Online chat assistance for helping shoppers

Retailers are starting to offer online chats to help customers who show signs of confusion while shopping the Web.

It's enough to make online retailers shudder. About half of all people who visit a commercial Web site intending to buy something give up because, above all, they are confused—by product descriptions, navigation and checkout procedures. To help them out, some online retailers offer shoppers "chats"—real-time typed dialogues via the Internet—with sales agents, but these haven't worked very well. Most visitors don't bother clicking chat-invitation buttons, and many who do leave after a frustrating wait.

Now companies are learning to profile visitors on the sly, targeting those who are confused (and therefore most likely to leave the site). These include people who shuttle repeatedly between Web pages that describe similar products, scroll up and down several times, linger or, even worse, open a new window to reread the description of a product in the shopping cart. These tip-offs identify shoppers "obviously having trouble making a decision—that's when we would intervene,"

The more factors analyzed, the more effective the service. A confusion ranking rises if a shopper fills in forms slowly. It rises faster if a shopper for, say, a laptop hesitates before typing answers to questions that require a great deal of comprehension (what bus speed? how much RAM?).

Circumstances provide clues even before a customer starts navigating. Confusion levels rise considerably, across the board, before Christmas and Mother's and Father's days, when gift givers venture into unfamiliar product categories. If a shopper is using a slow dial-up Internet connection, that tends to indicate limited online experience, which nudges up the confusion ranking—and therefore the money-making potential of offering chat assistance.

One way to get around the labor shortage is to offer automated chats. Retailers have had some success with software that answers questions based on keywords.

Many online merchants are reluctant to trust automated chats with the formidable task of reducing shopping-cart abandonment—the bane of the industry. As the checkout process moves forward, confusion often morphs into nervousness, especially when goods are expensive. Here the ability to match skilled and psychology-savvy chat agents with the most confused shoppers is especially profitable. Adept Web surfers may dislike the idea of being monitored for confusion; for the muddle-minded, being belittled with a high confusion score may be a godsend.

Merkasi designs and installs chat-assitance systems to help close sales through your online shop.

Extracted from Benjamin Sutherland report in Nwk.