Customized Chat Adds Seasonal Sales Advantage By Michelle Megna
September 22, 2008
The holiday season is approaching, and as a small online store owner, you may be wondering how to handle the increased traffic at your Web shop, especially if adding seasonal staff is not an option. The solution for some e-tailers is to "hire" virtual employees in the form of customer service agents that interact with your clientele — and hopefully help close sales that you'd otherwise lose.
One company offering such a solution is UpSellit. Deploying UpSellit's SMARTsales Agent, a customizable, performance-based virtual chat agent that the company claims increases conversion rates by seven to 15 percent, e-tailers connect with customers at that critical moment when they are on a site, displaying interest or intent to buy.
"Cart abandonment is an inevitable part of consumers' shopping behavior," said Glenn Russell, UpSellit president and CEO. "With a consumer focus on finding the best deal online, this season e-tailers will notice even more shopping cart abandonment due to comparison shopping. Instead of viewing this as a loss, UpSellit sees the upside. The SMARTsales Agent reaches out to customers after they've jumped ship on a purchase, providing that extra nudge — be it a discount, customer service or free shipping — to close the deal."
Ideal for seasonal sales, the SMARTsales Agent is scalable, and can communicate with 10 or 10 million customers simultaneously, according to the company, and is available on-demand via a company's Web site, providing customers with fast and accurate answers to their questions.
The SMARTsales Agent uses a proprietary combination of natural language parsing and branded messaging created by the e-tailer to ensure conversations are intelligent — and promotional. Communication can be easily modified to offer special promotions, such as free shipping and rushed delivery, or customized to open with a holiday greeting and information on return processes for the holidays.
Customizing Chat and Cashing In with Cashews
Being able to customize the messaging to ensure that it matches the company branding was particularly important for one SMARTsales client, Bronx-based Nuts on the Net, a family-owned and operated business spanning three generations. In preparation for the busy fourth-quarter, the purveyors of gourmet nuts started using the technology in June, said Zach Bobker, the company's e-commerce director, and saw a 10-percent jump in sales.
"It's part of our company history to have that strong connection with our customers. During the holiday season we experience an especially large flow of demand and traffic online," said Bobker. "There's no way that the family can personally connect with every buyer and remain efficient. That's where the SMARTsales Agent comes in."
He said the set up process was straight-forward, and involved having some code created and pasting a piece of Javascript code on pages of the site where they wanted the chat engaged. It may take up to three weeks, though, for everything to be ready, so now is the time to try it out if you want to be ready for the holiday rush.
"These are customers we had no way of contacting without this technology because they were coming to the site and just leaving, not giving us any information," said Bobker. "We customized what the agent says, including literature about our products and company history, and have things like shipping information in there, so it's consistent with anything we'd say if a customer contacted us directly."
For example, the chat agent dialog box pops up right before a visitor is about to leave, and offers this message: "Hey, wait. We hate to see you go. So this once we'd like to offer you 10 percent off for making your purchase today." Very tempting, indeed. The message went on to provide information about the company's Gold Series of nuts and explained how, unlike other companies, you can create your own assortments.
Another great feature, said Bobker, is that you can adjust the technology on-the-fly. " We have access to all the chat logs, so you see what most common questions are, whether about shipping or specific questions about a particular product, say, are the cashews salted, and if we don't have that in there, we know to put it in for the future."
Pay-Per-Chat Pricing
UpSellit's SMARTsales Agent is free to set up, and then, every time a chat results in a sale, UpSellit gets a percent. "It works well for the small Web shop owner because there's no risk," said a company spokesperson, "if it doesn't work, you can just remove it."
The best part: Bobker said the company has realized a 10-percent increase in sales since employing the chat technology. "I was a little skeptical at first, but the results are there to see immediately. Once you get started and see that jump in sales instead of people abandoning their carts, it makes a lot of sense."
Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.
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