Make it easy for me

The web is a competitive place. Unless you’ve got a very unique service and a customer base that desperately wants what you do, trading online is often difficult because you’ll have lots of competitors fighting you for that next customer.

So what makes the difference between the customer choosing you or your competitor? Assuming that the obvious price and product differences are reasonably even, the difference often comes down to the experience the user gets when visiting the website.
We’ve recently implemented two new pieces of functionality on our website, which makes it easier for customers to talk to us. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not hard for the customer to pick up the phone or fill in our very short contact form (Just 3 fields), but we’ve got a lot of competition and making it easier for a customer to contact us can be the subtle difference in them choosing us, rather than our competitors.

Slaask Instant Chat

Over the years we’ve tried all manners of instant chat plugins and apps and we came to the conclusion that unless you can physically guarantee that someone will be there to chat to customers, it creates a negative impression – there is nothing worse for a consumer when starting a chat, only to find there is no one there to speak to!  So my scepticism was not around the functionality but more to do with how we support it.
So we’ve taken the plunge with a new piece of software. We’ve started using Slaask https://get.slaask.com/ and we’re very pleased with it. Within the first month, we’ve had several online conversations with new customers, one of which has turned into a new account for us. So it’s been very worthwhile.
It’s worked so well for us, because our main internal communication tool is Slack https://slack.com/. Slack is a messaging tool for group chat or individual conversations. We use it quite a lot in and out of the office, it works seamlessly across mobile, tablet and desktop and neatly alerts you when people start or continue a conversation.
Slaask integrates with Slack and when a new customer starts a chat on our website, every member of the team sees it and can respond. There are lots of neat features too, such as scheduling, integration with social media and automatic chat dispatching just to name a few.
Some customers will want to pick up the phone, others want to send an email and some are happy to chat online. Having different ways for customers to talk to us gives them options and makes it easier for them to reach out in a way that suits them.
The other piece of functionality is a call back function, which I’ll talk about in my next post.