The Power of Click to Call and Click to Chat | an ATG Whitepaper

Live Help: The Power of Click to Call and Click to Chat | An ATG Whitepaper

Live Help: The Power of Click to Call and Click to Chat

WHY BUSINESSES MUST OFFER LIVE VOICE AND TEXT CHAT ASSISTANCE TO DRIVE ONLINE SALES

1 Live Help: The Power of Click to Call and Click to Chat | An ATG Whitepaper

Introduction

Most companies today understand that adding interactive live help services to their Web sites – including voice call back and online chat services – can help them acquire and retain more customers, increase transaction and order values, and reduce churn. The decision many companies say they struggle with, however, is whether to offer that help via voice OR text chat.

While chat and voice are sometimes equated, they serve different business goals. A growing number of successful online businesses across a range of industries are discovering that voice vs. chat isn’t an “either/or” decision. These e-commerce leaders recognize that combining live voice AND text chat services – offered selectively, proactively, and in an integrated manner to the right online prospects and customers at the right time – will maximize online sales and profits while boosting customer satisfaction and retention to new levels.

This paper explores the role that voice and chat play in an effective live help offering, and examines how the two technologies – when deployed in an integrated fashion – offer the most revenue and loyalty benefits for companies that are serious about maximizing the return on their online channel investments. This paper also illustrates how starting with voice-based sales assistance, and adding chat once key learnings are uncovered, is proving to be a highly successful approach to delivering faster ROI and greater long-term success.

2 Live Help: The Power of Click to Call and Click to Chat | An ATG Whitepaper

Live Help Online Yields Proven Value

For companies looking to maximize their online sales opportunity, offering prospects and customers the ability to engage in live interactions with contact center agents is now a “must have,” not just a “nice to have.” With near ubiquitous Internet access, a smartphone or netbook in every pocket or bag, and a never-ending expansion of online choices, it is increasingly easy to tire- kick and window shop online.

The data proves it. Today’s increasingly crowded e-commerce highway is littered with abandoned shopping carts, online forms, travel itineraries, insurance quotes, and financial services applications. According to MarketingSherpa, consumers abandon nearly 60 percent of all online transactions before they hit “submit.” For businesses serious about selling online, each abandoned transaction reduces revenue, increases acquisition costs, and – most importantly – represents a lost opportunity to land a long-term, loyal customer.

There are countless reasons why customers abandon a site once they’ve started the transaction process. In some cases they may not feel they have all the information they need to answer their questions and make a purchase decision. In others they may have concerns about the security of personal information. And sometimes, especially with the most costly and complex transactions, customers just feel better taking the final steps with the comfort of some human assistance.

According to Forrester Research, 66 percent of consumers do not apply for financial services online because they prefer to apply in person or over the phone, while 52 percent want human assistance to validate their decision. − Source: “Getting More Financial Services Shoppers to Apply Online” Forrester Research, Inc., September 2008.

Live, interactive Web site help offers consumers the chance to communicate with a live agent while in the process of completing an online transaction. Companies that offer live help provide online customers the extra information and confidence required to complete a purchase, precisely when they need it. As a result, these customer-centric organizations realize a number of important benefits including:

Reducing Web site abandonment Acquiring more customers Increasing sales and form conversion rates Increasing average order sizes and total sales Increasing customer present value and lifetime value Differentiating products and services Accelerating customer sales cycles Reducing contact center costs Optimizing Web site and live sales approaches

3 Live Help: The Power of Click to Call and Click to Chat | An ATG Whitepaper

Live Help: A Quick Overview

There are two primary forms of live help: voice “call back” services (often called Click to Call) and online chat services (often called Click to Chat). Both connect online consumers to a contact center agent during a live Web session.

Both voice and chat help are optimally delivered as hosted, Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, enabling companies to optimize their online customer experience without making substantial changes to their Web sites or incurring capital expenditures for the required software, hardware, and networking. The low cost, fast implementation, and near immediate payback afforded by live help services have led to a dramatic increase in adoption by serious e-businesses.

VOICE HELP Voice-based live help services integrate a company’s Web site or other online sales channels with its contact center by allowing customers to request an immediate phone call from a sales or service agent, simply by clicking a graphical button or link on the site. Using sophisticated technology, Web calls are routed to sales and services representatives without the need for any additional investment in contact center hardware, software, or routing.

Because voice help is delivered as an online service, buttons or links can also be embedded into e- mail campaigns, banner ads, landing pages, or directory listings with the simple insertion of a few lines of HTML code. This is increasingly important as organizations look to engage their customers and prospective customers across various channels to capitalize on the rise of social media and gain additional brand touch points and acquisition opportunities.

Voice-based help brings much more value than simply inviting visitors to place a phone call to a toll- free phone number. It ensures a personalized, highly contextual cross-channel sales and support experience, allowing customers to stay on the Web while engaging with a contact center agent as if that agent were right there with them to answer questions and provide the comfort and security to complete a transaction.

Advanced voice-based help solutions offer a complete feature set that allows organizations to maximize impact and ROI, including:

Selectively and proactively offering voice help only to the right customers at the right time Routing and prioritizing calls dynamically based on the customer’s need or location, their potential value to the business, and the availability of agents Showing agents customer data – including current Web activity and all known purchase and account information – to personalize interactions, up-sell and cross-sell effectively, and minimize call handling times Collaborative browsing tools that allow agents to push Web pages to and complete forms for in-bound Web callers with high security When implemented strategically, voice-based help improves customers’ overall experience and enables organizations to provide sales assistance when and where it is needed most to increase revenue and build ongoing customer loyalty. It also has been shown to reduce contact center costs by reducing call length.

4 Live Help: The Power of Click to Call and Click to Chat | An ATG Whitepaper

ONLINE CHAT Live chat is a proactive customer assistance service that can also help companies increase online sales, transaction values, and customer retention. Instead of crossing channels from the Web to the phone, however, chat brings the contact center agents to the Web site, where they can engage and assist online consumers via text messages.

Some companies – particularly those with simple sales and highly trained agents – can realize cost savings by using text chat vs. voice-based help because it allows agents to engage multiple customers at once and leverage pre-defined responses and knowledgebase systems to address common issues. While only the most advanced voice-based solutions enable co-browsing and page- push, most chat solutions offer some level of collaborative browsing, which allows contact center agents to assist in form completion and up-sell or cross-sell by directing visitors to other pages on the site.

In addition to addressing different types of sales and service interactions, chat is often used by a different audience from voice. Gartner has seen that 8-10 percent of chat sessions are initiated by a net new audience that has never engaged with a company before. Interestingly, that audience also tends to be younger – between 25 – 30 years old – than customers that use voice help. So chat can not only reduce calls, it can also increase a company’s exposure to incremental customers and prospects. And it can do so with a market segment that has been challenging to reach effectively via traditional channels.

Unlike live voice help solutions, however, chat implementations do require some software investments to equip agent desktops and some operational investments to hire and train agents with specialized typing and writing skills.

5 Live Help: The Power of Click to Call and Click to Chat | An ATG Whitepaper

The Right Live Help Service for the Right Customer at the Right Time

At the outset of this paper, we discussed how many companies today struggle with the decision of whether to invest in voice help or chat help, rather than how to implement them effectively together. This is partly due to three primary outdated assumptions, now myths, about the two solutions:

MYTH #1: VOICE INCREASES COSTS. CHAT REDUCES COSTS. Companies that still view the contact center as a cost center may treat any incoming voice call – even one from a Web visitor ready to purchase – as a cost. Chat, on the other hand, reduces costs in some minds because it is believed chat agents can easily handle multiple chats at once. Companies that opt for chat instead of voice to reduce costs, however, likely learn the hard way that these “rules” for help no longer apply.

When properly deployed and integrated with the CRM environment, voice solutions do not bring a net increase in contact center costs because they can be offered only to customers who are ready to buy or who offer the highest potential revenue or value. As a result, the incremental value gained from closing more sales with voice-based help more than offsets any incremental cost for additional calls.

Additionally, for businesses with complex sales, chat can actually increase costs when text discussions drag on and canned responses fail to address customer problems. In these scenarios, agents wind up handling one or two chats at most and often fail to provide the quality assistance that drives sales.

According to Gartner, Web chats are only more cost-effective than voice calls when an agent can handle three or more chats at a time.

MYTH #2: VOICE IS FOR SALES. CHAT IS FOR SERVICE. Due to the perceived increase in contact center costs, some e-business and contact center decision makers opt for voice help solutions only for sales situations, where the incremental lift of converting an online sale outweighs the cost of the phone call. Conversely, chat, with its perceived low cost, may be deployed only for service-oriented help and offered only to known customers.

With today’s innovative live help solutions, these assumptions no longer apply. For businesses with simple sales – such as a shoe retailer – chat can be a low-cost solution to handle common sales questions such as “do these shoes run big or small?” Providing simple sales assistance with chat addresses customer needs – and helps convert the sale – but allows agents to handle multiple sessions at once.

Chat or Call? Chats Calls 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% This table represents the relative volume of Financial Services Customer 1 completed voice calls and chats during a Financial Services Customer 2 three-month period. The data shows there no Financial Services Customer 3 clear trend towards a preference for voice or text Financial Services Customer 4 help, even across industries. The data proves Retail Customer 1 that each business – depending on its online sales Retail Customer 2 goals, audience, complexity of sale, and other Retail Customer 3 variables – may drive a higher volume of calls or Travel Customer 1 chats. Without an integrated voice and chat help solution, these businesses would not capture all Travel Customer 2 potential online sales. Travel Customer 3

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Businesses with more complex sales, such as insurance companies or high-end retailers, may choose to offer voice solutions for high-value customers and prospects, reserving chat for low-value customers and applicants. The cost of the calls is worth the investment to land high-profit sales and keep profitable customers satisfied, whereas chat may suffice for lower-value customers who are not providing significant revenue or profit.

According to Gartner, chat and voice can also work very effectively together to increase sales conversions. Many sales opportunities are identified and clarified in live chat sessions and then converted when the customer is transferred to voice. In these cases, live chat enables more cost efficient sales conversions and voice increases the conversion rate of live chat in sales situations.

MYTH #3: OFFERING BOTH CHAT AND VOICE HELP IS REDUNDANT – I DON’T NEED BOTH. Because voice and chat share similarities – they both connect Web users to a contact center agent – some companies feel one or the other is sufficient to address all their visitors’ needs. Offering both services appears to be a redundant expense for solving the same business goals.

Independent analysis and experience shows, however, that some buyers show a preference for either chat or voice, either because of their demographic or because of their stage in the purchase lifecycle. Forrester Research found that different Web site visitors opt to use different online help services based on their demographics. Older customers, for example, tend to be more comfortable with voice, whereas younger customers tend to prefer chat. Other buyers – regardless of demographic – may prefer a text chat when they are in the early phase of a purchase or if they just have a simple question, whereas they might prefer a call if they are ready to buy but encounter an error or have a complicated question. Finally, cultural and language issues may push one set of buyers towards chat and others towards voice.

“We added both voice and chat to help us take more reservations from the traffic on our new site. Whether people use Click to Call or Click to Chat, our goal is to ask them how we can assist in making a reservation. People who choose chat usually are looking for the answer to a specific question about the hotel, something they can’t find on the Web site. Those choosing Click to Call are generally ready to make a reservation with us at that moment. Each helps move someone to that point of purchase in a different way.” − Julie Silbar, Contact Center Director, Red Lion Hotels

As the examples above illustrate, chat and voice each play an important role depending on the demographic of the visitor, the transaction stage she is in, the nature of the problem or question she has, the complexity of the sale she’s engaged in, and the value she provides to the business.

Before we examine how chat and voice can work better together when deployed in concert, let’s first examine some potential risks in deploying standalone chat without voice, or deploying live help solutions from different, non-integrated providers.

7 Live Help: The Power of Click to Call and Click to Chat | An ATG Whitepaper

The Risk of Standalone Chat or Non-Integrated Live Help

It’s important for serious e-businesses to understand that deploying chat alone comes with significant risk, as does deploying chat and voice from different solution providers. Companies that deploy chat as a standalone solution risk losing thousands of conversions and opportunities to up- sell because ‘chatters’ often struggle to articulate their concerns quickly and clearly. Language differences, education levels, slang, etc., can all impact an agent’s ability to satisfy the needs of a text chatter, resulting in abandonment.

It’s also a risk to deploy chat from one vendor and voice-based help from another. As cited earlier in the paper, the conversion rate of chats nearly triples when escalated to a phone call. With a combined voice and chat solution from a single provider, agents can quickly and easily escalate a troubled chat to a voice call with a single click – without losing the context and continuity of the help session. This seamless escalation allows agents to rescue a significant pool of potential abandoners whose needs are not met via chat, helping businesses acquire more customers and increase their order size (which is easier done via a phone call).

“Web chat should not be seen as a stand-alone option but rather as part of an overall multi- channel interaction strategy. Organizations should not look at Web chat as a stand-alone component of customer interactions, because they risk buying a point solution focused only on this functionality.” − Grow Your Customers and Customer Service Through a Web Chat Channel, Gartner, October 2008.

VOICE & CHAT – BETTER TOGETHER While voice and chat solutions provide value when deployed independently, companies that implement them in a coordinated manner can deliver a more complete live help solution to engage the right online consumers at the most opportune moments and move them quickly to conversion, while minimizing costs. The two solutions must be choreographed, in a sense, based on the specific business needs of the organization and its Web visitors, to help maximize revenue, profits, and customer satisfaction.

In a recently published Live Chat Market Overview (2008), former Gartner VP Tim Smith stresses the importance of integrating click to call into chat, and finds that most companies are missing their opportunity by ignoring the value of integration:

Live chat is becoming an increasingly important element of overall contact center strategy. A key evolutionary path to the contemporary multi-channel Contact Center, especially in large enterprises, is through the addition of live chat to traditional telephony based contact centers. Yet little discussion of contact center synergy is found from any of the vendors; even those that list large contact centers as their customers. In addition, those that offer click-to-call capabilities usually position it as something that merely compliments chat and ignore the opportunity to integrate Click to Call into the established contact center. I believe this is an opportunity in danger of being missed to the detriment of vendors and customers alike.

8 Live Help: The Power of Click to Call and Click to Chat | An ATG Whitepaper

The Recipe for Success - Start with Voice, Then Add Chat

For businesses that are set to implement live help on their sites, voice-based help is the logical place to start. For a number of reasons, beginning with voice – and adding chat once key learnings are realized – can pay financial benefits in the long run.

NO UP-FRONT INVESTMENT Some voice-based help solutions require that calls be routed directly to the PCs of contact center agents, requiring costly desktop software and agent training to be able to field calls originating from the Web.

Today’s next-generation voice help solutions, however, do not require any changes to a company’s existing contact center infrastructure or agent training. Calls can easily be routed directly through the contact center’s existing phone network, either to specific phone numbers as set by the business, or into a pre-configured interactive voice response (IVR) system. It is recommended that calls be prioritized and pushed to the top of the queue to drive the highest level of online sales.

GAUGE DEMAND By deploying voice first, companies can also gauge their overall demand for live help so they can estimate expected chat volumes. Based on the number of inbound voice calls, and using other variables such as the complexity of the sale and demographic of the audience, a business can make a reasonably accurate estimate of chat demand. In some cases, chat volumes will be lower than voice, where in others they may be higher.

By starting with voice, businesses can work with their live help vendor to determine and forecast the future operational and capital investments required to service chat requests. This way, companies can ensure their software and training investments are consistent with demand and avoid getting caught off guard or investing too heavily in additional agents.

REFINE RULES AND TRIGGERS In general, it is not recommended that companies offer customers live help on every page. Instead, live help should be offered at critical points in the online experience before the customer has a chance to abandon the site. For example, if a customer is spending lots of time on certain pages like shipping costs, reservations, or personal information, companies can offer the opportunity to chat or call on the exact Web page where confusion or concern is happening. This allows the customer service agent to address the customer’s question or concern, and to help the customer complete the sales process.

By starting with voice-based help, a company can predict not only overall demand for live help, but also understand what specific areas of the site or stages of the sales process are driving the greatest needs for live help. Using A/B testing, a company can also determine what triggers and help invitation treatments generate the highest levels of conversions. This way, when the company is ready to add Chat, it can ensure that chat sessions will drive the most revenue for the business, while minimizing contact center costs.

9 Live Help: The Power of Click to Call and Click to Chat | An ATG Whitepaper

Conclusion

In order to gain competitive advantage and effectively capture the potential of online commerce, businesses must implement strategies that both integrate the online channel into their existing sales and customer service channels, and recognize the unique characteristics of the online experience. With live voice- and chat-based help solutions, companies are bridging the gap between their Web self-service and assisted-care channels. They’re optimizing the online experience to meet the unique needs of different customers, thereby increasing conversions, order size, and customer retention for each segment.

Combining voice and chat assistance helps drive more transactions through to conversion. Together, they can help your business offer a more satisfying and successful customer experience and help you close more sales. In most cases, it makes sense to start with voice, since it offers an easier implementation and faster ROI, and lays the foundation for the effective use of live chat.

With Click to Call and Click to Chat, ATG offers the industry’s most deployed, integrated live help solution. We encourage you to learn more about how leading retailers, financial services organizations, insurance companies, and travel/leisure providers are reaping the value of live help with our Click to Call and Click to Chat solutions. You’ll find much more information, case studies, and flash demos at www.atg.com/estara.

About ATG A trusted, global specialist in e-commerce, ATG has spent the last decade focused on helping the world’s premier brands maximize the success of their online businesses. The ATG Commerce application suite is the top-rated platform by industry analysts for powering highly personalized, efficient and effective e-commerce sites. The company’s e-commerce optimization services can be easily added to any Web site to increase conversions and reduce abandonment. These services include ATG Recommendations and the eStara services.

2009 Art Technology Group, Inc. ATG, Art Technology Group and the ATG logo are registered trademarks of Art Technology Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.

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