Today's guest post comes from Simon at Staff Squared who wrote to tell us how his team has used live chat to double the number of sign-ups for their app.
In hindsight building our app was the easy part! Taking the app to market, and engaging meaningfully with potential customers was a much harder challenge.
We built Staff Squared to provide a set of easy to use yet powerful features for small and medium sized businesses that want to reduce their HR admin overhead and better communicate with their staff.
We launched our website without chat software, and relied on email and phone to communicate with potential and existing customers. Despite generating website visitors and trial sign ups in the early days, we quickly realised the majority of visitors weren’t actually engaging, i.e. asking questions about the app or signing up for a demo or trial.
And while we wanted visitors to engage, we didn’t want them to have to stop what they were doing on our site to make a call or send an email. We wanted them to be able to ask it there and then.
So we looked at live chat solutions and settled on Olark. It was so simple there was almost nothing to lose by giving it a shot.
Start with a Greeter
Right away we started using the custom “Greeter” feature.
We programmed our Greeter to display a helpful message to anyone who stayed on the Staff Squared website for more than 30 seconds. It was clear that visitors spending more than 30 seconds on the site were engaged, and so the next obvious step was to strike up conversation.
We started to see results soon after installing Olark. For instance, visitor to trial sign-up rates doubled, increasing from four to eight percent of all visitors creating a free trial.
Study qualitative feedback
Our team also made a habit of reviewing Olark transcripts regularly. Based on the information in those transcripts, we made updates to our website based on the frequently asked questions raised by potential customers.
The ability to capture and share those transcripts, without fear of something being lost in translation, helped us create a much tighter feedback loop between the sales, support, and marketing teams.
We knew visitors requesting a demonstration of the app were significantly more likely to convert to a paying customer. So we customized the Olark chat box to make it very clear that our demos were ‘FREE’, making this very simple text change:
Even just this small change resulted in an increase in the number of demonstration requests: we went from 2 to 5 demo requests a week. And, even better, customers could arrange a demonstration in the chat, without having to use a separate scheduling system. It became a very informal and flexible way of approaching Staff Squared, which is essential.
Results
Adding Olark live chat as an additional channel for support and interaction has even led to specific testimonials that reflect the importance of the chat facility now offered:
Converting trial sign-ups to paying customers
With the visitor to trial process now flowing smoothly, we’ve now turned our attention to the trial to paying customer conversion rate.
In the coming weeks, we’ll add the Olark chat box to pages within the app that relate to upgrading or managing the account billing. This will ensure that customers who are at a key decision making point in their journey with us have the same level of instant support that they’re used to.
As with the marketing website, transcripts at this stage in the customer journey will be incredibly useful in refining these areas of the app.
I think visitors have always been impressed with the speediness of our response on chat, as it pushes them more quickly to make a decision to come on board. It’s convenient for our customers, but also reduces the amount of time that our staff spend answering questions. It’s a no-brainer -- when we see what impact a chat orientated approach can have on trials, we can’t wait to find out it will do for paid sign-ups.