Web Greeters Offer Opportunity to Keep in Touch With Online Visitors

Online businesses are in a fierce competition to lure in visitors to their sites and turn those visitors to customers. Still, between 95 percent and 97 percent of them click away within two minutes. A 3-year-old company in Chicagoland has come up with a simple but smashing solution: Web Greeters. Web Greeters offers Web site owners an opportunity to keep in touch with their online visitors in real time with real salespeople available on the Web site. The idea is not to wait for the visitor to click but to greet every qualified visitor and say: "Hello. I am the Web site greeter. How can I help?" before they end up on a competitor's Web site. After providing this service for the past three years and our extensive research before that, we found that most visitors who end up on a Web site by mistake leave within the first 30 to 40 seconds. The rest would click away usually to a competitor's Web site within 2 minutes. Of the ones who stayed for 2 minutes, they can't even remember which site they visited the next morning. Because of this knowledge, we greet the visitor first to engage them in a pleasant chat and to keep them on the site longer. Our service not only provides a software tool but also a small team of well-trained sales personnel allocated to each specific Web site operating from remote locations in Asian countries. The Web greeters help visitors browse through the site, provide information and answer queries. Apart from our research findings and the extensive training our operators go through, our operators also have real-time information about each visitor on screen such as from which site they are coming from, on which page of the Web site they are currently on, what they are reading and how long have they been here. All this information provided by our software helps our operators in their decision-making process while they greet each visitor individually to convert them into customers. During our three years of experience, we manage to keep between 10 percent and 35 percent of visitors on the site whereas without Web greeters only between 3 percent and 5 percent of visitors stay on a site for more than 2 minutes. That is a substantial increase in the conversion ratio with the help of Web greeters. We have also found out that the number of visitors willing to continue a chat with our greeters varies in different industries. The percentage for the least-likely industry comes to average 10 percent, which again is a substantial number. These percentages are indicative of visitors who not only willingly chat with our greeters but also trust them to leave their phone numbers along with e-mail addresses for further contact. In contrast, only about 3 percent of visitors leave their contact information on a site and that mostly is just an e-mail address. To visitors who decline to chat, our greeters are trained to say: 'Thanks for coming to our Web site. If you need any help, feel free to click on the button and I'll be here to help.' We have found that between 20 percent and 30 percent of the visitors who initially decline to chat but continue browsing by themselves end up clicking for the online help once they have settled into the site. It was also found that the response was much better if the look and feel of the chat window was customized to integrate with the Website design. When we asked the owners what they felt was the best feature of the service, most said that the best part of the service is that it is provided for 12 hours, which spans working hours across all time zones in the U.S. Our business is kept open even during off hours of the day with a polite and professional salesperson who gives the visitor a feeling that we care while generating many more qualified leads. We're the most experienced company in the area of implementing chat-based Web site customer service and sales support. We have put in a lot of research and effort into learning what to say, how to say it, when to say it and when to throw a smiling face to ease difficult moods. We found that between 25 percent and 30 percent of second-time visitors ask to talk to the same live agent they chatted with before, which is proof of Web greeters building relationships with customers to benefit the sites. The service becomes very affordable as compared to phone-based call center services since live Web greeters can have multiple conversations simultaneously. This enables the Web site owners to greet and get in touch with many more visitors for much less and even during late and off hours of the day. A testimonial from one of our satisfied customer sums it all: "We are very happy with the service," said Verne Harnish, a member of Gazelles. "The key point you need to make is that having a Web site without a Web greeter is like having a store without any people in it. I couldn't imagine walking into Nordstrom and just wandering around while hoping to find something and then purchasing it. While some people might like this, I like to walk up to a person, tell them what I'm looking for and have them take me right to where it is." More testimonials are available online here: http://www.webgreeter.com. You can view a TV interview here: http://www.liveadmins.com/newcltv.htm. A list of present customers can be made available on request. Contact: Bill Scott billscott@liveadmins.com 312-546-4114