It’s not an illusion: the now-ubiquitous live chat button has proliferated amongst online retailers, creating consumer expectation alongside the widespread adoption of live chat customer service.
However, the travel industry has been slow to adopt this technology.
Live chat is red-hot, with over a dozen startups vying for the live chat business: from SnapEngage to Olark, LiveOps to Zopim, there are plenty of services ready to help companies interact directly with their customers.
And customers love it: According to live chat provider BoldChat, 20% of online shoppers prefer a chat-enabled retailer. Live chat fans are also more likely to be college educated, between the ages of 31 and 50, and with a high household income – aligning frequent live chatters with the most lucrative and frequent travel demographic.
The surveyed customers choose live chat for a variety of reasons, all of which point to the importance of implementing the feature. The top three reasons for preferring live chat: immediate answers to questions, ability to multi-task and efficiency.
Efficiency and multi-tasking are also positive features for companies. Rather than taking time with back-and-forth emails or time-intensive phone calls, customer service reps can more efficiently deal with these needs because, like the consumer, reps can multi-task among multiple customers at the same time.
While the aforementioned study focused on Internet retailers, travel brands can learn from online retailers (check out this Tnooz article for more on the following framework), especially given the high average price-per-transaction of online travel bookings.
The advantages of live chat for travel companies are four-fold:
1) Inspiration:Â Travelers on an inspiration quest can quickly get questions answered, while a knowledgeable and infectious operator can promote the destination in an interactive way beyond just photos and casual browsing.
2) Personalization:Â Personalizing an offer is much easier with direct contact to the buyer. Without the delay of email, a knowledgeable and well-trained operator can deliver real-time recommendations with more conversion opportunities.
3) Differentiation: Offering live chat can set a travel company apart in a crowded marketplace. An active chat also gives the brand a chance to highlight its unique selling points directly to the potential customer.
4) Conversion:Â Purchasing intent can be quickly gauged by the chat operator, so travelers can be offered different incentives for immediate booking depending on individual needs. These personalized, immediate incentives from a two-way communication channel offer more opportunities for sales conversions than a static one-way channel like a webpage.
Online travel is simply another vertical of online shopping: inspiration, personalization, differentiation and conversion are all areas of necessary excellence. Features like United‘s Ask Alex are useful, but still end up leading to frustrations with the algorithm’s limited knowledge base.
With easy-to-implement and relatively affordable technologies – especially when compared to phone calls – live chat with an actual human is a welcome trend that forward-looking travel brands should already be taking advantage of.
NB: Chat image from Shutterstock
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About Nick Vivion
Very good article .I work for McGladrey and there is a whitepaper on the website about technology in retail that readers would find interesting. @ ( http://bit.ly/RRlVrP )
I think you make a good point here. I’m in the travel domain and we adopted live chat pretty early and it’s been great for our conversion.
We target the french user base, hence offer our chat in french – language is another important aspect in travel live chat. ClickDesk, the live chat software we use let’s us customize language easily.
I think we’ll see wide spread adoption of live chat in the travel industry in the near future.
Thanks for the comment, Laurent. What does your consumer look like? I’d be interested to hear more about who your consumers are, and what they are using the live chat for most often – ie. to get questions answered, to make a booking, etc.
N
Really good points. I think live chat will become a lot more popular in the near future maybe even replacing phone support at some companies.
It’s great for brand building and as the study mentions, people are 3 times more likely to be influenced to buy only because a live chat button is there, which is pretty amazing. Facebook and Skype made chat available for the mainstream and will help them to adopt live chat support.
Do your own tests on this. We tried a split test earlier this year and found live chat had 0 impact on conversions. But it did result in a LOT of extra work chatting with people – most who seemed to just be tyre-kickers. Wasn’t worth it for us.
I’m not so sure about this either. We’ve put chat on numerous client sites (both online travel and general retail ecommerce) and in many cases they didn’t utilize it and some just dropped it altogether after a few weeks.
An “offline” message in a chat window looks as bad as “under construction” messages and can be entirely counter productive – I would suggest at least one dedicated resource needs to be funded alongside the app itself.
Many of the clients can also cause issues for server load and security config (all can be overcome, but it’s rarely as simple as the documentation states).
It can work, but it’s by no means a must have, based on our experience.
Try the split testing before full deploy is the best advice.
In the meantime I’ll be reading that research, my info is obviously anecdotal (from US, UK and Irish markets).
Colm
Perhaps an alternative to “offline” is simply showing a “Chat Now” button when an operator is available, and just dropping it when no one is around.
Or, similar to opening hours, the live chat could sit next to the phone number with the opening hours information. So similar to a phone call, consumers can only chat during regular business hours. Setting that expectation is important – and completely legitimate.
N
Hi Nick,
Absolutely. The latter is probably less dependent on the discipline of the client operator. Of course this only works if your target market is in one time zone or your business hours are in many.
Having said that, with software, there is always a way!
C.
All good points!
N
Peter -
What portion of the travel business are you focused on? I’m interested in seeing how different types of consumers use live chat. And did you track the long-tail of conversions to see if any of these chatters converted further down the line – especially when compared to users who might just have seen a static website without any direct interaction with the company.
Hi Nick, this was specifically looking at accommodation bookings in the budget sector. The chat was positioned on property pages and on the checkout page. Yes, we tracked conversions over a long period and saw no appreciable difference. The only difference was a lot of distraction while we were answering chats. The enquiries on the whole didn’t seem all that bright I found too. Maybe college education isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
. Often the answers were right on the page had they cared to read.
We didn’t try prompting the chat, ie – a popup appears saying “Can we help?” after 20s or so. It could be that tactic might have more of an impact.
Perhaps having the chat only available on the contact us page would prevent the lazy chatters from just using the feature to avoid reading. Very interesting to hear case studies of what has worked and what hasn’t! Ping me if you have anything else interesting to share!
N
I like the idea of putting it only on the contact us page.
Have you tried asking them for their email address before they can start the chat? Maybe this also filters out the not so serious people.
What I really like about live chat is that with some people you can really ask for feedback and what they like/dislike about your website. Sometimes it’s also a good inspiration for new blog articles.
Putting it on the contact page might be interesting. Though the number of requests will probably drop a lot with that reduced visibility. All depends if that effort is going to be worth it.
Getting feedback would be an interesting way of using it, though I’d probably prefer to use one of the usability services for this.