Adding a “Human” touch to Online Shopping
Ever faced a situation where you are just unable to locate the specific item you are looking for in a website – be it a rate plan or the accessory product or maybe some specific product. This is similar to losing yourself in the aisles of a supermarket looking for the specific brand /product you want, which is hidden behind a maze of products that you have no interest in?
In a supermarket, a shop-floor attendant would drop by and politely ask “May I help you?” Online shopping could be much more impersonal; one can’t get advice on whether the product meets your needs as you would ask a shopping assistant.
“Proactive” chat solutions address this issue to a degree by using a business-rules based engine, with pre-defined business rules, to decide when to proactively display a “May I help you” pop-up. A survey by InstantService showed that…. Web chatters spend 35% more per order… 20% of web chats resulted in a completed purchase.
Though this addresses the needs for providing online assistance, it comes with a new set of issues to tackle – some people view it extremely intrusive, there have been privacy concerns stating that they feel their movements are being monitored on the web. And this can potentially drive shoppers away!
This is where predictive analytics makes a difference - Based on the different responses to the proactive chat pop-up by different customers, predictive models continuously learn & adapt and determine: Whether the user would need “help” online, what is the right time to pop the screen.
By optimally identifying the right customer to offer the proactive chat service, we can dramatically improve revenue per visit and reduce associated drop-out rates which are the core issues for any e-commerce website.
In case you are a user of proactive chat or provide proactive chat solutions, we would be glad to hear / discuss your viewpoints.