Magic Tips to increasing Online Sales with Live Chat Software

Live chat delivers a rich blend of services to online businesses. Get some magic ideas on increasing online sales through live chat software.

When on demand live chat emerged on the horizon during the early part of this millennium as a logical progression of funky chat room interactions sponsored by the likes of Yahoo and AOL, it was configured by service providers primarily as a customer support tool. Live chat’s customer-facing attributes such as its ability to provide tailored answers to specific questions in real time posed by website visitors and  generate a transcript of the chat interaction so that visitors didn’t have to take copious notes made it the perfect candidate for customer service delivery. Today, live chat, in its new incarnation, delivers a rich blend of service and sales thus making it the must have ammunition for any company doing business on the Web. That said, how can you leverage the true potential of live chat software to sell well as you pursue your efforts to increase revenues and expand into new geographies? Let us find out:

Trigger Proactive Chat
According to a study from Forrester Research, US online retail sales will touch $250 billion by the end of 2014. Train your chat reps to initiate proactive chat as often as possible to grab a slice of this pie. This is a sales-oriented feature of live chat which should be used judiciously.

Proactive chat invitations should not be mistaken for proactive chat intrusions. If your customers indicate to you that they are OK without live chat support as they step into your sales funnel, give them the breathing space they deserve and make it known that your chat reps are only a mouse click away.

Deliver Chat through Email
While some experts are of the opinion that email is a qualitatively superior service channel when compared with live chat, one size does not fit all. Email is an excellent service channel for simple and general inquiries such as the SKU number of a product in which a customer might be interested or a query about the availability of a product. Complex issues are better managed through live chat interaction. Provide a link to your live chat page in all your email communication including your email marketing collateral such as alerts and newsletters so that you can help your customers migrate to live chat with a view to achieving high First Contact Resolution rates (FCR). Live chat will help your chat reps close the sale if the marketing collateral you have mailed your customers targets the sale of a specific product or service while encouraging your customers to use live chat just in case they have questions.

Use Deal Closers
Live chat provides an excellent platform to close a sale with the help of deal closers. Deal closers typically free shipping, surprise gifts, a discount if the total exceeds a specific dollar figure through a coupon code to be used during checkout, etc. Regardless of whether your chat reps are engaged in proactive or reactive chat, these incentives can be announced live while your reps are engaging your customers. Combine these blue light specials with powerful features of live chat such as co-browsing and Push URL to close deals quickly and consistently. Explore the possibility of integrating your customer’s past sales history with your live chat application through your CRM so that your chat reps have instant access to these records. Such integration between your CRM application and your live chat application can make a tremendous difference in your sales figures.

Train Sales Reps to serve as Chat Reps
Pick a few sales reps within your sales force and provide them with chat operator training. Let them loose and notice the difference they will make to your corporate bottom line. Trained sales reps are excellent at sales strategies such as upselling and cross selling, managing dropout points and sales trigger points combined with deep rooted product knowledge. These are key skills for sales success. Use the chat transcripts your sales reps will generate to train your chat reps in the basics of chat centric sales.

Key Takeaways
In their book, Rethinking the Sales Cycle, John Holland and Tim Young identify a “sense of risk” as the most prominent emotion present during the ultimate stages of the buying cycle. Unfortunately, it is a major challenge to assist customers through this stage when all they tend to view is a monotonous computer screen. Given this set of circumstances, the presence of a chat rep who is standing by to support the sales process in every way possible can be quite reassuring.

No matter how knowledgeable your customers are about your products and services, a certain level of hand holding, which live chat facilitates seamlessly, can go a long way in closing the sale. Encourage your chat reps to remain in close proximity while your customers are making a purchase and you will notice how this strategy will further stimulate the sales funnel, reduce shopping cart abandonment, and impact your bottom line positively.