Behind the counter online store [Part 1]
Live support is what distinguishes a successful online store and a faceless rotting portal.
Among the hundreds of Ukrainian online stores of equipment, clothes, services, I have seen the live chat button for 10 percent. And these 10 percent of all stores are 90% of buyers (this is a personal opinion).
Do you still invest money in a magnificent web 3.0 design? Then we go to you! , in the run through the catalogs, in the warehouses for the goods and other beauty and convenience, and the seller, who stands behind the counter there. We get an online supermarket. You ride with the cart through the rows, took it, took it, threw it into the basket, grabbed it at the checkout. The cashier spoke with phrases from a piece of paper (yes, we now have one), gave the money and left. As a result, we bought the goods, and people, as you know, do not buy goods, but enjoy the pleasure of buying them. As a result, the portal's motto is approximately like that of fast food - “Devoured and dumped”. And the script from the anectode about how a man came to buy tampons, and eventually bought up the floor of the store, never to repeat in such an institution.
And what will make the buyer come to your store again and again? Not only a quality product / service (almost all the same goods are sold), but above all the attitude that he paid for honestly with his purchase. Even if it just goes one more time to look - the probability that he will buy something else more than from a new visitor. And if you contact him with the seller greeting "Hello,% username%! We are glad to see you in your store again. ”, Then it will be even harder for him not to buy something, even if the buyer just gazed in.
Our domestic buyer for the most part simply does not buy anything at the store, unlike the residents of the United States and the EU, who are accustomed to the Buy Now button on ibei. He does not trust anyone in this country, and this is, in general, correct, but we want to sell him something :) So we postpone the opinion about the Motherland, and we catch live chat on the site. When communicating with a living person, the buyer will already fall into a more familiar environment, ask a couple of trivial questions. Although the answers are on the site, the operator will honestly write them to him personally. And now the client already feels that the store loves him and in his store it will be easier for him to part with blood money than in another.
Someone will say that phone, ICQ / Skype and e-mail is enough, but it’s always more profitable to start communicating to the store than to send e-mails for a long time in instant messengers that are far from everyone or call the office (and not everyone wants to call to other cities). Chat lacks these shortcomings, but it has its own. My experiences of various chats will be discussed below.
Our site sells a rather rare service, so support was vital.
To quickly get started, I installed a demo version of a paid chat with a carrier console under Windows. There were quite rich features, including tracking visitors to the site, viewing all available information about them, chat history, the ability to connect several operators and transfer chat between them, as well as the rare opportunity to initiate chat by the operator, that is, the operator can invite the visitor to chat .
When the demo period expired for our domain, the toad quickly crushed the desire to pay $ 20 / operator per month, because the service was not worth it.
')
After attending a conference where Privatbank advertised my Siteheart, I ran to register there. It was naturally free. There are no restrictions, Windows client for the operator, storage of history, splitting by department and many other features.
About a month, the operators rejoiced at the new chat, but there was no such necessary chat initiation function with the visitor, and this accelerated the process of turning the visitor into a buyer.
Quite by chance, a domestic start-up liveoperator was found, although it was paid. Our sellers were not so greedy, so it was decided to buy licenses for 4 operators, which was enough. Only here the code issued by the developers to the site did not work. After addressing them with the question “What .....”, the errors were promptly corrected and somehow it all worked. The functional was at the level of the first chat, only here the history of communication with different positeli was kept, in general it was very convenient. Periodically, bugs crawled out, but developers were on the watchman and all the holes were patched. In parallel with this, on another site, I was testing the Woopra project, which was still free at that time. However, he did not give the opportunity to ask the chat user, and therefore it could only be used to track statistics.
Laugh for the sake of the Google Talk gadget was also tested for a site where a person was offered to immediately chat in Google Talk under the left nickname guestxxxxxx with our operators. But before the start of the chat, he gave out some dubious warning, and this greatly scared the visitors, in the end the idea was discarded.
Above, I described all third-party support services that I personally experienced. There is no popular liveperson (although it is not clear how it earned its popularity), there are not many other paid and free solutions, but all this is a personal experience.
Absolutely all of these systems had a serious drawback: the history of communication was stored on the chat owner's servers, therefore outsiders could get access to confidential information of users, and this in no way corresponded to the privacy policy that we offered to customers. That is why it was decided to connect your own chat. It was implemented using the Spark add-in for the OpenFire jabber server. Problems of storing the history have disappeared by themselves, since in the jabber-server it is almost the basic functionality, and it is more correct to use the protocol for communication that was developed for communication. Here is a truism.
On this, our wanderings on live support systems have just begun.
This is all that I can squeeze out of myself for now, especially since the article turned out to be huge, so I will write and publish the rest of it if possible later.
Among the hundreds of Ukrainian online stores of equipment, clothes, services, I have seen the live chat button for 10 percent. And these 10 percent of all stores are 90% of buyers (this is a personal opinion).
Do you still invest money in a magnificent web 3.0 design
And what will make the buyer come to your store again and again? Not only a quality product / service (almost all the same goods are sold), but above all the attitude that he paid for honestly with his purchase. Even if it just goes one more time to look - the probability that he will buy something else more than from a new visitor. And if you contact him with the seller greeting "Hello,% username%! We are glad to see you in your store again. ”, Then it will be even harder for him not to buy something, even if the buyer just gazed in.
Our domestic buyer for the most part simply does not buy anything at the store, unlike the residents of the United States and the EU, who are accustomed to the Buy Now button on ibei. He does not trust anyone in this country, and this is, in general, correct, but we want to sell him something :) So we postpone the opinion about the Motherland, and we catch live chat on the site. When communicating with a living person, the buyer will already fall into a more familiar environment, ask a couple of trivial questions. Although the answers are on the site, the operator will honestly write them to him personally. And now the client already feels that the store loves him and in his store it will be easier for him to part with blood money than in another.
Someone will say that phone, ICQ / Skype and e-mail is enough, but it’s always more profitable to start communicating to the store than to send e-mails for a long time in instant messengers that are far from everyone or call the office (and not everyone wants to call to other cities). Chat lacks these shortcomings, but it has its own. My experiences of various chats will be discussed below.
Choosing a seller
Our site sells a rather rare service, so support was vital.
To quickly get started, I installed a demo version of a paid chat with a carrier console under Windows. There were quite rich features, including tracking visitors to the site, viewing all available information about them, chat history, the ability to connect several operators and transfer chat between them, as well as the rare opportunity to initiate chat by the operator, that is, the operator can invite the visitor to chat .
When the demo period expired for our domain, the toad quickly crushed the desire to pay $ 20 / operator per month, because the service was not worth it.
')
After attending a conference where Privatbank advertised my Siteheart, I ran to register there. It was naturally free. There are no restrictions, Windows client for the operator, storage of history, splitting by department and many other features.
About a month, the operators rejoiced at the new chat, but there was no such necessary chat initiation function with the visitor, and this accelerated the process of turning the visitor into a buyer.
Quite by chance, a domestic start-up liveoperator was found, although it was paid. Our sellers were not so greedy, so it was decided to buy licenses for 4 operators, which was enough. Only here the code issued by the developers to the site did not work. After addressing them with the question “What .....”, the errors were promptly corrected and somehow it all worked. The functional was at the level of the first chat, only here the history of communication with different positeli was kept, in general it was very convenient. Periodically, bugs crawled out, but developers were on the watchman and all the holes were patched. In parallel with this, on another site, I was testing the Woopra project, which was still free at that time. However, he did not give the opportunity to ask the chat user, and therefore it could only be used to track statistics.
Laugh for the sake of the Google Talk gadget was also tested for a site where a person was offered to immediately chat in Google Talk under the left nickname guestxxxxxx with our operators. But before the start of the chat, he gave out some dubious warning, and this greatly scared the visitors, in the end the idea was discarded.
Above, I described all third-party support services that I personally experienced. There is no popular liveperson (although it is not clear how it earned its popularity), there are not many other paid and free solutions, but all this is a personal experience.
Your chat
Absolutely all of these systems had a serious drawback: the history of communication was stored on the chat owner's servers, therefore outsiders could get access to confidential information of users, and this in no way corresponded to the privacy policy that we offered to customers. That is why it was decided to connect your own chat. It was implemented using the Spark add-in for the OpenFire jabber server. Problems of storing the history have disappeared by themselves, since in the jabber-server it is almost the basic functionality, and it is more correct to use the protocol for communication that was developed for communication. Here is a truism.
On this, our wanderings on live support systems have just begun.
This is all that I can squeeze out of myself for now, especially since the article turned out to be huge, so I will write and publish the rest of it if possible later.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/78211/
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