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