example. As a consumer you could be calling to query a bill, terminate an account, open an account, pay a bill, switch to a different tariff, report a fault, move to a different payment system and a host of other things. The menu system is there to help you get through to exactly the right person and ultimately save time.

That’s the theory. In practice it seems very different. If you’re lucky, you’ll listen to one list of menu options, pick the appropriate number and get straight through. But in many cases, one list leads to another, and so on through a hierarchy. Research carried out by website PleasePress1 found that call centre menus in the UK ranged from 1 level and 2 options through to 10 levels with 101 options, with simple systems being depressingly rare.

To make matters worse, the query may not exactly fit any of the options, so you take a chance on something that seems almost right and end up speaking to the wrong person. And when you arrive at your telephonic destination there may well be a queue where you spend the next five minutes listening to a carefully chosen piece of music. Continue reading

For many businesses, the primary objective of a live engagement strategy is an increase in conversion rates. It’s a clear correlation. When an agent talks to a customer – offering advice or assistance – there is a greater likelihood of a sale taking place. Thus the conversion rate rises and the benefit goes straight to the bottom line.

But an increase in the number of transactions is not the only benefit delivered by live engagement. Targeted engagement with customers can also have a significant impact on the average value of individual conversions. For instance, when airline and holiday company Virgin Atlantic adopted proactively targeted live chat as a means to answer customer queries efficiently and boost ticket sales, conversion rates for “chat-assisted” customers rose to 3.5 times the level of those who self served. That in itself was an important metric, but the airline also noted a 15% rise in average order values among the chat-assisted group.

As in an offline store, an agent talking directly to a customer can influence the final purchase choices, and there are clear opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling. Left to his or her own devices, a customer may well purchase a single item. With an agent on hand to provide advice, there is a greater likelihood of the customer adding complementary items – a case to go with a camera, software to go with a computer. Equally, the customer may opt to go up a price point on the advice of the agent. Continue reading

Live chat is an increasingly common feature on consumer-facing websites and in its most basic “reactive” format it provides a simple and relatively effective means to answer customer queries.

But – and this is quite a big but – “reactive” chat has its limitations and once businesses have experienced the benefits of communicating in real time with their customers via an online chat solution, many move on to a “proactive” system.

So what do we mean by that? Well, a simple chat system might have an invite on some or all of a website’s pages, inviting customers to click to chat to an agent should they require assistance. This already marks a significant improvement from the traditional telephone “helpline”, simply because the customer can click through and speak to an operative immediately without a) leaving the site or b) having to negotiate an annoying hierarchy of menus. It’s also more cost-effective for the merchant as live chat agents can deal with several customer queries simultaneously.

This is a reactive system, in that the customer clicks and the agent reacts. The alternative – and it’s often a much more effective alternative – a proactive engagement system. Customers are tracked, their behaviour analysed and chat invites are served to those who fulfil certain criteria. For instance, you might make an offer of assistance to customers whose behaviour suggests confusion or frustration. Or you might serve invites to selected “high value” customers. Continue reading

Nothing gets you into a holiday mood more effectively than blue skies, long evenings and rising temperatures. It’s been a long winter here in the UK so it’s probably safe to say that those of you who operate travel or travel-related websites are watching traffic levels rise as the summer draws nearer.

But travel is a complex product and for the consumer the sense of anticipation and excitement that invariably accompanies a trawl through online travel agents, accommodation bookers and airlines is always spiced with a certain amount of natural caution.

For the truth is, a one or two week holiday in the summer months bites a sizeable chunk out of the annual budget – particularly for those who are taking a family – and consumers are unlikely to take pictures of sun-drenched beaches, luxury hotels and stunning vistas at face value. Inevitably there will be questions. How close is the hotel to the beach? Is the hotel child-friendly? Does the holiday cottage welcome pets and if so is there a surcharge?

Now consumers with questions to ask have a number of options. A prospective traveller wishing to find out more about a particular hotel might well choose to take the independent research route, perhaps by reading reviews on Trip Advisor or a similar site. Now if the hotel has a great reputation that’s potentially very good news for the online booker as lots of positive recommendations should incline the customer towards completing a transaction. Except of course, the prospect has left the original travel site and may well not return. Continue reading

Social media continues to make the news and this week it was the $1.1bn acquisition of Tumblr by Yahoo that dominated the headlines, not only on the business pages but also on radio and television.

Tumblr, one of the young pretenders in the social media space, currently hosts around 50 million blogs and its popularity is on the rise. As the hefty price tag indicates, Yahoo clearly believes that its new acquisition has huge potential for further growth in terms of both users and revenues.

The deal also reminds us that the face of social media is forever changing. As things stand, the space is dominated by Facebook and Twitter but new players are coming on stream all the time, each of them offering a variation on the theme. Some – such as Tumblr and the online pinboard Pinterest – have achieved real traction with consumers.

But the wider point is really that all of these sites are tapping into the desire of internet users to meet, converse and share. Social media is now the place where many internet users spend the bulk of their online time and everyone – including Yahoo – needs a social media strategy. Continue reading

At its heart, live engagement is a simple concept. In a medium that has traditionally been defined as ‘self-service’, tools such as chat provide merchants with a means to talk directly to customers at points on their journey when assistance is most required. By and large customers enjoy the self-service experience of online shopping, but there will always be times when the product information on the site is not sufficient. Those are the times when customers bail out and go elsewhere. Yes they could ring the helpline, but that’s a hassle. Yes, they could send an e-mail but that’s an act of faith as no one knows when a reply will be forthcoming.

So at one level, live engagement through chat, tailored content, multi-media walkthroughs and telephone call back – is simply a way of providing the customer with additional help and information in real time.

But on another level it’s an opportunity for online companies to establish meaningful relationships and dialogue with their customers. So what does that mean in practice?

1. Make it bespoke

No website can answer every single question that comes into a customer’s mind. No matter how much product information you have on offer there will always be customers who have additional questions. Continue reading

This is the age of more for less. Or to put it another way, in most business sectors customers expect the quality of service and products to get better and better over time. What they don’t expect, however, is that the improvement will be funded by a sharp increase in costs.

So here’s the conundrum. Even at a time of moderate inflation most companies see their costs rising but don’t necessarily want to pass the increase onto customers. So how do you improve service without undermining your own competitiveness?

And for consumer-facing businesses it’s a dilemma that becomes ever-more acute as e-commerce volumes rise. In the world of bricks and mortar, loyalty is partly based on the strength of a particular brand and relationships built up over time between customers and the merchant. But it’s also based to some extent on proximity. If you live in a town where you have a Boots, Marks and Spencer or John Lewis, that’s where you shop.

On the web, that doesn’t apply. Customers can buy goods from any competitor, regardless of location. Repeat business depends on the whole value proposition, from price, through fulfilment to after-sales service.

Which brings us back to that opening question. How do you offer great service while remaining competitive? Continue reading

Here’s a conundrum. Every year we see both increases in the volume and value of online sales, a trend that shows no sign of slowing. Now that’s great news for online retailers but there is at least one fly in the ointment. As overall sales have risen, average conversion rates have been falling.

According to a report by RedEye and eConsultancy, average conversion rates stood at about 3.8% in 2012 falling from a peak of more than 8.0% over a period when the value of e-commerce sales had risen from £30.2bn to £60.bn.

So how can this be?

Well arguably the decline in conversion rates – which vary significantly from sector to sector and from retailer to retailer – is a symptom of the success of e-commerce. Five or six years ago, when volumes and revenues were lower than they are today, consumers saw the internet as a purchasing channel for specific classes of goods. So they would decide on a product, go to a trusted site and make a purchase.

Today the web – traditional and mobile – has emerged as a primary shopping channel rather than simply a convenient way to purchase goods. Customers enjoy the experience of internet shopping and their journey can take them from search engines, price comparison sites and social media. Continue reading