Every time a customer engages in a web chat you have an opportunity to make a sale. If you’re a retailer with a web site, I bet you watch your web chat conversion rate like a hawk. Improve the conversations you’re having with customers, and you can convert more chats to revenue.
So what happens when customers get distracted or interrupted and leave the conversation? Many retailers struggle with web chat abandon rates in double digits. By focusing on the conversations you’re having instead of those that have been abandoned, you may be overlooking a treasure trove of revenue opportunity. To find that hidden treasure, you’ve got to think like a parrot instead of a hawk. Arrrrrrrrrrrr.
Dealing with distracted, multi-tasking, mobile consumers
The problem with chat is it doesn’t work the way we live our lives today. Chat is session-based. It assumes you start a conversation and finish the task at hand in one sitting on a single device. You know… like a phone call with typing instead of talking. We just don’t behave that way anymore. We’re distracted, multi-tasking, device-hopping consumers who don’t give anyone our full attention.
So when a customer gets distracted or interrupted, being locked into a chat session becomes an inconvenience. Many of them abandon, and the conversation (and conversion opportunity) is lost. If you could resume those “lost” conversations at a time that’s convenient for the customer, it could be like finding hidden treasure. Some of those customers will re-engage at their convenience, and some of them are going to buy.
How to think like a parrot
This is why you have to think like a parrot, because parrots are really good at reminding you the last thing you said to them. In fact, in their own simple way, parrots are excellent at preserving context even over a period of hours or days. We call this persistence, and it’s your treasure map to recovering lost conversations. When you make your conversations persistent, interruptions don’t matter because you can pick them up right where you left off. This is amazingly convenient for consumers because it allows their conversations with you to fit within their lifestyle, not the other way around.
How much revenue potential are we talking about?
So what about all those abandoned web chats? With persistence you’ll be able to recover some of those lost conversations and convert them into revenue. How much hidden treasure are we talking about? It could be a lot, and chances are you’ve been overlooking it because you didn’t realize it was possible to recover any abandoned conversations. Take this five-question quiz to get an estimate of how much hidden revenue potential you could unlock.
How can I have persistent conversations with web chat?
If that hidden revenue potential looks compelling, you may be wondering already how to get persistent conversations with web chat. That’s where this story takes an unexpected twist. Without going into technical details, web chat is by design session based. That means it can’t support persistent conversations, and if you stick with web chat you’re just going to have to put up with abandoned conversations and conversations that time out (a.k.a. the chat equivalent of hanging up on your customer.)
Fortunately, it’s easy to upgrade from web chat to intelligent messaging, which does a very fine job of supporting persistent conversations that help you re-engage with customers at their convenience. Our intelligent messaging solution, My:Time™, is easy to pilot and deploy. Click below to learn more.
