Click-to-call and live chat Web services are plethora these days. Some of these products are mature market leaders like Liveperson with a myriad of features and a dashboard to compete with the space shuttle. If I were the owner of a small online business I would probably feel quite lost when trying to select the best tool to add live contact capabilities to my Website.
This first post of the Peerant blog will attempt to clarify some of the criterions to keep in mind to avoid setting a live contact service that will turn out to be a disappointment or even a headache for your business. Here are some typical mistakes to avoid…
1) Expect your customers to communicate with you using <insert name of popular IM or VoIP client software here>
If your business deals mostly with US customers, using Skype as your main contact method is probably not a good idea since less than 5% of the US online population uses Skype. You need to understand what communication tools your Website visitors are using and this is dependent on many factor: where are your visitors coming from (for instance Skype usage is widespread in the UK), what is their degree of technical proficiency, etc. Reusing a tool already installed on your users’ desktop is good practice since it saves them the hassle of downloading and setting up new software. However, the most common tool that everyone uses remains the Web browser.
2) Everyone uses Internet Explorer or Firefox these days
Click-to-call vendors have adopted the Microsoft ActiveX technology as a convenient way to package their VoIP soft-phone as a small component (most often less than 1 MB in size) that will be installed on the fly within your Internet Explorer when you access pages that offer a live call option. This works fine for many customers, but make sure that your click-to-call solution also caters for those Firefox or Safari users out there (they can be quite vocal if their beloved browser is not supported and they can’t talk to you right now because of that). The easiest option is to offer a browser-based text chat fallback or a telephone callback if PC-to-PC free calling via an ActiveX is not possible.
3) Forget that those international calls can be expensive
Or worse, they might be unsupported by your click-to-call provider! If you happen to sell internationally, double check that your provider offers international and not only US domestic callback. Glance through their rates and verify the price per call minute for the countries where you expect your visitors to be coming from. Some providers require two calls to be placed to put you in touch with a customer, this means that you’ll pay twice the cost of the conversation per minute! Also beware of cheap VoIP solutions that compromise call quality: how much are your customers worth? Enough to understand their questions clearly and avoid having them repeat themselves ten times?
4) Think that everyone has got a microphone and headset handy? Think again!
PC-to-PC calls are free and with the appropriate VoIP soft-phone technology they sound great too. However, many people work on laptops or PCs that have poor microphones and speakers that are mostly good at generating feedback noise and echo. In my experience only a fraction of the online population has a good quality headset with microphone handy for talking to your representatives on a PC-to-PC call. Once again, the secret is to offer options to your customers: let them choose their preferred contact method.
5) Chatting is better than calling? Not always
Would you rather spell out a lengthy alphanumerical serial number on the phone or in a text chat session? Depending on the type of question your customer got, chat might be better suited than voice. Technical users and non-English speakers often prefer chat above and beyond a call (I certainly do). But this does not mean that your novice PC user customers won’t love scheduling a phone callback instead of having to struggle with a chat session. Besides, for selling a product nothing replaces the human touch, and a trained sales person will be a lot more effective talking rather than chatting with your customers. Always aim to establish the friendliest possible conversation with your customers.
6) Installing a live contact solution in my Website is a piece of cake!
That’s certainly true if you are moderately comfortable editing some HTML, and can remember the username and password to access your Web server (or the phone number of your Webmaster to ask him to do the editing for you). The real stumbling block is elsewhere however: where in the elegant layout of your site will you insert that new live contact button? Oh, and do you like the default button style supplied by your click-to-call or click-to-chat provider? A smooth integration, visually speaking, is not that easy to achieve and more often than not requires designing your own live contact button and modifying your Website layout.
7) Not taking all your costs into account
Managers in large contact centers know a powerful basic truth: the main cost of running a support organization is the payroll. You do not want to sprinkle live contact links all over your Web site and be bombarded with calls from all over the world at the most ridiculous times of the day or night. Think how your Website visitors will use your Website and at what point they are most likely to need live support. This could be during the checkout process of their cart for example. Only insert live contact buttons where they make sense and won’t result in low-value call traffic to your representatives.
8) Ignoring that solutions like Peerant’s are also about measuring effectiveness
Let’s suppose you place your company phone number on your Website. How many calls you got last week came from Website visitors? How can you measure the effectiveness of your customer communication strategy without the proper tracking in place? Check your live contact real time statistics and historical reports to understand patterns and optimize your customer service strategy.
9) Why pay for a commercial solution when free open source tools exist?
This is a valid question for text chat solutions, if you are willing to restrict your customers from having the convenience to speak with your representatives. To deploy an open source live chat tool you’ll need to be knowledgeable in a variety of technologies like PHP, MySQL, Linux, etc. Your time has some value too, and I’m still to install an open source package that doesn’t require some “tweaking”, a few visits to Google and different forums as well as some moments of deep perplexity. However, my main issue with many of these tools is that their creators assume a degree of technical wizardry that your Website visitors are unlikely to have. Having said that, if you need to chat live with technically inclined users and you are keen on toying with this technology, by all means go ahead, though I would recommend considering our free trial or Personal plan.
10) I don’t need any live contact solution and neither do my customers
Well, since you have gotten so far reading this blog post I guess you are at the very least interested about what this type of tools can do for you? Numerous studies have demonstrated that you can multiply your lead conversion rate by a factor 3x if you add live contact capabilities to your Website. Haven’t you ever surfed to a Website, found a nifty product you were interested in buying but didn’t fancy spending hours waiting on a 1-800 number to get a simple answer, then moved on to some other tasks and never revisited the subject? Imagine how many of YOUR customers have done the same on your site - and how many sales you have lost by not offering them the convenience of having their questions answered live, on the spot.
At Peerant we are focused on offering a live contact solution for your Website that will enable friendly and efficient conversations with your customers. We are working hard to understand your business and what your Website visitors want when contacting you online. Peerant is neither a click-to-call provider nor a live chat vendor: it’s your one-stop-shop Web communication partner.
Feel free to contact us to discuss your live contact challenge or just sign-up for a free trial. Oh, and keep visiting this blog or subscribe to the RSS feed. We’ll be adding interesting new posts at least every week.
