Some people believe it is the easiest way to quickly get their problems solved, while many others simply hate hanging on the phone. It’s the caller’s attitude that makes phone support so challenging.

Growing creates additional needs

Markets and audiences’ size determine support tools. Smaller businesses start slow and usually without paying much attention to details such as customer service – website design, search engine optimization and advertisement tend to be more important than email address or phone number clearly visible on the website. Lack of a toll-free number, unreliable free chat widget and no dedicated people to answer the question. Does it seem familiar? I hope not!

Fortunately, this sad picture changes over time when business owners realize they need to care about much more than just sales and financial results. When this moment comes, the company opens up for customers – adds dedicated tools for managing customer emails, installs online chat software on the website, creates social media profile on Facebook or Twitter or simply starts in the most usual and traditional way – sets up an additional phone line for customer support.

The phone is ringing

Everything seems to be going right until first angry customers call with their issues. It might seem obvious, but the very first thing you need to do to improve your phone support is to pick up the phone! It should not ring more than 3 times before being answered, so even if you are not the one who’s responsible for it – do not ignore it and do not hesitate – pick it up if there’s no one else around.

Phone call still is the most popular way of getting support, because (at least theoretically) it gives customers the biggest chance of having their problem solved immediately.

Thank you for calling, how may I help you?

Although the Internet is full of best practices for phone support or call center guidelines, following the common sense is the right beginning. Identifying yourself and the company when picking up a phone and speaking clearly (should I mention no eating or chewing gum is allowed?) with a pleasant and polite tone will help you with starting a decent conversation.

There’s a big chance that the calling person will only ask several questions about your offer and services. Sometimes details like product availability or delivery time need to be clarified and good old phone seems like a right choice – cases like that are easy if you know your company and its procedures.

Placing customer on hold and transferring should be done only when there is no other choice and preceded by asking for permission. However, if there’s a chance that the wait time will be too long, it is better to ask for the name, number and the message to pass. The most important part though is to make sure that someone actually calls back the customer.

Put yourself in caller’s shoes

Answering the call is all about understanding the point of view of the caller and realizing where the issue is.

Kory Salsbury, an IT specialist with over 10 years of experience, described several crazy phone calls he was a part of in the article for InfoWorld. One of them involved an Indian gentleman who had very little familiarity with computers and who would call with extremely naive questions.

One evening after hours, he called and left a message that mystified us all: “The ball is bouncing. It is bouncing. And exploding!” he exclaimed in his endearing accent. When I called him back the next day, he repeated the story, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what he meant. He just kept saying, “The ball is bouncing, the ball is exploding!” During the call, a number of my coworkers collected outside of my cubicle, listening to the conversation, trying to supply tips, and giggling quietly.

Then it dawned on me. The screen saver! – set by someone to the ‘bouncing ball’ that shatters when it ‘hits’ the screen edges. I asked him to move the mouse. “What mouse? There is no mouse!” he exclaimed. “Press the space bar,” I said. “Oh! The ball went away!” he cheered.

Making the person on the line comfortable and allowing him/her to take the time to describe the issue while we provide some knowledge about the subject is a natural way of gaining trust. That helps with going through the resolution process together with the customer.

Keep your nerves down

There are moments when the relation between a caller and an operator is more tense. Try to be prepared – think ahead and minimize the negative emotions connected with phone support. Avoid incompetent employees picking it up, putting people on hold, playing annoying music and constantly transferring visitors. People appreciate calling back with a solution instead of keeping them hanging on the line. If they really have to wait, they’d rather listen to relevant information instead of silly tunes or even worse – silence.

Fred Reinheld of Bain&Company brought up an example of Rackspace hosting company in his entry on HBR Blog:

An employee on the phone with a customer during a marathon troubleshooting session heard the customer tell someone in the background that they were getting hungry. As she tells it, “So I put them on hold, and I ordered them a pizza. About 30 minutes later we were still on the phone, and there was a knock on their door. I told them to go answer it because it was pizza! They were so excited!”

Obviously I am not telling you to buy pizzas for all of your callers (although probably they wouldn’t mind). But doing a bit more than expected can give you an edge in overcoming what the actual issue was.

Phone used to be a must-have support tool. And even though running an online company may seems a bit different from traditional business, the customers out there still reach for their phones to call you. I hope this post will help you handle them better.

Cover photo courtesy of JD Hancock.

Customer service: all interactions between a customer and a product provider at the time of sale, and thereafter. – Business Dictionary

Introducing game mechanics to buyer-vendor interactions increases retention by providing fun. It’s the new hype and everybody wants a piece of it.

Gartner predictions state that 50% of companies will gamify their processes by 2015. Customer Service In the Cloud says:

By 2014, a gamified service for consumer goods marketing and customer retention will become as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon, and more than 70% of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application.“

Gamify to drive participation and engagement

Devoted communities built around products and services help them grow. An abandoned brand page or forum can bum a company out. Arguably the best example of a ghost-town is Google Plus. Even though the service provides amazing features like hangouts, you don’t log in because everybody’s playing Farmville-like games on Facebook, right?

It’s simple psychology, really. People have the need for self-expression, achievements and goals. They want to compete, score points and be rewarded for their efforts. As they grow (level up), they desire more perks, but for that, they need to play ball with the big boys – climb the leaderboard, so to speak. This is true both for private and career life.

Brand involvement goes a long way when gamified, boosting retention of customers and making them happier. It’s easier to quit a service that doesn’t promote a long-term relationship. It’s hard, and even a bit nostalgic, to delete a LinkedIn profile which says that it’s 100% competed. This is why telco companies offer better prices for people prolonging their contracts.

Remember: acquiring a new customer involves more costs than keeping an existing one.

Having fun is what it’s all about – thought leaders know it

There are quite a few outstanding examples of gamification out there. From software suppliers to sports and financial institutions – everybody’s doing it!

Everybody hated Clippy, the office assistant from Microsoft Office. Well, not any more. He’s the office hero now, teaching you how to actually use MS Word. It’s ridiculously fun, and just goes to show that what Lisa Loeffler, leading researcher and analyst at Convince & Convert says, is true: “We might hate the players, but we don’t hate the game”.

American Express uses an app to promote itself via Twitter, rewarding customers by special deals or offers. Tweet your way to savings, they say. The more you do it, the better the deals. Just like gathering resources in a real time strategy game, don’t you think?

How did Nike+ iPod get runners spending hundreds of dollars on their hobby, when all they need is a decent pair of sneakers? They gamified the run itself. Not only can runners track their pace and performance, but they also can share that information with their fellow sportsmen, compare, and even dare to go further and faster next time. In result, whole cities around the world compete with each other.

Foursquare, the “check-in” mobile app, alongside Starbucks, award badges for visiting coffee houses. There are no freebies involved – only the sole satisfaction of visiting more of those than other friends on Foursquare. It’s somewhat like the ever popular fashion of collecting Hard Rock Cafe T-shirts. Only this time, it’s online and competitive.

CSRs and customers – the role playing game

You already know that each interaction between your customer service representatives and customers in an opportunity you cannot afford to waste. In Layman’s terms – a game. Imagine that hand in hand, customers and CSRs struggle with the forces of evil (uplugged printer), eventually freeing the princess (plugging in the printer), and living happily ever after (buying more toner).

• Reward customers for self-service – If they log in to your forum and help one another, promote them with special perks, say how insightful they are, make them feel a valued member of the community around your product. Incentivise chatter by titling participants with seniority or experience badges.
• Ensure the time customers spend on hold is fun – Did Youtube ever seem to take forever to load that Lady Gaga video? Scroll the progress bar all to the left, hit your arrow keys: left, then fast up. Play snake when on hold. Genius!
• Empower agents – Supporters are key players. True, they can be rated by customers (kings!) but it’s them who put on the armor and fight the dragon. Give them a dashboard where they can compete for ratings or satisfaction levels, and make sure you incentivise them with i.e Donut Day, or other fun office events. Quality and satisfaction will go off the chart!

Play responsibly

Like everything, gamification has its price. To provide a happy and playful environment, you will need to sacrifice short term benefits, and focus on developing meaningful relationships. Always be sure your customers leave your store with full pockets, ready to come back some other day. Be advised though: do not gamble away your profits or authority. After all, it’s you who deals the cards!

Being prepared for all kinds of situations and events is definitely a quality that every online marketer should aim to acquire. It’s easy when there are no complaints, when your customers are satisfied and when you are making nothing but good decisions.

When things go sideways however, you should be ready, prepared to act swiftly to dismantle the situation. This is important due to a couple of reasons. Here are some points you should consider when a mistake on your part occurs.

Be quick

If you don’t stay on your toes and act fast, you may very easily lose the hard earned trust you worked to build up through the years. Funny thing about trust, it often takes small mistakes on your part – accidental overcharge, delay in delivery, temporary lack of access to your service and your customer may feel completely let down and betrayed. Do whatever in your power to resolve the problem and prove that you are trustworthy.

Toyota lost a lot of clients due to losing their trust. They decided that common acceleration malfunctions were not a just reason for a decent trade-in and wanted to make money on their own mistake – they took one year cars bought for $20,000, offered only $10,000 for the trade-in while selling the very same used cars for around $17,900.

Transparency earns trust

Don’t try denying your mistakes. They will come up sooner or later anyways, leaving you in a bad light. You have to be transparent, describe things how they really are. If your delivery system had some kind of malfunction, describe the problem to your customers. If some part of your stock was damaged, don’t try to blame it on the buyer. Your customers deserve to know what’s happening, especially when they are worried. Don’t let them stay in the black!

In the fallout of recent hacker attack on Zappos, the customers were notified right away about the possible leak of their personal information but that’s not all what Zappos decided to do. They redeployed all their support reps and temporarily disabled their phone lines to answer all the emails they were receiving. That’s a good example of how such situations can be handled. Turning off phone lines may seem like a bad idea, however, in a situation where you receive thousands of emails, answering phone calls takes way too much time. They decided it is better to temporarily answer only email inquiries and restore the phone lines after the crisis has been averted than to leave thousands of clients in the dark.

FedEx and their package-over-the-fence crisis is also a good and well known example of how to react in difficult situations. PR experts hailed it as very good way of dealing with company mistakes. The crisis revolved around a FedEx delivery man that was caught red-handed when “delivering” the package to a client in a rather unusual way. In a video that circulated the Internet like wildfire, he is seen throwing the package, which was a new monitor, over the recipients fence. FedEx responded to this with a long and sincere apology video. They didn’t stop at that though. Apart from apologizing, they also informed the public that something is actually done to prevent such cases in the future, i.e. used this case in employee training as an example of how precious cargo should not be treated.

Don’t leave mistakes unattended

Don’t wait. Act. Doing nothing can be your biggest vice in crisis situations. Nothing says “We don’t care about our customers” more like posts, comments and tweets without your replies. Try to answer any questions about existing problems as soon as possible, even if you don’t have a solution, or it is very simple to implement, it is crucial that you keep your social media channels monitored and handled.

This was the problem Sony made when after their Playstation Network got hacked and they were hesitant to inform its users about possible identity and credit card information theft, Jason Schreier, writer and media junkie from Wired Magazine informs. Such actions only lead to more confusion, and eventually, instill fear in customers.

The Red Cross didn’t made the same mistake as Sony did. Due to smart management, they handled their rouge tweet matter quick and without unnecessary delay. A simple, yet possibly volatile tweet appeared on their company Twitter feed when one of the employees mistakingly posted with the company account instead of his own. The employee tweeted about a beer party that is about to happen, involving some Dogfish beer. The Red Cross dismantled the faux pas quickly, deleting the accidental tweet and making a short and funny statement that assured its followers that “The Red Cross is sober and we’ve confiscated the keys”. The whole situation ended rather positively when Dogfish joined the discussion and encouraged donations. A possibly dangerous situation turned good, thanks to a correct response.

A few things to remember

Difficult situations like these can ruin years of trust building efforts in mere hours and you have to be quick to dismantle those ticking time bombs. You should follow these guidelines to resolve such situations:

• Respond as soon as possible to a situation, you social media channels should never go silent to your customers questions and worries
• Don’t wait for your customers to start making complaints; make the first move
• Don’t neglect any problems, even if they don’t seem like much
• Monitor your social media feeds for any unsatisfied customers
• Work on your communication flow; make sure that in case of emergency the right people are notified and ready for action
• If you happen to upset your customers, you should make all efforts to make it up to them

Remember that social media channels shouldn’t just serve to this purpose alone. There is much untapped power wasting in them if they are used only to patch your relations with your clients. Utilize that power and create stronger and better relations with your clients that will last, even if you happen to slip from time to time. Trust building starts right here!

Photo courtesy of Pierre Beteille.

There’s a business you run: an office with employees in it and a product or service that people want. Customers… everything you do is for them and they are the most precious value you have. Right?

Customers vote with their wallets

The relationship between you is simple – they vote for a product/service with their wallets. Whenever they approach you, it is totally up to you whether that affection for the product you sell is sustained or does it simply go “puff”, and it’s gone!

There are things about customer service that most of the businesses already know: support agents should be helpful, polite, show appreciation, respect and value the customers. The question is: why doesn’t it always look like that? Why are the customers put on hold, even though over 50% of them hang up and 34% never call again? Why support agents don’t care about customer’s needs, even though 3 out of 5 customers take their business to the competitors after poor customer service experience?

Change of orientation in seller-buyer relationship

There are several anwers to the questions above. Even only several decades ago, business owners were in a much more comfortable situation – they always had an attention of the customers. They were the center of the market and there was always a demand for their product. At this moment however, in the so-called “New Economy” or an information economy, everything turned around and markets became customer-oriented.

Apple knows how to create demand for products - one of few places where customers wait in queues

Product life-cycles keep getting shorter, demand for products is unpredictable and wide customization options made consumers masters of the situation. Adjust or die – there’s no other option for businesses. It’s also time for customer service to catch up and fight for customers, not fight against them.

Customers becoming brand ambassadors and referrers

Easier said than done, right? Kristina Evey, president of Centric Strategies, customer service management company says people no longer buy products or services – they buy relationships:

“The No. 1 reason that people leave a place of business is based on how they were treated. Smart companies understand the value of their current customer base, and recognizing what they need to do in order to keep them. By focusing on the customers, the smart companies are really broadening their customer base by increased referrals.”

An investment in customer service can later turn out being a source of new customers. It can become an efficient, very credible and free advertisement, but managed improperly, can also cause a lot of trouble.

According to White House Office of Consumer Affairs satisfied customers share their experience with 4-6 people, while a dissatisfied customers tell 9-15 people about their negative experience. Moreover, about 13% of those unhappy customers will tell more than 20 (!) people about their problem (yes, unfortunately people tend to talk more about their bad experiences).

Numbers reflect the true power of word of mouth – stats mentioned above clearly show how customer happiness brings an additional value to a company and how bad experience turns out to be an additional, unnecessary cost.

Know your customers by heart

Some customers keep coming back. They like the company, its products and enjoy the way it is doing business. How often do you come back to your favorite pubs or restaurants, where a waitress or a bartender know your name, favorite dish or drink? They will change a channel on TV for you without asking – because they know that you are really into football, but not a big fan of hockey.

Bartenders use interpersonal skills to provide great customer service. Sometimes they even make friends out of customers.

Asking ‘How is it going?’ opens up a chance of creating that special kind of bond, a series of contacts that later turn into a relationship – where knowledge about customers usually goes far beyond their names – where selling is not an ultimate goal. Returning customers love it and they will keep coming to get more of that and to buy something too.

The key and the ultimate goal is to get to know them as people, not as buyers.

This is a first of the articles about customer service best practices. Read part 2 that covers phone support.

I’ll help you build customer loyalty, and get free publicity by branding your product the way top sellers do. Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy your day, learning to make your fans market for you.

Delivering the promise

A brand ideally means sustainable promise. Harley Davidson’s logo is cited to be the most often tattooed brand, and there’s a lot of reasoning to it. Their motorcycles for decades promise a lifestyle of adventure on top of a beautiful and well engineered roadster. On the opposite, as found in Branding Strategy Insider, advertised fast foods don’t look nearly as delicious in reality as their paper printed counterparts, failing to deliver the promise.

Being able to match the expectations with reality will result in positive chatter about your product. John Jantch, marketing, digital technology coach and best-selling author is direct about it: “People trust the recommendation of a friend”. The thing is, no one will evangelize brands that feel fake or unreliable. Delivering the promise should be the first step in building brand awareness.

Promises and reality don’t mix every time. People may reach out to your customer service and complain. Take an example from this Snapple ad, and keep your brand’s image simple. Don’t overdo. The reward is trust and loyalty, which are required to get evangelists.

Brand recognition through customer service

A great opportunity lies between the lines of customer service communication. Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO, makes a great point, stating that when approached for support, “You have the customer’s undivided attention for five to ten minutes, and if you get the interaction right, what we’ve found is that the customer remembers the experience for a very long time and tells his or her friends about it.”

SmugMug’s help desk is serviced by super heroes. It’s a promise of superior quality with a pinch of fun. The company offers online photo albums and that’s exactly what people expect from such a product. Since they are friends because of similar interests, they are prone to recommend, thus raise brand awareness.

SmugMug’s help desk is serviced by Super Heroes!

The promise is outstanding service, which is great both for promotion, and retention. In addition, the media loves when customer service goes cool, and gives such brands free publicity!

Evangelists are invaluable

A brand evangelist is a person who attempts to build lots of support for a given promise in order to establish it as a standard in his network.. He will endorse your ideas through social media, and most probably address your target market.

Recruiting someone like that is hard, but not impossible, and definitely worth the effort. Provided your brand delivers promises and keeps the product cool and simple, they will eventually show up.

One of the mechanisms of evangelizing brands through social media is what Mashable calls the Interest Graph. Basically, friends share interests and tend to discuss them with others. Twitter makes it possible for anyone to reach within just seconds. An evangelist does this full time, day by day, free of charge.

Awareness is measured on involvement levels

For brand managers delivering the promise can be very difficult, due to limited reporting capabilities. Measuring how many substitutes of Oreo’s can a vertical remember isn’t the way to go. Brand involvement is measured by person’s level of interest.

Katie Paine, Social Media Expert, in her study on brand involvement, suggests what needs to be measured on which level, in order to understand growth of brand awareness online. Searchers are new customers who have interacted with your product for the first time. Lurkers are those who got intrigued, and are looking to learn more. Casuals know you, and sometimes talk about you. Actives will take lively interest in your doings, and Defenders will evangelize you along the way! As involvement level grows, reporting focus should be put less on raw page visits, and more on comments and networking.

Growing involvement level should start with more visits, and end with networking and comments.

Low level involvement applies to FMCG i.e. groceries. Awareness can make a huge difference in choices, since in highly competitive markets the brand is what tells customers that the product is worth their money. High-tech or luxury offerings on the other hand imply higher level involvement. Customers build opinions and feelings around designer clothes, cars or smartphones. The iPhone vs. BlackBerry duel is not about functionality, but about evangelism. CBC announces that Canadian sales of iPhone have beaten RIM’s (originating from Canada!) devices and there’s no stop to discussion on Twitter!

Up to date there is no effective method of measuring the overall awareness so it is key to keep customers involved on all levels with consistency in promises and reality.

Customers like products, but love brands

Let’s face it, a lot of products are nearly indistinguishable. Take Pepsi and Coca-Cola for instance. People do notice slight differences in flavour and sweetness, but at the end of the day, they’re just evangelists of one or the other. Today’s technology makes it tremendously easy to copy a quality product. It is said, that Twitter can be reproduced within a week. The attempt is not made however, due to uncertainty of delivering the same promise as Twitter does. To survive in today’s economy, you must choose to brand your services and ensure to always deliver the promise.

The new way of presenting your Facebook fan page – the timeline, is about to roll out on all the fan pages, whether you are ready for the change or not. There’s still some time so get yourself prepared without even breaking a sweat!

The change

All Facebook brand pages will automatically convert to the new design on March 30th. The timeline has been available for the public and their personal profiles for quite some time now and people had a lot of time to play with the new feature. Many really innovative timelines have appeared since the change went live on personal profiles.

You might wonder what is going to change on your brand page and what it would take to create one. The following paragraphs will guide you through the process of redesigning your brand page and showcase the changes, while stressing their use in your social media efforts.

Show yourself to the world

To start off, you will need a cover photo. It’s the most eye-catching part of your new brand page. Guys at Hongkiat.com prepared a template that should make it easier for you to design your cover photo. The cover photo is 851px (width) by 315px (height). You should also remember that your profile picture is now an integral part of the timeline. This can be utilized to create a cover photo and profile picture combo that would complement each other (e.g. Ford and Pizza Hut have managed to do this quite well).

The profile picture should be at least 180x180px. It shouldn’t be too detailed since it will be presented in a resized size of 32x32px in all your posts. A typical approach is to place your brand logo here, since it’s easily recognizable by your customers.

Tell your story

When your new cover and profile photos are ready, the next step is to fill out important information about your company. You can highlight photos, likes and apps that you think are important for your brand.

Amanda Webb, from Sabre Hospitality Solutions, suggests that you should drive your visitors attention to the apps you want them interact with. Doing so will allow you increase your visitors engagement and further advertise your brand. When creating the graphics for the apps you might want to remember that the new thumbnails are 110x74px, which is way bigger than the old app icons.

Companies can post specific milestones they have achieved on their timelines, as well as photos showing the behind the scenes side of their business, giving it more personal look. Additionally, it is now easier to drive visitors attention to specific events happening in the company by pinning them down on the timeline.

Starbucks pins information about their achievements and current events.

You can modify the content of your timeline as you wish by using the pen and star icons on your timeline posts. The pen will bring the specific post higher up so it will stay visible longer than other, less relevant posts. This allows for freely managing the contents of your timeline.

Use the star to make specific events or posts wide and more visible for your visitors. Use this feature when you have something special to share, for example, you won a particular award or you have a really great story to share.

Staring a post will make it wide while pinning a post moves it up on the timeline.

Amy Kattan, Socialnomics, describes the new timeline as a way to provide your fans with background knowledge and create a personal bond with them. Every company has some interesting stories to share and now it’s the perfect moment to do so! Sharing even a simple story about a company trip or special event will spark a lot of interest in your fans. People love to learn that their favorite brand or company is made of real people with real personalities and real life stories to tell.

Keep in touch

The new timeline allows for a more direct way of connecting with your visitors. They can send you direct messages, which creates a whole new way of earning a loyal following. Replying to a direct message takes little time, but can mean a whole lot to a satisfied customer. Let your fans know that you appreciate the feedback and try to respond to all their messages.

Customers can comment on specific posts letting you know what they think about the current events regarding your company. If you manage to create the kind of following, where users share their views and opinions on your wall, you are one step closer to creating a powerful and recognizable brand. The word will eventually spread, more and more people will talk about it, sharing the news on their own Facebook walls. Encourage your visitors and interact with them.

Mixed Opinions

There’s a lot of opinions on the topic, both in favor and against the changes. According to Christine Erickson from Mashable, the change could be a potential downfall for small companies that don’t have big content creation capabilities. You can read a lot of negative comments under articles on Facebook Timeline – people are criticizing various aspects of the change and worry that it will affect all the small companies out there that lack the resources to have dedicated social media teams on board.

I believe the change can do more good than bad. Every time there is a major shift in a service people will get angry, they grew accustomed to certain parts of the service and now they have to go through the learning process again. However, timeline offers greater possibilities in terms of telling your story to customers. Even if it may take a bit longer to set it up and then manage, it’s certainly worth it.

Learn from the best

There are a ton of companies that have already updated their Facebook brand pages with the new design. We know from own experience that this process may take way longer than expected, so if you are still looking for design ideas, here are some Facebook Timeline cover examples of our favorite designs that we stumbled upon when doing research.

ESPN showcases some of the fan-made signs that can be visible in their transmissions.

Porsche uses the cover photo to advertise their new Boxster.

Monster Energy displays their ties to and support of extreme sports.

If you already have a timeline published or you plan to do so soon, be sure to share it with us. We can’t wait to see what our readers have come up with!

If we all know that user “adoption” is a key to success — then why does it seem always like an after thought? Then again, why is my desktop riddled with so many shortcuts to unrealized promises?

Every year billions of dollars are spent on fancy new software products and services which caught the eyes of a decision maker. Each was pitched with a robust list of features as silver bullets to a wide range of business challenges, and most often the initial budget is blown in configuration and installation and everyone is exhausted by the time the project turns to “adoption.” Too often the result is disappointment, unrealized goals, and executives that move on to the next fancy doodad.

LiveChat can be different!

By following some simple guidelines that are built right into the software platform, your organization’s commitment to deploy live customer support will quickly become an indispensable sales, marketing, service and support tool.

These guidelines were developed through a comprehensive assessment of the success and failures of deploying LiveChat with dozens of our clients. Certain patterns emerged which quickly became the guidelines for our business development team to facilitate a successful adoption process. I hope you find them equally helpful to your team.

Here’s the list of 10 Simple Guidelines for Improving LiveChat Adoption:

1. Plan is Not Just for Launch

2. Take The Time to Customize Your Set-up

3. Branding Matters

4. Make changes – lots of them.

5. Customized Invitations

6. Start New Operators as Passive Responders

7. Integrate with your CRM

8. Integrated with SaaS

9. Not Just for Prospects

10. Use the Social Media Buttons

1. A Plan is Not Just for Launch

Whenever we deploy new technology into our organization — or that of a client’s — we make sure that we develop an “adoption plan.” Oh sure, these plans can be complex with sophisticated behavioral analysis — or they can be a good check-lists of activities. Such plans are not just a way to guide us during the launch, but to provide a roadmap for ongoing improvement of our use of the tool and the systems it is meant to improve.

Action Ideas: Understand what success looks like. Consider the front line chat operators. Confirm who “owns” the what part of the process.

2. Take The Time to Customize Your Set-up

Adoption must start in the planning process — not after deployment. Our team has spent hundreds of hours learning how people responded to chat differently on different sites. The nature of your company’s product or service and the role of the website in your customer sales process has significant impact on the configuration of LiveChat. Once deployed, you then start to modify the visitor’s experience.

Action Ideas: Grow Leaders. Start Small. Expand in Steps.

3. Branding Matters

No matter what size company you are, a lot of thought, and often significant cost, went into your branding. There is either an implicit or an explicit style guide that covers colors, fonts, and use of your logo. Don’t throw it all out the window when you deploy LiveChat. The flexibility of the LiveChat platform provide “best-of-class” customization options for every aspect of the communication with your site visitor: from the presentation of the live chat option, to the invitations, to the actual chat panel.

Action Ideas: Include Your Brand. Use Real Operator Pictures. Don’t Forget Mobile.

4. Make changes — lots of them

As we integrate LiveChat more deeply into our customer’s online experience, we generate a tremendous amount of rich interaction data. This data allows our web design and content team to suggest changes to the sites’ user interface –especially our Business-to-Consumer (B2C) sites — to reflect the type of questions we have received from site visitors responding to our invitations to chat.

Action Ideas: Add Your Webmaster. Share the Highlights. Test New Content.

5. Customized Invitations

One of the outstanding features of LiveChat is the robust customized invitation feature, so we tested numerous invitations for specific actions including time on the site, search words used, referring page, and/or sequence of pages visited. We learned which invitations worked based on asking various personalized invitations. Then a series of automated invitations that address the specific interests of the site visitor were generated. This greatly enhancing the response rates.

Action Ideas: Ask Open-end Questions. Enhance your Squeeze Pages. Customize Based on Referrer.

6. Start New Operators as Passive Responders

Extensive use of the customized invitations, especially activating the “time on site” option, which allows operators (who is typically someone in sales/marketing) to be doing something else while receiving incoming chat requests.

Action Ideas: Demonstrate Real Value. Provide Ongoing Support. Reward Performance.

7. Integrate with your CRM

LiveChat also allows seamless integration directly into our CRM platform. This ensure consistency in leadership messaging about the critical importance of every step of the CRM process being documented in the CRM platform. LiveChat currently support archiving chats directly into several CRM platforms.

Action Ideas: Link Information Requests. Ensure All Have Access. Monitor “Chat” Entries.

8. Integrated with SaaS

An unexpected surprise was that by leveraging iframes and other programming tricks we were able to embed LiveChat inside our CRM and ERP platforms thus providing immediate live client support to support the adoption and use of these tools. By turning LiveChat towards internal customers we are able to leverage it’s immediate response power associated with specific user action to support the adoption of our SaaS platforms.

Action Ideas: Consider During Design. Treat as a Feature. Don’t Forget Mobile Applications.

9. Not Just for Prospects

We have found that nearly 50% of the actual users of our LiveChat deployments are current clients or distributors that come to ask a quick question, get a piece of information, or to facilitate a referral!! This was a surprise to us, and we had to reconfigure deployment to match this need. It has permitted us to leverage live customer support throughout the client life-cycle.

Action Ideas: Treat Existing Customers. Know the History. Your Intranet is online too.

10. Use the Social Media Buttons

The web has become social. You can’t avoid it. And really, why would you? Connecting with your current and prospective customers is what it is all about. By leveraging the social media buttons to connect your clients with your social media marketing you are providing them a link to your various social media platforms.

Action Ideas: Visit Yourself. Friendly Traction Help. Keep it Current.

Focus on the Relationship

In the end a successful organization engages their all their stakeholders in a relationship. We have found that live customer support is emerging as an important tool is supporting the feedback loops that allow client relationships to deepen.

As more online users become comfortable with live chat support — as on Facebook — the desire for the informal conversation that comes from the highly responsive platform provides a fantastic tool for your overall business growth strategy.

More Resources

The Author

Joseph Barisonzi is an accomplished executive with fifteen years of experience and a verifiable record increasing organizational value, enhancing productivity, streamlining operations and improving sales performance. He is a principal with Strategic Growth Initiative, a California-based business development firm that helps companies grow. They have a primary interest in Busy Worker Bee, a marketing production company; eBee5 a business development team which works with companies seeking immigrant investor money; and SugarPros, an adoption-oriented CRM consulting firm.

Joseph is a dynamic and inspirational leader with a strong entrepreneurial spirit and talent for grasping innovative ideas, developing comprehensive strategies and implementing actionable plans. Joseph can be found on the web starting at the portal: http://about.me/jbarisonzi

The new chat window takes all the functions of its predecessor and brings new improvements in terms of easy navigation and wider reach. The best part about it? It is persistent, your visitors will no longer have to keep your website and the chat window open in separate browser tabs.

Every time your visitor switches to another page, the chat window will follow, enabling for a number of benefits:

• An embedded chat window increases the number of chats considerably. Your visitors will find it always at their cursors’ length. According to our statistics, they are more likely to start a chat with this kind of window in place.
• Higher Invitation to chat conversion. We noticed about 40% rise in the number of chats on sites with enabled embedded chat window (and in several cases – this number went up to insane 300%!)
• A lot of synergy with our Push Pages functionality. Now you can push a link to your customer and open the new page without the need to switch between browser tabs. Thanks to this, pointing your visitors in the right direction is considerably easier.

Embedded chat window offers also:

• Functions like our Visitor Satisfaction system and Social Media Integrations.
• Greater degree of customization with the use of custom CSS.
• Easier and shorter implementation process. Only one installation code is required now, allowing for seamless integration with our solution.

When we designed our embedded chat window we didn’t forget about the rising number of customers who browse pages on their mobile devices. With embedded chat window on your site, they can communicate in an easy and comfortable way, that is sure to go appreciated.

Don’t take our words for granted, go to our site, see how easy it is to navigate and talk with our representatives at the same time and feel the difference! You can see an example implementation of the chat window on our page.

Be one of the first to try out the embeded chat window – easily activate it in your control panel.

LiveChat integrates with Assistly to improve customer service by speeding up the support process. Chat agents are now able to escalate inquiries to Assistly tickets using a single hit of a button.

What is Assistly and how does the integration look like?

Assistly (www.assistly.com) is a web-based service that allows you to keep your customer support communication in one place.

How does the integration work and save time?

Manual transfer of a chat into a ticket form, with passing e-mails and transcripts usually (from testimonials and my own expertise) takes about 2 minutes. Chat agents tend to multitask, serve many customers concurrently, so that time may vary. Using the integration, agents not only save 2 minutes per inquiry (that means saving an entire hour each 30 chats!)- they gain a lot of time to improve their customer service performance on a daily basis.

Frontline chat agents love it! During the chat, all an Operator does, is clicks the Assistly button to make a quick ticket:

• Escalated chats can be managed by higher tier support staff
• Sales inquiries can be passed onto sales teams

How to start?

More details can be found on our tutorial page.

And if you are looking for a tool that will improve your customer service, we encourage you to sign up for free Assistly trial and take it for a 30-day test drive.

Features the most useful and popular among our users were also presented, including: tag-based canned responses, social media integrations, LiveChat on Facebook fan page and our mobile applications.

Don’t worry if you missed the webinar – we have it recorded on video – you can watch it below:

Here is the list of the additional materials mentioned in the video:

• Learn how to boost invite to chat ratio.
• Find out more about the Triggers and Goals/Conversion Meter.
• See how online retailer ScotteVest.com closes 25% of their chats with sales using LiveChat.