Comments on: Customer Service: Tips for Proactive Chat

By: Business Referral Group

Business Referral Group — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 04:58:28 +0000

I’ve been thinking of implementing chat on some of my sites for some time. I’ve got to say the information in this post is invaluable, so thanks for a great post!

Chris

By: What is Ecommerce? | Ecommerce

What is Ecommerce? | Ecommerce — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:09:58 +0000

[...] Customer Service: Tips for Proactive Chat | Get Elastic [...]

By: How To Implement a Proactive Customer Support Strategy

How To Implement a Proactive Customer Support Strategy — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:35:09 +0000

[...] link to do so. That’s very smart, proactive customer service. Incidentally, it’s also a smart sales tactic. Sales is a critical part of customer support’s role.Aside from automated emails to [...]

By: Top 10 Things Customers Expect from Your Online Store « Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 19:54:16 +0000

[...] clear call-to-chat appears on your site, and the customer initiates the conversation, or it can be proactive, where the system triggers a chat invitation based on user [...]

By: Linda Bustos

Linda Bustos — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 02:45:40 +0000

For B2B rules, you’d need to adjust it to the particulars of your business. In general you can shape your rules by time on site, page views, viewing certain pages/products, referral source, keyword source, IP address (if you can identify key, profitable clients via IP address), repeat visits, authentication (log in) etc.

By: Ross Haskell

Ross Haskell — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 20:43:53 +0000

Glad everyone is enjoying the post! Greg, you’re quite right that agent empowerment is critical to success; it can make the difference between customer delight or disappointment. Jody – as to your question about proactive in a customer support environment, here are a few tips listed in order of complexity (the first is simple, the last advanced):

- Issue invitations only on support related pages. If your pages are customized based on support issues, make sure to customize the message in the invite. ["Can I help with your shipping question today?]
- Customize invitation messaging using a combination of time on page metrics and your website analytics. You may choose to issue an “early” invitation based on visitor average time on page that is more generic ["I'm a live agent and if you need assistance, I can help"]. A “late” invitation might say something different ["Are you having trouble with......?"]
- Pass customer information into the rules engine based on successful authentication. If you have a customer login area, you can pass visitor data to the proactive rules engine. This allows you customize messaging for certain customer groups, etc…

If you have further questions, feel free to contact me: ross at boldsoft.com

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 20:31:11 +0000

Great article and I have been searching around for livechat programs. I was going to sign up for BoldChat but it will only work if you are running Internet Explorer on the computer. Our whole office and 90% of our clients use Mac’s and we don’t dual boot Windoze.
Volusion livechat is the same thing. They should really built the program so it works in any browser so people can use it their new powerful mobile phones. Imagine being at the beach and still doing livechat with your customers to close deals!

By: Jody Pellerin

Jody Pellerin — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:55:03 +0000

Any tips for B2B or for use strictly for customer support as opposed to retail?

By: Jacob Martin

Jacob Martin — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:25:52 +0000

That is an awesome article. We have had chat on our website for about 6 months and at first I was proactive chatting with everyone. That didn’t turn out so well. For the last several months we have just waited for people to talk to us. With this information, we can use that to start proactive chatting and hopefully make some more sales. I am truly thankful for this article and hope to contribute future data to prove this.

By: Greg Power

Greg Power — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:22:31 +0000

Great post! A lot of food for thought.

I remember reading a post on GrokDotCom where the author had an expired voucher code and tried to extend its use / blag a new one. Unfortunately, the chat agent wasn’t allowed to do anything like that.

It might sound a little obvious, but it’s worth ensuring your customer service staff are empowered to offer this sort of thing, could be worth it for orders of high value/margin.