Increase Online Conversions Using Live Chat
June 22, 2007 by Pablo Palatnik
About 3 days ago I was signing up for a service online and somewhere in the process became lost and confused. The service seemed pretty good but, I had questions I needed to be answered before I actually entered a credit card number. I remember seeing a live chat option in the home page and decided to go back and initiate a conversation with the websites customer support.
SOLD! If it wasn’t because of the live chat option, most likely I would have closed the website and MAYBE call customer support to ask my question or move on to the next site which offered the same service.
It’s complete coincidence that today I checked my email to find an e-mail from WebProNews about live chat increasing conversions. GetElastic released its own report on live chat. WebProNews reports, “Live chat has the potential to bridge the customer service gap that exists between online shoppers and retailers,” the authors say. “It can be the extra little push a shopper needs to get over any conversion hurdles that may exist such as purchase uncertainty, product questions, or technical and policy assistance.â€
WebProNews goes on to report, “Jane Paolucci, VP of marketing for Coremetrics, shares some more numbers in an interview with WebProNews. She said that 68.5 percent of CompUSA customers chatted while browsing the site and that 32 percent chatted while in the shopping cart during the late stages of the buying process.
“Out of that,” she said, “over 10 percent of those sessions convert to a sale, 10 times the average website conversion rate.” Paolucci says that only 28 percent of ecommerce sites are currently offering live chat.“
