May I help you?

The Handbook of the American Entrepreneur
HandsOn
January 2006
technology
May I help you?
New live-chat software helps Web merchants convert browsers into buyers
the customer enters McGrath Acura of
Westmont, Ill. Within seconds, the salesperson pounces.
“Hello. My name is Grace. How can I
help you?”
“Just looking,” the visitor replies.
“Let me help you with that,” Grace continues. “Are you looking for new or preowned?”
It’s a conversation you’d expect to hear at
any auto dealership. Except that this didn’t
happen in the show room. The exchange
took place online, at acurabymcgrath.com.
Last year, general manager Ken Girard
added a new feature to the dealership’s website: live chat. Now, instead of waiting for a
visitor to click on a button and ask for help,
a service agent detects the visitor’s presence
on the website and initiates a real-time conversation. “It really sets our site apart,” Girard says.
For most of its brief history, online
A Harder Sell
shopping has been a largely anonymous
Furniture retailer
Mark Denham
process, with Web-based merchants conhas live people
tent to wait for browsers to initiate an into greet Internet
shoppers.
teraction. But now, more businesses are
adding technology that allows them to
step up and make the first move and offer
Even now, years into the Internet revolution, e-shopping
a virtual “May I help you?” The idea is to introduce a human
factor into virtual shopping. “People like to buy from peo- remains a dicey business. Research shows that 98% of visiple,” says Farrakh Azhar, CEO of Live Admins, a Chicago- tors leave without making a purchase. Indeed, about half of
based company that helped Acura of Westmont create its all Web shoppers who put an item into a virtual shopping
live-chat experience. “It’s the same as walking into a store cart leave without buying it, according to the E-Tailing
and having a staff person greet you. It makes a connection, Group. “As an industry, we need to look at why 98% of the
people who visit us leave without making a transaction,” says
a one-on-one conversation.”
Photograph by Jennifer Hale
HandsOn
technology
Robert LoCascio, CEO of New York City-based LivePerson,
a provider of inbound and outbound chat technology. “Especially since the rate of impulse buying is much higher in
the offline world. Why are we still at 2%?”
He and others insist that the answer lies in making virtual salesmanship more proactive. Web shoppers should not
have to sacrifice service for the privilege of shopping in their
bunny slippers at 2 a.m., LoCascio says: “We can do more.”
Mark Denham, CEO of 247 Workspace, is onboard. The
company, a seller of office furniture based in Los Gatos,
Calif., added chat to its website in early 2005. The goal was to
provide more qualified leads to the company’s sales reps. Because most customers are other business owners looking for
things such as conference tables and cubicles, the sales
process is often long and complex, involving a great deal of
back-and-forth between the sales rep and the buyers.“There
are a lot of choices and particulars in our sales process,” Denham says. “We were finding that having an individual try to
sort through 600 pages on our website was overwhelming.”
The outbound chat aims to simplify things. It looks a
lot like Instant Messenger, though customers don’t have to
download software for it to work. Not every visitor to the
site gets a greeting. But if you hang around for a few minutes or get seven or eight pages deep into the content, a live
agent will say hello and offer to help. In most cases, the
agents simply help visitors find the information they’re
looking for. “Individuals who have engaged in text chats
have a much higher sales probability than a standard lead,”
Denham says. “Once we engage in a conversation, we find
the probability of a sale goes up dramatically.”
Other companies use the tactic with a bit more restraint.
Jesse Kelsey, marketing project manager of eRug.com, says
he loves to shop online precisely because he knows he won’t
have to fight off a lot of pushy salespeople. So his company,
based in Redwood City, Calif., is designing a live-chat system
that will give shoppers an unmolested five minutes. After
that, a text box will appear, saying,“If there’s anything we can
do to help, our design consultants are here for you.” The
company’s four design consultants will do the chatting, and
Kelsey promises that it will be a soft sell. “We offer to help,
but we don’t scare the customer away. We don’t want to turn
anybody off,” he says.
That’s a wise mindset, says Martha Rogers, founding partner of Peppers and Rogers, a management consulting firm in
Norwalk, Conn. Approaching Web shoppers, according to
Rogers, is a dangerous game. “One reason people shop online is because they don’t want to be harassed by the sales
help,” she says. “If they want live help, they know where to get
it. The idea that salespeople can now follow you around online is not very appealing.”
Maybe not to all shoppers, but anecdotal evidence suggests live-chat technology works. The Internet service
provider Earthlink boasts that 15% of its initiated chats result in a customer signing up. E-Trade Mortgage, based in
Arlington, Va., added an “invite to chat” program in early
2004. In the first six months, the program improved customer satisfaction ratings and the company found chatters
were more likely than nonchatters to become customers.
And it also works for smaller outfits—which can get the
service for as little as $99 a month. Rackspace, a Web services provider in San Antonio, gets about 80% of new sales
via an initiated chat session, according to founder Patrick
Condon. And LoCascio found 25% of visitors to his site
who were engaged in a chat ended up buying something.
“Humanizing the experience helps make the sale,” he says.
—Ellen Neuborne
▲
Resources Tech website TopTenReviews has a live-chat buyer’s guide at live-chat-support-software-review.toptenreviews.com. For
more advice, read “How to Screw Up Live Customer Chat (and How to Fix It),” at clickz.com/experts/crm/traffic/article.php/3499311.
Copyright 2006 Mansueto Ventures LLC, publisher of Inc. magazine, New York, NY 10017. Posted with permission.