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How to approach visitors through live chat

Topics relating to managing people and relationships

Ajtothec

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Hey guys,
I'm afraid nobody was able to help me with this one so far. I'd appreciate any advice or thoughts from you guys. (Fingers crossed).

Here's the situation:
I'm running a couple of informational sites that function as niche brands that try to be an authority in this niche. So basically the visitor is interested in this niche, searching for information where he can buy XY, what the dangers/advantages are, what providers there are for certain services, etc.

I want to add more value with a personal assistant that is chatting with visitors. My problem is that even though we use a personal approach like "Hello, my name is Andy and I'm your personal assistant today. If you need any help with XY in the United States, let me know" the response rate is very low. I can't tell if they don't want to get bothered and just browse or if they think we're just a bot or whatever. We could help them 99% of the time and delivering more precise information even faster.

Is anyone doing this already here and may have some experience? Any thoughts about approaching them differently? Anything is appreciated.

Thanks,
AJ
 
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Mattie

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Really you have have a site that has a lot of traffic and reviews for that to work. If you don't have legit reviews they don't know whether you're a real deal or a bot. And a lot of websites now have cam so they can see you and know you're real and free open chat to ask questions with a button that takes you to private. The problem is there are so many sites that don't have real people answering them they don't know they're talking to a real person.

You have to make it more known it's not a bot and real person.
 

Delmania

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What Mattie said. Do you need chat for multiple users? Why not use Skype or Hangouts?
 

Ajtothec

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Really you have have a site that has a lot of traffic and reviews for that to work. If you don't have legit reviews they don't know whether you're a real deal or a bot. And a lot of websites now have cam so they can see you and know you're real and free open chat to ask questions with a button that takes you to private. The problem is there are so many sites that don't have real people answering them they don't know they're talking to a real person.

You have to make it more known it's not a bot and real person.

Thanks for your reply.
Yes, I was thinking about that as well. I was also asked if I'm a bot or human.
Honestly, I do not get approached very often when browsing as visitor/customer. So to me it's not obvious that there are many bots approaching you "pretending" to help.

Right now I'm using Olark as it's simple to use and rather cheap. But yes, it's "only" live chat. Right now I don't know how to give it a more personal touch tbh.
 
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Mattie

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I've been on many sites that have bots, and your message says a lot. Usually with a bot you can type anything in there and it will give you some programmed response regardless of what you ask it. And that's the first impression they get by the image and automatic response. I used to play with these bots just for fun with a friend. They're quite stupid.

And I think that's why you might want to make a video or something with your face or someone who is live bait explaining you can talk live and you'd be glad to help them. Do you have videos of yourself or a human on your site. When they see who they're interacting with it makes a difference.

I would go find sites that have these chats in different niches and see what type of messages you get, and test them, and you'll see the difference.
 

Phones

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If you want to scale, chat support isn't the way to go.

I went that road for a month or two, eventually I had better things to do, and after I stopped doing the conversion rate was the same.

I was, however, able to get the biggest pain points and questions and make sure that that information was available and that people were seeing, so it's good if you want to learn and improve your website.
 

theag

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Ajtothec

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Obviously I'm not doing it myself but I got two very good operators with experience in this niche. I see many important benefits and that's why I want to do it properly. It all comes down to response rate and conversion rate increase though, that's why I'm asking. Also it depends a lot on your market. In this area there's virtually no customer support. People are not used to get treated professionally. When I want to go the same way as competition I should stop caring. But I do care about adding value, helping visitors, earning their trust to make them my customers for a long time.

The bot issue @Mattie mentioned is real. Even though I can't tell how big the issue is exactly.
 

Ajtothec

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Webinars require a lot of traffic AND a lot of interest in a fixed date.
I thought about it as well and it may be an option in the future but it's rather tough to pull off now.
 
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Delmania

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Not necessarily, you can start small, record it, and put it online. Even if you have only 5 people, they can ask questions and help build your rep as an authority.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

BaraQueenbee

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PERSONALLY, I get easily annoyed by the chat pop-up "Hi I am this and that and I can help you?" screen, and appreciate a more lay-low but very visible option.
Also Skype and Hangout can be indeed a very good option!

Good luck!
 

Ajtothec

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Maybe it's time to realize that you cannot approach them properly and need to make them chat on their behalf.
Also webinars or hangouts are a good idea. Could work very well when done properly.
 
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Rachel Akito

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Hello, maybe, instead of a ppo-up message, just make it an "action icon," one that is easy to see, maybe a good color and font size. May customers find chat windows as annoying so even if we have good intentions of helping them, we are driving them away.
 

spence_douglas

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Okay here is what you do. Say "hi this is Andy with Xy, do you want to caht?". Be sure to include the spelling mistake. It shows you are human and is disarming. Give it a try and watch the rate go up.

Let us know the results too.

Sent from my SGH-I747M using Tapatalk
 

Ajtothec

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May 30, 2015
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Okay here is what you do. Say "hi this is Andy with Xy, do you want to caht?". Be sure to include the spelling mistake. It shows you are human and is disarming. Give it a try and watch the rate go up.

Let us know the results too.

Sent from my SGH-I747M using Tapatalk

Good point. Will try that for the next couple of days.
 
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Christiano

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I previously worked at a sales job where we did email, chat and phone sales simultaneously. Here is the deal with chat:

1) Don't engage them, let them engage. Your chat should be somewhere that's not in the way where they can see it - that's it. I worked for a company that was sold for $210,000,000. We had approximately 400 chats per day regarding a $10/mth digital fax service. People don't "chat" very often dude - it's not you.

If you want to engage collect their email addresses. At least then you can stay engaged, stay top of mind AND monetize those lists with targeted content and well executed native advertising (with clever copyrighting skills).
 

Ajtothec

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May 30, 2015
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I previously worked at a sales job where we did email, chat and phone sales simultaneously. Here is the deal with chat:

1) Don't engage them, let them engage. Your chat should be somewhere that's not in the way where they can see it - that's it. I worked for a company that was sold for $210,000,000. We had approximately 400 chats per day regarding a $10/mth digital fax service. People don't "chat" very often dude - it's not you.

If you want to engage collect their email addresses. At least then you can stay engaged, stay top of mind AND monetize those lists with targeted content and well executed native advertising (with clever copyrighting skills).

Yes, I will go this route now I think. Even the most personal and flawed approaches did not work out any better. Time to focus on increasing traffic to make it worthwhile having someone full time taking care of self intended chats and emails.
 

Christiano

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Awesome - manipulation tactics will not serve you long-term. For the chat as long as you set expectations on availability or even better, remove it when no one is there to answer. As far as customer expectations, you have roughly 60 seconds to respond when communicating via chat at most before customers will start getting frustrated. If you can't maintain this service level, abandon this as a communication medium.

Email response expectations are within 24 hours at most with positive perception accrued with a response time of 60 minutes or less.
 
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