Closing the Sale With Live Video Chat

The Internet provides opportunities for businesses to interact with customers in new ways. As innovations in social media appear, enterprises slowly adopt those same trends to offer alternatives for making the sale online.

Some companies are attracting potential new clients through live video streaming or open chat channels. Sometimes these cutting-edge approaches are combined to engage visitors into a unique one-on-one discourse with an office worker.

Many businesses are looking at how they can use social networking to get in touch with their consumers. For instance, a business could build a group of people interested in related activities or the business' products. This gives the firm an easy way to stay in touch with its customers, explained Susan Barnes, professor of communication and associate director of the Lab for Social Computing at Rochester Institute of Technology.

"A lot of people are drawn to pictures and the ability to engage in chat. This is no longer restricted to youngsters. Many college graduates are used to this method of communication. It is transitioning into the adult work world," Barnes told CRM Buyer.

Getting Into It

Various Web 2.0 products are becoming available for businesses to more easily plug into the use of social media as a customer communications tool. For businesses with an existing Web site and IT support, the addition of streaming video and open chat lines is limited only by factors of time and money.

Numerous turnkey offerings are available. Neulio.com is a good example of how businesses are forming to provide tools to do these things for other Web-based companies. Neulio helps companies and other organizations take advantage of social media. Online training, marketing , customer support and how-to instruction are just some of the options Neulio brings to the toolbox now available to e-tailers.

"We don't do chat specifically. The broader principle is that video is playing a bigger part in how we communicate with customers. Our collective communication vocabulary is changing. It's clear that this is a view as to how communication will go," George Colombo, founder and CEO of Neulio, told CRM Buyer.

Live From Our Office

Imagine working in a fishbowl all day, staring into a webcam and responding to an open chat window on your computer screen. This situation drives home the realities of meeting the customer in a Web 2.0 world.

That's the approach advertising agency Lisa P. Maxwell has created for several clients and ultimately for its own ad agents. The ad firm redesigned its Web site several months ago after some staff members at a meeting asked why the firm was not doing the same video streaming that it arranged for its clients.

"So I decided to put cameras on each person and let them chat all day long. Most agencies are very secretive. They want to keep a cloak of secrecy. All of our staff liked the idea. But some were nervous about it," Andrew Miller, managing partner of Lisa P. Maxwell, told CRM Buyer.

It cost the firm about US$20,000 to set up streaming video and chat, even though it did the work internally. Besides the basic equipment, the biggest expense was maintaining more bandwidth.

So far, the video and chat combination strategy produced 20 new business leads. One became a paying client, and several more conversions are developing. The firm is also in discussions with vendors to sponsor its Web site.

"The new Web site made us more relevant. This notoriety dramatically eclipsed our Web footprint," Miller noted.

Video Compelling

The concept of using live streaming video chat to interact with customers may be too new to have produced much convincing data on its effectiveness. The use of video embedded in Web sites and the use of live text chat sessions with customer service or sales staff within a corporate Web site is more commonplace. Neither is yet rampant. Ultimately, it will become more important for businesses to maintain a presence on social networks, noted Barnes.

"When people go to a business site using video cams, there is the attraction to always be seeing new things. Live is the attraction. Some companies and even schools are using webcams around the campus to show the company's facilities. Having a live camera always focused on workers is a novel situation," she explained.

Miller's ad agents can attest to the novelty of working while the world peeks in. Their experiences have not been unlike those of their ad clients using the same set up.

For instance, in the first four days the agency workers got some crazy responses from around the world. Somebody in the office sneezed, prompting somebody online to type "bless you."

"A cult developed among some viewers about who was sitting near whom in our office. We got requests to toss stuff around so viewers could see the office layout," Miller said.

Predictive Chat

While some companies are content to merely open the chat channels or engage in a one-way video view of the worker, 24/7 Customer offers businesses another approach to maximizing customer responses. It uses predictive analysis and behavior mapping to predict customer behavior. The proprietary analysis software lets customer service agents know when it is the ideal time to engage a Web site visitor in a live chat about buying a product.

"Live video could be a natural extension of this, but we haven't added a video component yet," PV Kannan, CEO of 24/7 Customer, told CRM Buyer. "Consumers are just warming up to text chatting [in business]. I'm not sure about video yet. This is still cutting edge."

The customer response system invites visitors to the client's Web site to engage a sales agent in chats about a pending purchase. The software analyzes the viewing activities of the Web site visitor.

How It Works

"We can predict what customers are thinking about with 90 percent accuracy. People tend to buy after they scout lots of comparisons by consumers They compare and read reviews," Kannan explained.

Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) , for example, observes searches and aggregates results to present a list of interpreted topics. 24/7 Customer does more than that. It has more data on customers so it can more accurately predict a customer's buying decision, he said.

For example, the software collects data about what visitors to an e-tailer's Web site are doing online. Then it models the behavior.

This process is similar to credit card scoring. A customer is apt to buy or not buy. 24/7 Customer's software scores those probabilities. This is critical with big-ticket items, noted Kannan.

"Most services provide chat. Some provide human agents. We add solutions to qualified customers," he said.