Remember the last time you walked into a store and there was no one to help you? What did you think of the store? My guess is, nothing positive. Most of the shop owners and managers nowadays are well aware of that fact. But can the same be said of e-commerce? Do the managers apply the same rules in the online world?

The common thinking is online shops save a lot by automating sales and support services. At the very best, auto responders and automated FAQ list dispensers or 800 support phones are set up, and… you can sit back and check your bank account watching the numbers grow bigger and bigger as you sip your gin&juice. Seems like a perfect world. Well, sorry to disappoint you. It doesn’t work that way.

The truth is, current online service levels would never be accepted offline. Web companies spend huge sums on marketing to attract customers. But they’re in danger of losing them when they fail to provide adequate customer service.

Online shoppers abandon more than two-thirds of their almost completed purchases at the checkout, often because they can’t get a prompt answer to an important question, according to surveys.

Without proper customer support, companies virtually deprive themselves of a large part of their profits.


LIVECHAT software has been developed to fill this gap. Chat is probably the most effective technique that offers the same level of customer support online as shoppers are used to offline. Now, when a customer has a question about that new bike or jacket, she clicks on the LIVECHAT icon and a chat window pops up, with a company staffer on the other side willing to help you. They can answer questions immediately or can suggest alternatives, just like traditional clerk would. Unlike a traditional clerk, however, the support chatter can handle four or five customers at once.

At the cost of $33 per month for each operator using its software, it’s much cheaper than 800 lines, and definitely cheaper than lost sales. Think about it.

According to recent studies, almost half of marketers say their businesses are not effectively taking advantage of online lead generation as a way of growing their business.
Four out of five online marketers see online lead generation as a rapidly developing area, and almost two thirds of online marketers consider it to be its own distinct area of online marketing. However, not even half of them say that their companies are effectively exploiting online lead generation as a way of increasing revenue.

It seems that online methods will become more and more effective than offline methods when it comes to generating leads in the business to client area. There are huge opportunities, irrespective of whether these are eventually converted online or offline.

As more and more e-marketers are beginning to value conversion rates above traffic data as the primary tool of measuring online advertising’s effectiveness we’d like to share our thoughts on the issue of conversion.


There are two main types of converting website visitors - the search type and the pitch type. In search type, the conversion relies on the user and is natural, organic; paid keywords and SEO are the tools used to increase the chance that the user will pick this particular site out of all the search records.

Pitch type, relies on the user first seeing and responding to an ad, which can take a form of a banner, video, animation etc. Then he’s attracted to a website and usually lead through a sequence of web pages. Marketers’ most typical goal in this scenario is to get the respondent’s contact information. And this is where the advertiser’s creativity and/or creativity of his advertising agency come into play as the sequence of the pages-screens must create a smooth and pleasant experience for the visitor.

What’s interesting, studies reveal that in various product categories more than 50% of all the purchases by consumers who conducted online searches occur offline, not online. This is why the typical measurements like online conversions and click-through rates don’t give a full perspective of web search campaigns.

What can we learn from it? Marketers shouldn’t rely on web-only metrics as the ROI of such campaigns can be much higher that the numbers usually taken into consideration might indicate.

There are two words in English that might be the most important ones regarding not only customer relations, customer service, but also sales and marketing.

Responsiveness: The ability to engage your consumers, measured in the length of time that elapses between consumer question or comment and your response.

Response: The nature and quality of that response.

We all know the autoresponses that are so common today. They may sound like this: Your comment/question is important to us. We will get back to you in the order your comment was received…


Now try to put yourself in your customer’s position and think how big a difference such a reaction would make to you: Hello and welcome to (your company name). Thank you so much for taking the time to contribute. My name is Anna and I’m your operator. Is there anything I could help you with?

More and more companies today provide what we might call a “human response”, sending customer a message: We heard you.

And that simple message makes a HUGE difference.