I am pleased to introduce guest blogger, Damien Acheson today. Based in Cambridge, MA, Damien is the Product Marketing Manager for ATG’s Live Help products. Welcome, Damien!!

BY DAMIEN ACHESON

Why all the hype around live help?

An eCommerce professional recently asked me: “Why all the hype around live chat and click to call?” I already have a customer service phone number that’s available to my online visitors. Why would I want to add live help? If anything, I want my website to reduce the number of calls to my contact center, not increase it!”

The effect of adding live help to a website is counter-intuitive. Done right, live help doesn’t increase your call volume; it optimizes it by replacing traditional telephone calls with smarter, more productive, live voice and live chat interactions. This generates instant cost savings, and a measurable lift in sales and customer retention.

A live help interaction differs from a traditional telephone call in six radical ways:

• Targeting. With live help you can target specific visitors at just the exact right time with a live call or live chat invitation based on hundreds of different parameters. For example, visitors who appear to hesitate before making a large purchase may receive a live help invitation, while others may not.

• Productivity. By reserving live voice to visitors with complex questions, and offering self-service and live chat for more simple interactions, agents with the right domain expertise can handle simultaneous queries and achieve substantial productivity gains.

• Routing. Live help interactions take into account visitors’ web context to intelligently route queries to the best available agent, thereby lifting first contact resolution.

• Context. Traditional telephone numbers force online customers to “change channels” and “start over” with a phone agent. With Live help, agents get the context of the web session and can instantly access the customer’s transaction details and account information, substantially reducing handle times.

• Interaction. Agents can solve a customer’s problem more effectively co-browsing and collaborating with the visitor in real-time to complete online forms and transactions.

• Analytics. Unlike traditional telephone numbers, live help allows you to tie Web analytics to customer satisfaction and agent performance indicators.

To better understand these differences and advantages over traditional customer service, watch this demo on optimizing customer interactions with Live Help.