Using Customer Service to Boost Your Conversion Rate

Posted on January 31, 2012 by bill_t

Guest blog post from Claire Broadley from  experience day site Wish.co.uk

The best time for any customer to visit your website is when they’re ready to spend. But not all buying decisions are based purely on price. It’s important to make sure you’re competitive, of course, but if you put all your energies into selling on price, you’re missing something vital that could affect the type of clients you attract.

Of course, some people only have small budgets. To them, cost is the biggest factor in their purchase. Other clients will be looking to spend a little bit more to develop a relationship with someone they can trust. They want someone who is easy to contact, easy to work with and happy to solve their problems without a fuss. These clients will be keen to build up a long-term relationship with you, and as such, they represent the most valuable conversions.

If you’re not seeing a good conversion rate from more selective customers, it may be that you’re pushing hard on price and not showcasing your customer service skills. You may not be giving clients a chance to find out how friendly you are, or how you like to take care of people. Don’t let your website become a barrier between yourself and these valuable clients.

Humanise your contact options

Every website has a contact form. Contact forms are dull – we all know this. They also require that the person using the form has a well-rounded idea which they can put into words quickly. Not everyone does. A short contact form means your client won’t give you much information, but a long contact form will be intimidating to clients who don’t write well.

Olark’s live chat box is obviously one way you can humanise your contact page. Live chat is less rigid than a contact form: your client can start a conversation without really knowing what they want to ask. The Greeter is ideal if you want to give your visitors an extra nudge towards sending that vital first message: set it to display only on your contact page if you’re concerned about troubling people before they’re ready.

Analyse your content

A client who is looking for a good relationship with a supplier will make decisions about the supplier based on their marketing material and website. That concept applies equally to customers who visit an ecommerce store. What do you show those clients? Are you giving them the impression that you’re happy to help?

Look critically at all the written material you send to clients – particularly material you might send them before they’ve made a buying decision. Loosen up the tone of your website and re-write your terms and conditions so that the client isn’t scared away before they’ve picked up the phone.

It’s also a good idea to make your routes to order pages and contact pages as clear as possible to maximise conversions, and put email addresses and phone numbers on every document you send.

Show signs of life

An active blog isn’t just good for SEO. It can show that your company is healthy, busy and engaged with its customers. Blog posts don’t really need to be about your company: you can blog about all kinds of relevant topics, as long as you bear in mind the kind of clients you are looking to attract. (There’s no point in blogging about soup if you sell trainers.)

If you pitch your blog posts at the right level, you can also use your blog as a sounding board to impart friendly advice or invite users to contact you by name. Users really like having a named person to deal with, rather than an email address for a generic department.

Make sure blog comments are always open, and don’t make clients log in to comment. Barriers make people nervous and less likely to trust you. If your customer makes a complaint or seems angry in your comments, swallow your pride and put their pride ahead of your own. Treat an unreasonable person well and you’ll make a great impression on everyone else who comes across that post.

About the Author: Claire Broadley writes for experience day site Wish.co.uk and is passionate about using content and customer service to bridge the gap between website and consumer.

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Doing it Live with Topspin Media — an Olark Case study

Posted on January 29, 2012 by bill_t

Guest post by our pal Brad Barrish from Topspin Media

Topspin is the premier direct-to-consumer solution for music artists, filmmakers, comedians, writers and anyone else who might want to sell stuff directy to their fans. We work with all types of artists, across many genres and of all sizes. Trent Reznor, Beastie Boys, Madi Diaz, Dillinger Escape Plan, Paul McCartney, Andrew Bird, Umphrey’s McGee, Kevin Smith and Ron White are just a few of the thousands of talented folks with whom we work. In addition to helping them utilize the platform, we often interact directly with their fans. We want to make sure we’re doing everything possible to ensure that their fans have a great experience. That’s where Olark comes in.

We had been considering the idea of binging live chat capabilities to the Topspin platform for some time. Late last year we decided to test Olark on a campaign that we did with a little band called Pixies. Maybe you’ve heard of them? We did a blog post that detailed the campaign. Because the band was offering a very limited amount of tickets to their fans, we wanted to make sure that any customers that had an issue could get their questions answered immediatley. Additionally, we wanted to make sure that chats were logged in Zendesk, which we use for all Artist and Fan Support inquiries. Olark was a simple, straightforward solution for customers and it proved to be very effective for this campaign.

Due to the great experience we had with Olark on the Pixies campaign, we decided to use it on a few other select campaigns like Smashing Pumpkins and Justin Bieber.

Complete Topspinmedia Pixes blog post

In addition to utilizing Olark to help the fans of our clients, we’ve also implemented it for our own clients, which means it’s directly integrated with the Topspin application for our Plus and Enterprise customers. This allows them to reach someone quicker when they have an urgent issue. On average we see between 5-10 chat requests per day from the Topspin application with an average of 11 messages exchanged versus an average of 20 artist support tickets per day created on Zendesk. We have seen the number of tickets go down since we implemented Olark, but if anything we are spending more time on artist support overall, which is fine. We would rather spend a little more time and have very happy clients. We measure satisfaction via Zednesk and our satisfaction rating for Artist Support is 96%.

Thanks to our Olark integrations, we’re able to serve our clients and their customers faster and provide a better customer support experience all around.

Brad Barrish oversees customer support operations, warehouse logistics and designs products at Topspin to ensure that clients and customers have the best experience possible with the platform. He plays a mean game of table tennis and tends to hog the office Sonos. He can be found on Twitter and Tumblr, among other corners of the Interwebs.
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The Art of Excellent Customer Service 101 – Organizing Your Live Chat Teams

Posted on January 23, 2012 by bill_t

Okay, you’re all set. You’ve hired some sparkling customer service reps and sales folk with great experience and winning personalities. You’ve got Olark on your Web pages and you’re ready to go.

What next? Organizing your team into well, a team.  Sounds simple and sometimes it is if your business only requires an operator or two to handle all the sales and customer service inquiries.  But if you’ve got a high traffic site with quite separate areas for technical support, sales, developer support or any other variations, it becomes vital to organize in such a way to get the proper live chat operators connecting with the right site visitors.

Olark has a solution in one word:  Groups!

By using Groups you can designate chats originating on specific pages to go to only members of a specific group.

For instance on a page dedicated to sales info you might want only your crack sales team folks to get chat requests, and your tech support guys to get the how-to questions from your help page(s).  Or perhaps your CEO has offered to participate (we highly recommend as a best practice everyone in your company playing a role in interacting directly with your customers) but doesn’t want to get flooded with tech support chats – so you can segregate him/her to a special “Chat with the boss” page.  Use your imagination.

So how do you accomplish that?

In your Olark Dashboard in the Operators tab (where you’ll set up your sales and support reps with their operator accounts) you’ll find a button to “create groups”

Be brave and click on “Create Group” to  create your first group.

The Group is created as “New Group” (creative, eh?) but you can name it anything you like right away by clicking on the edit icon next to the default snappy name.

You can add as many of your operators to a group as you like by clicking on the add to group drop down menu which will show all your current operators  (ops can be members of multiple groups of course, if that fits your schema).

A small snippet of code (seen in the gray box above) is automatically generated, which you can copy/paste to place on the page right below the Olark chat code.  Put that in place and you’ve got team organization, baby!

Team organization via Olark Groups;  as simple as pie.

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