eMarketer recently published an article entitled “How Helpful is Live Chat?”. It doesn’t contain any new or particulary exciting information, but it did inspire some thoughts worth sharing.
The article references studies paid for by chat provider Bold Software and click-to-call provider eStara, respectively.
Not surprisingly, the chat study showed consumers that chat buy more stuff and shop online more often.
Also not suprisingly, the click-to-call study showed that consumers prefer click-to-call over chat especially when the topic of conversation is complicated or confidential.
As readers of this blog know, ContactAtOnce! supports both chat and click-to-call so we have a very qualified and authoritative take….why not offer your online visitors the choice? Duh!
For those that are curious, our data shows that car shoppers are 20 times more likely to chat with a dealer than they are to initiate a click-to-call. Could be that a consumer shopping for a car acts differently than one looking for a book or a new mp3 player, and that kind of leads to the final point…
Aren’t the same consumers that shop online for product or serivce X the same consumers that will be shopping online for product or service Y? We know so. The implication is that no matter what you are selling online, you need to offer chat and click-to-call as options on your website. If you don’t, you are effectively locking some of the doors to your store and losing customers.
So how do you choose the right chat and click-to-call provider? There are many solution providers including Bold and eStara that do a great job of serving online retailers and their shopping cart applications, but we believe the online shopping experience is different for products and services that are researched online and ulimately purchased offline - including cars, apartment leases, homes, insurance policies, etc. That’s why we chose to focus ContactAtOnce! on those verticals, and that’s why our company is experiencing such great success - we understand that the online shopping experience for research-online-purchase-offline products and serivces is different and we’ve built a solution tailored accordingly.
Our Take on eMarketer Article “How Helpful Is Live Chat?”
eMarketer recently published an article entitled “How Helpful is Live Chat?”. It doesn’t contain any new or particulary exciting information, but it did inspire some thoughts worth sharing.
The article references studies paid for by chat provider Bold Software and click-to-call provider eStara, respectively.
Not surprisingly, the chat study showed consumers that chat buy more stuff and shop online more often.
Also not suprisingly, the click-to-call study showed that consumers prefer click-to-call over chat especially when the topic of conversation is complicated or confidential.
As readers of this blog know, ContactAtOnce! supports both chat and click-to-call so we have a very qualified and authoritative take….why not offer your online visitors the choice? Duh!
For those that are curious, our data shows that car shoppers are 20 times more likely to chat with a dealer than they are to initiate a click-to-call. Could be that a consumer shopping for a car acts differently than one looking for a book or a new mp3 player, and that kind of leads to the final point…
Aren’t the same consumers that shop online for product or serivce X the same consumers that will be shopping online for product or service Y? We know so. The implication is that no matter what you are selling online, you need to offer chat and click-to-call as options on your website. If you don’t, you are effectively locking some of the doors to your store and losing customers.
So how do you choose the right chat and click-to-call provider? There are many solution providers including Bold and eStara that do a great job of serving online retailers and their shopping cart applications, but we believe the online shopping experience is different for products and services that are researched online and ulimately purchased offline - including cars, apartment leases, homes, insurance policies, etc. That’s why we chose to focus ContactAtOnce! on those verticals, and that’s why our company is experiencing such great success - we understand that the online shopping experience for research-online-purchase-offline products and serivces is different and we’ve built a solution tailored accordingly.