'Net Features : velaro

Bringing the Sales Team to the 'Net

Allison Howen — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 22:24:00 GMT

The holiday season is quickly approaching, which means that e-commerce merchants need to be prepared for an influx of consumers that will inevitably be shopping at their brick-and-mortar stores and on their online retail destinations.

And while it is easy to hire seasonal employees to help with an increase of foot traffic in-stores, merchants must also take steps to prepare a seamless online shopping experience for their digital guests. For example, a customer who is looking for a product while at a business’s brick-and-mortar location can easily ask an associate for assistance, but this is not the case for online customers – who most of the time will get frustrated when they can’t find something and either leave the site, or even worse, abandon their cart.

In order to combat this problem, merchants should have technologies set in place – such as live chat or virtual assistant options – so that their online customers will receive the same shopping experience as in-store customers.

Live Chat

If you haven’t implemented Live Chat into your website yet, you are probably missing out on some valuable conversions. In fact, a recent Oracle study reveals that 57 percent of consumers believe that live help is among the most important features of a website, while a BoldChat survey shows that live chat is the preferred communication method for 20 percent of the online shopping population.

Not only can live chat help answer basic consumer questions, but it can also help retailers build stronger relationships with their digital customers. This is because live chat provides consumers with a personalized experience, which can lead to an increase in trust, as well as higher average order values.

Live chat platforms, like Velaro and BoldChat, enable retailers to monitor their customers' actions in real time. By doing this, merchants can decrease abandonment and increase conversions by starting a proactive chat with the right customers at the right time. Additionally, merchants can evaluate the paths that consumers take to make a purchase – to see if promotions, such as free shipping, are driving conversions.

Virtual Assistants

Although not yet as popular as live chat, virtual assistants also provide merchants with an avenue for interacting with their digital customer. This unique technology can be instrumental in increasing engagement and helping consumers navigate a website.

In fact, online ticketing provider LottoGopher recently implemented CodeBaby’s virtual assistant technology into their site.

“We chose a virtual assistant to better position ourselves with customers that use the Internet to make their lottery ticket choices,” says James Morel of LottoGopher. “CodeBaby offers state of the art technology that will certainly help our company convert more site visitors into customers.”

CodeBaby’s CIVA (CodeBaby Intelligent Virtual Assistant) technology guides site visitors to specific actions, improves site navigation and Web self-service to enhance the customer experience, as well as decreases abandonment rates and increases conversions. Additionally, CIVA reduces the number of times website visitors need to escalate to calls through a company’s call center.

Another virtual assistant platform worth checking out is VirtuOz. This company’s virtual sales agents can help provide assurance to customers both online or on mobile devices, as well as help merchants eliminate common abandonment issues, such as common product and shipping inquiries. Additionally, VirtuOz's virtual sales associates can even be implemented into a brand's social network accounts, including Facebook, so that brands can offer their customers a similar experience across channels.

CodeBaby Virtual Assistant:

VirtuOz Virtual Assistant from Facebook:

Get Satisfaction with Live Chat

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:30:00 GMT

In what may just be the first technology-based implementation of WM’s Knowledge Base Optimization principle, live chat software provider Velaro has announced an integration with online community platform Get Satisfaction.

Through Velaro’s live chat application and Get Satisfaction’s community forum solution, site visitors gain access to knowledge base answers and relevant topics after completing a short pre-chat survey. If the visitor’s question has not been answered already, they can opt to initiate a private chat session with a support agent.

“Any business with a community-powered support portal from Get Satisfaction can now enhance customer loyalty with this new integrated offering,” says Alex Bloom, co-founder of Velaro. “By being able to efficiently deal with customer issues, businesses can now support more customers faster, while also building a strong base of customer advocates who have had a positive interaction experience.”

This integrated solution is a smart way to streamline customer interactions. Perhaps even smarter, however, is that support staff can answer questions by searching their Get Satisfaction knowledge base – which is integrated within Velaro’s Web-Based Agent and Desktop Agent interface products – and push responses to the visitor

“By bringing together our knowledge base and Velaro’s award-winning customer live-chat software, we aim to reinvent CRM and how businesses interact with customers online,” says Get Satisfaction CEO Wendy Lea. “With this new integration, we are allowing businesses to make their support staffs more efficient, while increasing overall customer satisfaction at the same time.”

Velaro Live Help Webinar

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:57:00 GMT

Mark your calendars - live help service provider Velaro is hosting a free webinar, "Take Back Your Customers this Holiday Season" on September 23. As consumers shift their spending online, it's increasingly important for merchants to be proactive and interact with customers during critical conversion points.

The Webinar will provide tips on increasing cross-sell and up-sell rates by enabling sales teams to push relevant, timely and personalized offers to the right customer at the right time.

"Our webinar will show online retailers how to interact with customers at critical times in the sales process," Alex Bloom, President of Velaro, continues, "From initiating a chat session with idle customers, to enabling rules based coupon offers for high-value visitors at critical purchase points. Online retailers must have well thought out engagement processes to compete in today's marketplace."