Website chat has become very popular because it feeds the need for instant satisfaction. This need may arise from thoughts like, I need more product information before I buy or I want to jump the support queue and talk to a real person. Chat is very effective in both scenarios.

From a selling perspective, there is never a better time to start a conversation than when a prospect is on your website. They have just invested effort to find your site, view your offering, and are often ready to purchase. You need to convert this opportunity before the visitor drifts off to visit a competitor’s website. Chat is proven to engage visitors, greatly increase conversions, lower processing costs, and provide direct feedback about your website’s ability to deliver the answers prospects need.

From a customer retention perspective, chat enables your company to be effective at dealing with support requests while providing superior service and reducing costs. Other benefits include;

• Answer support requests faster – better for the customer
• Answers are simple and accurate because agents can exchange information
• Help more than one customer at a time
• Avoid speech issues such as foreign languages or bad connections
• Avoid call costs for the customer
• Weblinks can be sent via chat (for example to knowledge articles)
• Live analytics can be used to route and match visitors to agents
• Pro-actively start chats as a prospect moves around the website
• Chat can be switched off at any time if needed
• Easily manage quality assurance through recorded or monitored chat conversations.

It is logical to conduct chat sessions from within your CRM as this is where you create or update prospect and customer information. A typical chat sequence is as follows:

•  An interested visitor arrives on your website
• A chat window pops up after a predetermined time and asks a question
• If a visitor replies, the chat software alerts an agent who can respond from within the CRM
• A new lead record, or case, is created and the conversation attached to the record.

In Salesforce® Service Cloud® the chat functionality is called Live Agent and is ideal for Support teams. For pricing information on the Live Agent add-on, view the Service Cloud pricing page. Live Agent has some great features:

• Support for pre-chat forms that ask the customer questions prior to the chat. The answers can be used to route the chat to the most suitable agent, or simply allow the agent to get a jump start on the conversation. Answers can be recorded in the case record
• The initial chat window is personalized with the agent’s name
• The visitor is validated as real before being linked to an agent
• To improve response, a Sneak Peek feature lets agents see what a visitor is typing before the message has been sent
• Whisper messages let supervisors communicate with an agent that is currently in a chat session. The supervisor can offer help without disturbing the agent's chat
• Quick Text provides text snippets that an agent can use for commonly used answers
• Post chat surveys to provide chat feedback
• Supervisors can choose to view chats as a means of quality control

FuseIT is fortunate to work with international companies that use our connectors to cleverly integrate Salesforce® CRM with their websites, usually Sitecore® based. We believe technologies like Live Agent, and others, like website personalization, are changing the face of marketing like never before.

FuseIT offers a range of scalable, flexible, and affordable enterprise software integration solutions and has a world-class team of Salesforce and Sitecore professionals.

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