Customers give 10x more feedback via live chat than a contact us email link.
They’re also willing to say things they won’t bother with on email. This is
how we turned repeated questions into changes that improved sales for an email
marketing startup.
1. How do you compare to X competitor?
They know about our competitors? Of course they know!
They did their research and wanted to know about the specific differences.
Eventually, having typed it out so many times, we created an article
explaining the differences to point them to.
Then we realised that we may as well put a link to that article as an
auto-message on the home page and so far 400 people have read it. Conversions
went up rapidly.
2. What’s your cancellation policy?
Wow, didn’t we make that clear in the FAQ? People don’t always find and read
the FAQ! They prefer to get the answer directly from an agent.
At it’s core, our product is not something many people need for 12 months.
It’s more likely they’ll need it for a few months each year and besides which,
people don’t want to be tied into a contract. We had it in the FAQ but so many
people asked, we put it in the main header of the pricing page and repeated it
across other in-app messages.
3. Where are you based?
WTF, it’s right there in the…. oh!
This set off alarm bells. When we ourselves purchase a product from a company
we’re not familiar with, we check where that company is based and it should
have been obvious to users that we were a real and active company. We put a
flag and phone number on the home page with an activity icon. We also added
testimonials to key pages. We put our location in the about us page and rather
than just an address, we showed our beer on tap office and mentioned the
wonders of Soho in London ? Since, we’ve had the question at least once then
but it’s rare.
Result
We’ve had a distinct increase in sales. Around 20%+ in each of the first 2
months compared to previous months. It is difficult to measure sometimes
because of seasonal changes and other variables but this came in what’s
normally a low season. We are not doing anything different and we’ve had a
good uplift.
1% changes add up. A 1% improvement a day compounds to 37 times better in a
year. 1% a day on an initial investment of $100 becomes $3,778.34 = $100 * (1
- 1%) ^ 365. Live chat gives us the feedback to improve. We might not manage
1% a day, but we’ll damn well try.
Final note
If you’re a live chat user then give yourself the gift of sight with
Upscope.
We built it while working on the email startup while using live chat. It
helped us take even the toughest and most confused from sign up to purchase in
minutes, where normally they can take up hours in the day. Give it a try for
free ?
