Many web users like to use chat services when browsing the internet. Here, Kurt Bager of Netop explains how his business uses chat to help its customers keep close to theirs.
Please tell me about your business
Netop has been in the business of remote management software for 25 years. Our latest offering, live chat, allows businesses to engage with their online customers on a one-to-one basis, via text or video, and increase their sales as a result.
Our live chat product, Live Guide, is a real-time tool that can only be administered by registered company professionals, and allows customers to get their questions answered without waiting on hold or writing up an email. It’s also been equipped with an enterprise-level security system, which caters to the needs of the most highly regulated industries and eliminates the risks associated with online communications.
Who is the product aimed at?
If your business relies on a website to do business, you can use live chat. Text and video chat is used across the world by single-user start-ups to some of the largest multi-national firms. It experiences the most success in industries where customer service has to be right on the front line; the travel industry, finance and retail would be three examples of this. For industries where the utmost personalisation is needed, such as the pharmacy sector or businesses selling high-end goods, we see the use of video chat growing particularly fast.
What are the benefits of using it to an eCommerce business?
One of the biggest problems with eCommerce is cart abandonment. Concerns about shipping costs, card fees or delivery times often lead to a customer clicking away from your site. With live chat, your company has a better chance of keeping them there.
Chat can be offered in both a proactive and reactive form, meaning you can respond to inbound queries and also reach out to customers that are browsing your site.
How much does it cost?
A single license costs £25 ($39) per month
How does it work?
When you are browsing a site, you will either see a pop up window that invites you to chat, or there will be a ‘chat with us’ button if you have any questions. Either way, a chat window will pop up, connecting you to a customer service representative, and you can choose to interact via text or use video if it’s available. There’s nothing to install, it all runs on your browser. Within the chat you can, of course, ask questions, but the operator can also show you documents or web pages that might be relevant to your inquiries. This is a huge benefit if you’re unfamiliar with a particular website, and want to know where you should be looking.
Take me step-by-step through how I buy and install it
Once bought, you are given login details to the Live Guide console, which can be customised in any way you want. Set your operator names, button design, opening times and your FAQ answers as a first step. It’s also worth assessing which pages on your website are getting the most traffic, and would benefit most from live chat. You can then analyse how long shoppers are spending on certain pages in order to set how quickly a proactive chat window should pop up.
Once this is done, click a button, and the whole thing becomes a line of HTML code. Paste this on the pages you have chosen in your website, and off you go. There is nothing to download or install; the whole thing is run remotely by Netop. It’s a very straightforward process, but if you do have any questions, there is an option to live chat with our team within the console. The Netop team is also on hand to offer more strategic advice on where and how to use the product.
What do I need to do once it is set up?
Our advice is to make use of the product’s extensive reporting tools to build a clear picture of your customer’s buying behaviour and understand the previous experiences they have had. Not only does this provide valuable customer insight, it also improves contact centre efficiency levels and optimises the process for staff and customer.
By exporting customer forms and data from chats through the product’s multiple APIs, you can also integrate this data into CRM, ticketing, analytics, and other business systems.
It’s also important to keep monitoring where customers are looking for you online. If you are seeing a lot of traffic via your Facebook page or your email marketing, for example, then live chat can be easily installed there.
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