Drive Online Sales with Proactive Chat + Customer Context

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Take this common scenario: a customer is browsing through a store, putting a few items in their cart. However, just as they reach the final step of checking out, they hesitate.

At this crucial stage, in an in-store setting, a salesperson might approach them and initiate a proactive conversation with the customer. They would address any lingering questions, provide assistance, and gently guide the customer towards the register with a friendly prompt like, ‘Can I help ring you up?’

However, unlike their in-store counterparts, online customers are often left to navigate the purchasing process on their own. This lack of personalized attention puts them at a higher risk of abandoning their shopping cart without completing the purchase. Considering the recent surge in online shopping due to various events—a trend that is expected to continue—it has become increasingly vital for brands to be capable of engaging their online customers through proactive conversations, just as they would in a physical store.

Enter Proactive Chat.

With Proactive Chat, brands can bring some of that in-store salesmanship—the ability to identify and act on those all-important customer signals—and automatically send their customer the right message in the right moment, to help close the sale.

What Makes Gladly’s Proactive Chat Different?

It’s all in the customer context. Proactive chat has been around a while. And it’s gotten an undeserved reputation of being somewhat of an annoyance to customers rather than a help.

81% of consumers like it when a brand reaches out to them proactively on their site.

But it’s teaming proactive chat with context that makes all the difference.

Tailor your Message to your Customer

With context, you can take your proactive chat messages from generic to targeted in 2 seconds flat.

And being targeted with your messages, like referring specifically to an item a customer is looking at versus a more general greeting, greatly increases the chances of your customers engaging. After all, customers love it—and are more likely to make a purchase—when brands make the effort to personalize to them.

With Gladly’s Proactive Chat, you can create specific messages for every page on your site, each with its own set of triggers—like the URL the customer is on, or how long they spend on that page—via our Proactive Chat Campaign builder (below).

So, for example, if a customer spends more than 60 seconds looking at a pair of your Louis Button shoes, that might indicate they’re interested, but hesitating about buying them. In cases like those, you might want to automatically trigger a proactive chat message that specifically mentions your top-selling Louis Buttons, and if they had any questions around the fit.

REPORT

Empowering Agents to Sell: How CX Can Drive Revenue

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Send your Customers to the Right Agent

Having more context also means you’re better placed to send your customers to the right agent or team to close the sale. Because getting a customer to engage is half the battle—securing the sale lies in routing them to the best person to answer their questions, so they feel confident taking the plunge.

And that’s especially true when it comes to expensive or custom purchases, like the $3000 olive green sofa they’ve been going back and forth on for the last month.

That’s why we built the ability to team your Proactive Chat campaigns with Rules, so you can automatically route a customer that comes in through a specific campaign—for example, your Expensive Sofa Buyer Campaign—to the right team.

In this case, that might be your Interior Design team who can help your customer envision the couch in their space, put their concerns at rest, and close the sale. And they might even be able to recommend a side table to go with the couch while doing it.

Empower Agents with Customer Context

Of course, once you’ve routed your customer to the right person on your team, arming that person with additional customer context is key. After all, the more they know, the more tailored they can make the conversation to the customer.

That starts with giving your agent context around why the customer is engaging with you in the first place. With Gladly’s Proactive Chat, not only does the agent see the chat message that was sent to a customer in their timeline, they also see a quick snippet describing the specific Proactive Chat Campaign triggered by the customer.

And, as is always the case with any conversation in Gladly, if the customer has bought from you in the past, customer’s past purchases and product preferences, right at the agent’s fingertips, and on the very same screen they respond to customers on (so say goodbye to time-consuming toggling between platforms).

Giving your agents easy access to a customer’s past purchases and preferences provides invaluable insight into a customer’s taste, which in turn makes them better-equipped to make the right, targeted product recommendations. While having a customer’s past conversations just a scroll away gives agents an opportunity to remind customers of previous items they had their eye on, that they might want to revisit.

It’s a subtle way of not only showing your customers you know them, but helps your agents provide targeted recommendations that have a far higher chance of converting.

Give Managers Context on What’s Working (and What’s Not)

And agents aren’t the only ones who get some helpful context. Managers can also get invaluable context on how their Proactive Chat Campaigns are performing via our out-of-the-box Proactive Chat Report.

By tracking conversion across each Campaign—i.e. what percentage of the time a customer engages with the proactive chat message offered to them—managers can get a better understanding of which messages work better than other, and fine-tune their strategies to get maximum engagement every time.

Reach Your Customers in the Moment

Often in life, it pays to be the person that initiates and leads the charge. And that applies, especially,  to connecting with your customers online.

With Proactive Chat, it’s easier than ever to reach out to customers with the right message and at the right time, driving engagement that helps move a customer from ‘just browsing’ to ‘checkout’.