Data from web analytics programs can help e-retailers make more effective use of live chat systems in which agents offer instant message exchanges to web site visitors, say live chat vendors.
“You might have 1 million folks coming to your site per month, but a certain percentage will never buy from you because they’re coming from a country you don’t sell to,” says Kevin Kohn, executive vice president of marketing at LivePerson Inc. Other customers can be eliminated because of where they’re coming from, such as a competitor’s site. “Let’s put that information to work,” Kohn says. “If there’s a portion of people who you’ll never sell to, take those off the table.”
Analytics can also help an online retailer determine the best time to offer a chat session, Kohn says. There are typical ways consumers move through an e-commerce site on the way to a sale, and certain deviations from that flow usually signal that the visitor is about to leave. “Look for anomalies where the person starts down a flow and deviates in a way that you know is high risk,” Kohn says, “then introduce a customer service specialist to try to guide them back into the flow.”
Cross-sell opportunities can also be identified with the help of analytics technology, says Scott Carlin, vice president of sales for live chat vendor InstantService Inc. For instance, a retailer of fishing gear like Orvis can use its Coremetrics analytics system to identify when someone who buys a rod has not looked at reels. An agent can pop up a window offering advice about what reel would go well with the rod.
Another InstantService client, computer and electronics retailer TigerDirect.com, offers live chat when a customer enters a search term and gets no results—but only when an agent is available to chat, Carlin says. The retailer, which also employs Coremetrics, can use the analytics system to track how often a visitor was not offered a chat because no agent was available. That data can be used to determine if more agents are needed, Carlin says.
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