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Live Chat Initiation but not too Instrusive???

by birdman87
9 replies
Anybody have any experience with live chat. I've had it on my site for a long time now. The mortgage brokers don't really use it much as we just haven't had any that have the time for a while.

This will all be changing soon. We probably get about 12 offline messages per month for people that want to use our service.

Thinking about testing it out myself to have brokers manning the live chat at all times and hopefully making more out of it. I'm doing the testing to begin with.

Do any of you that actually use it tend to have any luck with initiating the conversation? I can see which pages they're on and are often looking for specific information that I can help them with. Not sure whether or not to start initiating chats or just wait for the odd and occasional chat to be initiated itself.

It tends to folow a consistent pattern with me. I usually wait for at least a couple of minutes before I initiate. 5 out of six times they promptly leave once I ask them if there is anything I can do for them.

The sixthtime it works out really well and they are very engaged with me.

Any good ways to approach it? Is it worth doing or should I leave it?
#chat #initiation #instrusive #live
  • Profile picture of the author birdman87
    Been playing wiht this some more. It really is a case of it being really difficult to get a conversation going but when I do every customer is hugely engaged and nearly always turns to business.
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  • Profile picture of the author Patrick
    If you are the one initiating the chat, then stop doing it. It's a very bad marketing strategy. If I come to your site and you pop me up with a chat request, I will close it and never come back to your site.
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  • Profile picture of the author tpw
    Click-to-Call might be more productive with prospects, and it would certainly be more economical for you since you would not need to have someone manning the chat console.
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  • Profile picture of the author Paul Gram
    I would absolutely NOT initiate a chat. It's very annoying and will have the opposite affect that you want.

    Instead, what I'd recommend is a chat box in the lower right corner that your website visitor can click to start a chat if they wish to.
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  • Profile picture of the author smileverse
    In my opinion, the core point is the analysis of the visitors' behavior. You can monitor the visitors' navigation history, so you can clearly know their point of interest. If they are viewing pages smoothly, don't disturb them. If you find a visitor come and back between several products for a long time, then he may need your help, you can send a chat invitation.

    In most cases, visitors will contact you directly via live chat once they have any question. If you want to increase sales by live chat, you can also analyze which product are most popular and adjust your sales strategy. Hope helpful for you.
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  • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
    Banned
    Originally Posted by birdman87 View Post

    5 out of six times they promptly leave once I ask them if there is anything I can do for them.
    And you're still doing it? What's that about?

    Originally Posted by birdman87 View Post

    The sixthtime it works out really well and they are very engaged with me.
    Aren't those probably the 17% who were going to be interested anyway, without unnecessarily driving away the other 83%?
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    • Profile picture of the author birdman87
      Hi Guys

      Thanks for the responses.

      You are all right! I knew that initiating chat nearly all the time wasn't working very well. It probably is not worth doing in most cases.

      I think what smileverse was getting as it what I meant. Mortgages is such a diverse field, there are inevitably going to be times when actually initiating the chat will help. I guess I need to work at identifying the visitor behaviour that constitutes this. Most of the time it is good just to leave them be.

      We do have a livechat box at the bottom of the page and it can be really helpful when they've sent an enquiry through to immediately contact them via livechat to arrange a phone-call.

      Flicking back and forth between pages is often a good way to know that they're not getting the information they need off of the site.

      It isn't always the case that it's just the ones that would have made enquiries anyway. One example is someboyd trying to find out if they could get a mortgage if they were a commercial offshore oil contract diver with no fixed residence. It's so specific a lot of the time that you can't provide tailored info to everybody. After live chatting with him he ended up arranging for a phone-call with an adviser and he would have otherwise left.

      The average bounce rate for the site is about 65%. Is that good or bad in you guys opinions? Most of the keyword traffic is information and advice orientated.
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