When we walk into a store, bank, or hotel, chances are we’re instantly greeted with a friendly, “Hello, can I help you with anything today?” As customers we usually welcome this proactive offer of support because it helps us get what we need more quickly. However, what many companies don’t always appreciate yet is that people want the same level of support across all channels – and especially online. In fact, nearly 85 percent of consumers say they want access to online live help.

Are you offering this support? Live help solutions provide quick and easy access to a sales or service associate via click to call and click to chat technologies. Online live help can boost sales, increase customer loyalty, and reduce abandonment rates.

Join ATG’s Ryan Hoppe this Thursday at 1 p.m. EST for a complimentary 1to1 Media Webinar entitled, “Engage the Right Customers at the Right Time,” and learn how including a live help option like click to call and click to chat can be the difference between satisfaction and site abandonment.

The Webinar will also address:

• How to use online service as a sales channel
• The three myths about live online service
• How to engage your best customers in the moment

Click here to register for this free video webinar.

In September, I attended Shop.org’s Annual Summit, where I moderated a roundtable discussion and attended many industry analyst presentations. One session that has stayed with me ever since is the keynote address from Forrester’s Sucharita Mulpuru. Her address, “The State of Retailing Online,” outlined what online retailers are doing well in the current economy and why e-commerce continues to be a bright spot for the retail industry.

Why am I still thinking about her talk? I was really taken by her emphasis on the importance of live help strategies, and her declaration that live chat is “underutilized.” Sucharita inferred that although few retailers are actually using this live help solution, a majority of e-merchants do seem to understand its value because, according to Forrester’s State of Retailing Online 2009 report, 80 percent of retailers surveyed are planning to focus on live chat this year. But why are relatively few retailers actually using this live help solution?

Perhaps retailers understand the value on one level, but still don’t feel the urgency of adopting it themselves. Yet, at ATG, we consistently see the results of implementing a solution that gives online shoppers the instant ability to have their questions answered or get more information before making an online purchase. A live help study we recently conducted at ATG showed that 52 percent of consumers said live chat would be “very/extremely useful when making an online purchase.” This ability to connect easily and directly with a store associate can spell the difference between an abandoned transaction and a completed purchase.

In these times when retailers are trying to pull out all the stops to maximize revenue this holiday season, we see that live chat can decrease Web site abandonment rates, provide consistent and optimal customer service and, perhaps most importantly, increase conversion rates.

If you are among the 80 percent of retailers who had planned to focus on live help this year, but haven’t done so yet, what’s stopping you? What do you plan to do to drive sales this holiday season? Are click to call or click to chat part of your Web strategy for the upcoming season? I’d love to hear your perspectives on this topic.

Earlier today, we announced the results of an independent consumer survey we sponsored, exploring shoppers’ perceptions of click to call and click to chat live help options when browsing and buying products or services online. The survey revealed a lot of interesting – and some quite surprising – results, which we’ve detailed in a research report entitled “Consumer Views of Live Online Help: Voice and Text Chat.”

The results of this survey showed that consumers want live help. In fact, a full two-thirds of respondents said having both click to call and click to chat options available would be useful. At the same time, only 37% of consumers have used click to chat and a mere 21% have used click to call. So, a strong consumer desire for live help with relatively low consumer experiences with live help indicates that these tools are not as available as they should be. Not to state the obvious, but clearly online merchants need to start offering both click to chat and click to call options. Responding to your customers’ wants and needs is the type of thing that improves loyalty and retention. That’s just good basic business.

An interesting finding I see in the data is that for certain types of (generally more expensive) purchases, consumers are likely using your site to research and compare, but there is still a level of unease associated with buying them online. By offering a click to call option, merchants can establish that one-to-one human contact that consumers need to get over the hump and “pull the trigger” on more expensive online transactions. Not only will you be creating a better experience for your customers, but also greatly improving your own business results.

In my experience in working with our customers at ATG, we often hear how Web analytics solutions are great providing an overall “health check” for the online sales channel. How is traffic today? Where is it coming from? What’s the overall conversion rate? What’s the average transaction value? Where is traffic converting the highest? What’s my bounce rate on this page?

A recent Web analytics survey published by eMarketer highlights that, in some respects, online sellers are frustrated with understanding and using Web analytics tools. Three of these particular data points caught my eye:

1)    Integration with other marketing solutions” (46 percent)

2)    “Drilling into the data” (42 percent)

3)    “Marketing attribution issues” (32 percent)

These three challenges – to me – are indicative of a growing trend in the e-commerce market: the difficulty in using Web analytics to measure “cause and effect” in the online customer experience. In other words, Web analytics tools alone may not give marketers all the data they need to determine what is causing their KPIs – such as conversion rates or abandonment rates – to dip or rise, as well as how specific campaigns and optimization strategies affect those KPIs.

So what’s the answer? More and more, customers are looking to supplement Web analytics with actionable analytics offered by other solutions – such as their e-commerce platform or Web site optimization tools – to help them quickly identify the causes of online problems (or opportunities), implement site changes, and measure the effect of those changes. These actionable analytics and reporting tools – integrated directly into the tools that online marketers and sellers use every day – help color in the “big picture” of Web analytics. They give business users the 360-degree customer view they need to make informed decisions and measure the impact of those decisions to make sure they are moving the needle in the right direction.

If sounds like a lot of theory, here are a couple tangible examples. A large US airline uses our ATG eStara Click to Call product to optimize its online booking experience. Using built-in analytics and reports, the customer noticed a large volume of calls coming from a particular point in the online booking process – well above the normal call volume. They quickly deployed a custom survey for these callers to find out why they were calling, and played back a number of the conversations to determine if a single cause might have been behind the spike in call volume.

As it turns out, a particular page in the bookings process omitted seating assignments. Consumers, hesitant to click the “back” button for fear of losing their transaction, were using Click to Call to get their seat assignment before moving forward. The airline enhanced that part of the booking process by adding the seat assignment to the page in question, and noticed a near-immediate reduction in call volume and increase in online conversion rates. By utilizing actionable analytics – integrated with its live help solution – the airline was able to improve the customer experience, reduce abandonment, and reduce the demands on its call center.

Let’s take another example, this time in the online retail world. More and more merchants are using automated recommendations services to optimize interactions by showing more personalized recommendations to each visitor. One of our customers noticed, with the help of integrated merchandising analytics, that visitors who clicked on recommendations in the same brand were converting much more often than those who clicked on recommendations for other product brands.

The retailer theorized that its brand loyal customers were more enticed by “in-brand” recommendations. They quickly added an “in-brand” refinement rule to all product pages so that recommendations would be personalized but limited to the same brand as the product shown. After a few weeks, the customer noticed a lift in conversion rates for shoppers clicking on recommended items. Cause and effect.

This post certainly isn’t meant to de-value Web analytics solutions – they absolutely have their place in the online marketing and selling tool set. But as businesses look to truly optimize the online customer experience, they should use actionable analytics from their e-commerce solutions and Web site optimization services to dig a few layers deeper to get to the actionable data and more effectively attribute results to the key decisions they make each day.

With less than five months to go before the holidays are here – and just months before the Web is abuzz with bargain hunters – e-tailers are gearing up to get their sites in order. But given the country’s economic uncertainty and the fact that we’re already more than halfway through the year, what can merchants do today to boost holiday sales without major Web site investments?

At this point in the year, Web sellers are looking for “quick wins” that will help increase their key performance metrics (such as page views, conversion rates, order values and repeat purchases). Click to call and automated recommendations are two Web site wins that take only a matter of weeks to implement, yet can deliver a significant, rapid payback. We’ve noticed an uptick in interest in these products at ATG, so I thought I’d spend a minute outlining what they are and how they can help you close more holiday sales.

Let’s start with click to call. Web stores without click to call force users to search for a 1-800 number to get a live voice on the phone to help them. Even when they can find the number, shoppers may then have to wade through a sea of options, only to be put on hold and connected to an agent a few minutes later who knows nothing about them. This slow, impersonal experience might explain why conversion rates for Web callers into a 1-800 number can be quite low.

Click to call instantly bridges the online shopper to a live agent without forcing them to search for a number or wait on hold. Advanced solutions like ATG’s eStara Click to Call can be offered proactively only to shoppers who are having trouble or have high-value carts, and can show the agent exactly where the customer is shopping on the store. Our experience shows that click to call, when implemented proactively and integrated with existing contact center systems, can produce conversion rates of 35 percent or more. And, because click to call interactions are more personal, they are shorter than standard 1-800 number calls, helping to drive down contact center costs.

Recommendations tools are another holiday “must” for e-tailers looking to take advantage of the holiday surge. In fact, according to our research, shoppers who interact with automated recommendations during a session convert up to 300 percent more often and spend up to 30 percent more than those who don’t.

The key is to find a recommendations solution that can not only automate cross-sells, but let you quickly add more personalized merchandise to your online store in time for the holidays. Imagine a gift guide that is dynamic, personalized and completely automated so that it can help buyers find the right gifts based on their shopping activity and previous purchases. Or, imagine a top-sellers section that dynamically changes based on each shopper’s browsing behavior. Recommendations engines that empower online merchants to “refine” automation with their control can be used to build these value-added solutions quickly and without a lot of work. The result? Higher page views and higher conversions.

Signs are pointing to brighter economic conditions. Let’s hope that when the holiday season arrives, online consumers are ready once again to open their wallets. Adding click to call and recommendations to your online store now can help give your shoppers that extra guidance or advice they need to find and buy more products on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. They might even buy an accessory or two.

Recent reports conclude that Craigslist is expected to rake in $100 million in revenue this year. Kudos to CEO Craig Newmark for his innovative thinking and this very commendable 23 percent hike over last year’s estimated revenue.

In contrast, EConsultancy said the Newspaper Association of America is reporting that newspaper ad revenues are down by 29 percent. So what can newspapers and other online media properties, such as local and vertical directories, Internet Yellow Pages and classified sites do to protect their businesses, keep advertisers coming back and compete with the likes of Craigslist?

Media properties need to influence and enhance advertisers’ ability to immediately connect and engage with their browsers. They also need to provide innovative tools to help illustrate how their customers’ ad dollars are generating real leads and sales.

Let’s face it, we live in a “pay for performance” world right now. The days of disposable advertising dollars are long gone and advertisers – whether they are looking to rent a room, sell a house or publicize a job opening – are carefully choosing where to spend their money. However, according to Forrester Research, 76 percent of advertisers still have no way of determining their online advertising campaign ROI, and few are measuring campaigns across channels.

By implementing optimization services such as call tracking, text to speech technology, click to call and call recording, publishers can close the loop for advertisers by converting more leads, guaranteeing that no lead goes unanswered and proving campaign ROI. In fact, the ability to address the ROI factor alone can put a media company steps ahead of the competition.

These services also allow media properties’ advertisers to be immediately connected with potential customers at the point of peak interest and create a personal connection with consumers.

Yes, it’s true that we live in an overly-automated, fast-paced, now-or-never world, but the fact of the matter is that we – as humans – yearn for personal, trust-laden relationships. Without optimization services, media properties’ customers are just another advertiser with another product to sell. Services that help them interact with potential buyers make them stand apart from the crowd and provide proven ROI by converting more browsers to buyers.

Though the government says consumers are reducing their spending, online retailers are reporting a year-over-year growth in sales for the first quarter of 2009. In fact, a majority of online merchants are predicting that the positive momentum will continue throughout the year.

These numbers were reported this week by Internet Retailer, as part of the publication’s new profitability and business development survey of 92 Web-only retailers, chain retailers, catalogers and consumer brand manufacturers.

This is more great news for e-commerce merchants and we’re glad to hear that a majority of online retailers are faring well in these difficult times. We are also encouraged to see that very few retailers are planning cuts to their technology theater of operations. As Gene Alvarez, vice president of e-commerce research at Gartner Inc., says in the Internet Retailer article, companies that continue to invest in their Web sites through tough economic times are best positioned and prepared to capitalize on the economic turnaround when it occurs.

As such, we wanted to provide a couple of tips to help online retailers continue this growth in sales and power through these shifting times. The time to be a little creative and try new tactics is now, so you are well prepared as we head closer toward the holiday season:

• Deploy automated recommendations: Personalized merchandising services help quickly lift revenue by recommending the most relevant products from the catalog to each shopper. If your recommendations engine understands your catalog and gives you the control to balance automation with your merchandising strategies, you can use it to personalize merchandising across the site and across channels. Why not automate and personalize your top-seller pages, a slot on your homepage, or even create new pages such as gift guides or “just for you” sections? Our data shows that customers who extend recommendations across their site and across channels have a much greater revenue impact than those who use them for cross-sells alone.
• Implement live help with click to call and click to chat: These technologies can help quickly and measurably increase conversions, reduce Web site abandonment, increase order values, and improve customer loyalty and contact center efficiency. A recent report from Forrester Research finds that firms that are successful in implementing interactive help features like click to call and click to chat are quick to move shoppers from the Web to the phone. The more you can do to make experiences satisfying and consistent across channels, the more new and repeat customers you will earn.
• Try re-marketing techniques: One of the most recent trends we’ve observed with our customers is the growing use of re-marketing or “winback” features that proactively ask site visitors to provide their e-mail address when their online behavior indicates they may potentially abandon a transaction. You can easily do this with a proactive rules engine that you control, so you can offer this “winback” feature only to select visitors who exhibit common signs of abandonment, such as hovering on a page for too long. You can then re-market to those who opt-in, providing links back to carts and reminders to complete orders.

We came across an interesting post that was included on InternetRetailer.com, which discussed the e-tailing group’s recent findings from their customer satisfaction survey. The e-tailing group mystery shopped 100 retail web sites and scored merchants on 80 metrics split into three categories: execution of key pages (25 points), merchandising (43 points) and customer service tactics (32 points).

It was surprising to see that just eight out the 100 e-tailers included in the fourth quarter survey scored an 80 or above on a scale of 100, although, Lauren Freedman, president of the e-tailing group, noted that it can be quite difficult for merchants to excel across all three categories.

Considering these stringent requirements, we’d like to offer our congratulations to those eight merchants who have continuously shown their dedication to providing an exceptional experience to their customers, and offer a particular note of praise to the two ATG customers who received this distinction.

The eight retailers scoring an 80 or above along with their scores this year compared to last and the percent increases are as follows:

• Sears, 88.25, 67.90, 21.48%
• Golfsmith, 82.25, 75.50, 8.94%
• Frontgate, 80.75, 70.00, 15.36%
• L.L. Bean, 80.50, 76.00, 5.92%
• Discovery Channel, 80.50, 76.00, 5.92%
• Amazon, 80.50, 73.00, 10.27%
• Best Buy, 80.50, 68.50, 17.52%
• Orvis, 80.00, 75.50, 5.96%

Kudos to these merchants who are also committed to improving their customers’ experiences while shopping online. Keep up the great work.

With almost a full month behind us, we’re getting a clear picture of what the e-commerce industry will look like in 2009. The Web appears to remain a bright spot in this beastly economy, and there’s evidence that brands are continuing to invest both in long-term solutions and fast-to-market tools that help them quickly deliver more rewarding customer experiences. Forrester Research has attested to this in recent reports, and just this week Brian Walker, a senior analyst at Forrester, posted his take on “Ten Themes for 2009: eCommerce Technology.”

Brian commented on some interesting themes for this year, including:
• SaaS commerce going mainstream
• BtoB platform demand picking way up
• BtoC platform demand remaining quite healthy
• Automated recommendations will become completely ubiquitous

What particularly stood out for us is that he draws a parallel between what he anticipates will happen with automated recommendations technologies in 2009, and what took place with ratings and reviews features in 2007.

“Predictive merchandising becomes ubiquitous, and the crowd begins to separate. “Predictive merchandising” is also referred to as “automated merchandising” or “personalized product recommendations”. Whatever term you like (or are marketing) we will see this area are the “product reviews of 2007”, where we go from stepped up interest and demand to a default feature. The incumbent concerns and cultural hesitations of merchants and marketers will be replaced with an enthusiasm for the improved customer experience and ROI. Many retailers (and the vendors) will be picking off low-hanging fruit and seeing some good results even from the lesser solutions (to start). Meanwhile the crowd of solutions will begin to separate as the vendors with traction and profits outlast, out-market, and out-invest the start-ups.”

Brian notes that automated recommendations will be a favored e-commerce feature given immediate needs to heighten the customer experience and demonstrate real ROI. With maybe a little less to spend this year, businesses are looking to quickly increase revenue by boosting the value of their brand with cost effective tools that they can implement quickly. Creating a unique, distinctive, and personal online experience is an essential component to extending customer loyalty and weathering out the shaky economic storm. Individual, relevant product recommendations will significantly improve conversion rates and create a better, more relevant experience for customers.

This week we announced the expansion of our eStara Connections services, to include online video advertising with eStara Video Connect. This new product makes Internet video ads actionable by allowing viewers to engage and interact with the video advertiser in real-time before, during and after viewings.

Although overall spending for online advertising is down – interactive video is actually on the rise. According to a recent report from eMarketer, 67 percent of all Internet users are viewing some form of video advertising at least once a month. The report also discusses that the audience for video ads has reached critical mass as a viable video advertising market has grown. But, even with the increase of video advertising viewers have mostly only been able to passively engage. That’s all about to change. Now with the launch of eStara Video Connect advertisers can take advantage of the market trend and ensure the monetization of video with active participation.

Beginning today, we will be demonstrating eStara Video Connect at ILM 08, the Kelsey Group’s annual conference devoted to digital media with a local focus. Also at the event will be Dallas-based Media Distribution Solutions, one of the first companies that have already implemented eStara Video Connect. If you’re attending the ILM 08 event please feel free to stop by our booth – #122; we’d love to give you a live demonstration!

In the meantime, check out some of our recent coverage:
Direct Marketer Magazine
LocalBizBits
Online Video Watch
Xconomy

eStara Video Connect