Preventing Shopping Cart Abandonment Using Live Chat Todd Follansbee WebMarketingResources.net, - Oct 16, 2007

Recently I was shopping online -- determined to buy a product. I tried until it was obvious that it was impossible to complete the transaction. Being an experienced shopper, I had every expectation of overcoming the site's underwhelming usability, but failed. After e-mailing the site owner requesting help, I returned the next day with no success. He advised me that he had a surprising number of customers abandoning their shopping carts. Hmmm.

I moved on to another site and again found the usability barely manageable. When I was at the point of abandoning the shopping cart, up popped an invitation to engage the "live chat" option for direct online human help. I clicked on the icon and was quickly connected to a helpful person who took me through a complex scenario and saved a sale which would have otherwise been lost. We spent 15 minutes chatting.

Like many people, I may not remember what I had for lunch, but I do remember sites that fail me -- I rarely go back to them. I will use this site again because despite serious usability flaws, live chat makes it usable. It intrigued me enough to test live chat on my site.

I tested LivePerson (www.liveperson.com), a higher end product that costs under $100 per month. It is fully configurable to offer chat windows on any page and it can launch special chat invitations based upon events (such as an error message). A one seat license allows one connection at a time, though you can install it on several computers, if you have a team of customer service personnel that work from home, for example.

The operator immediately sees where the new visitor came from, what search terms he used, how long he has been on the site, and what pages he has seen on the site. You can access a history of chat, "push" a web page to him, transfer him to another expert, or offer a host of easily accessed canned responses. One operator can manage multiple chats at a time.

I worked with one site that had gone from three seats to over 60 seats in a matter of months. The chat operator I interviewed worked from home, had great access to information, and enjoyed her work.

If you decide to implement live chat:

• Test the process by engaging from remote computers; test every change you make.
• Customize the chat windows with your company logo.
• Test and refine canned responses, since poor ones can put people off. Keep them short.
• Consider answering chat questions in the FAQs on your website.
• Train and monitor your operators.

A surprisingly large percentage of people are reluctant to pick up the phone, preferring to exit when they encounter a problem. Adding live chat expands the conversion options. Many seniors are also comfortable with using chat.

Live chat does save sales. Live chat, of course, is a only short term fix for a site with poor usability. You can cut your live chat costs by improving the usability of your site through user testing.

Todd Follansbee is founder of WebMarketingResources.net. He is a usability and persuasion consultant who has been testing user behaviors on web sites for over 10 years. His methodology for improving conversions recently won a top ten award in Entrepreneur Magazine. For a limited time, Todd is offering a special small business one hour site review and consult for only $125. Improve your user experience and your bottom line. For more details visit here. http://www.webmarketingresources.net/reviewoffer.html