There are many ways to ensure enchatment for your customers. Marketing guru, Guy Kawasaki defines “enchantment” as a process of delighting people with a product, service, organization, or idea whose outcome is voluntary, long-lasting and mutually beneficial. Today, many companies have deployed chat support successfully because it is user-friendly, cost effective and enhances customer experience. Therefore, “EnChatment” could definitely drive customer “enchantment” (pun intended)!

Conventionally, chat has been used as a customer service tool and creatively in different applications, such as making a website easier to navigate. However, chat needs to be “rediscovered” as an enabler of better customer experience and, therefore, a key ingredient of your customer lifecycle management strategies.

Let’s look at various touch points in the customer lifecycle, where using chat could drive engagement and reduce customer effort—driving Guy’s aforementioned “enchantment” outcomes.

A common perception is that chat lends itself well to customer service or even, retention. But as we will see below, the fact is that chat can also be successfully used in sales. One of our clients (who offers education products and services to a global student audience) was finding its banner advertising failing to generate inquiries from prospective customers on its Web pages. The low conversion rates meant poor return on investment (ROI) for its campaigns. A Minacs team proposed the deployment of a chat solution to improve conversion rates.

Suprabhat Thanekar, Manager-Operations at Minacs, recalls, “By deploying chat, we enabled this client’s counselors to receive live inquiries, work with the prospects and attempt to convince them not to cancel. We quickly saw conversions shoot up almost 150%!

“More importantly, our client started getting instant feedback. This live Voice of the Customer (VOC) insight helped the client decide what worked and what didn’t. This is crucial input for the product management team that now designs better, more targeted packages and adds new offerings at appropriate price points. What we started as an experimental pilot for this client with a headcount of ten counselors grew to almost 200!”

Clearly, chat support for prospects at a crucial time, offering them easy and prompt help, information, answers and guidance, helped enchant and convert them into customers!

Another client realized that while business was rapidly attracting new customers fueled by ongoing attractive offers, its customer base was also experiencing increased customer attrition! Its communication products for the SOHO (small office home office) and SME (small and medium enterprise) segments are seasonal, with usage diminishing after a period of time. Customers commonly called the inbound toll-free number to cancel service at this point. The customer service representative would note the cancellation request and make a pitch to customers to prolong their business.

Manju Nair, also an Operations Manager, lays out this client’s challenges and needs very succinctly, “While our client invested in plenty of pre-disconnection reaching out, clearly its cancellation call retention efforts were increasing. Because of the growth in the incoming call volume from cancelling customers, others requiring customer assistance also found getting through difficult. In fact, cancelling customers would claim to have called and would use call volume congestion as an excuse to dispute bills for spillover services, claiming that our client was intentionally making it ‘hard to cancel’.”

Senior Manager-Operations, Deep Rawtani provides further insight to the solution approach that ultimately provided significant results, “A conventional resolution to such a ‘call volume problem’ would normally be to perform a contact center management exercise with historical churn analysis and the anticipated volume of inbound calls. But the cost of servicing a voice call would still be incurred! So, reworking queues via plain workforce re-planning was not the long term solution for churn management. We placed a “Chat” button on this client’s website to encourage customers to cancel more simply via chat rather than on the phone.”

The chat deployment helped to:

• Reduce cancellation load on the contact center
• Reduce strain on service levels for inbound customer service without adding staff
• Improve customer retention by inserting targeted retention pitches during calls. Retention went up from 12% to 35%, helping to drive down “net” costs, and (double whammy!) signing up more customers to prolong their association

What’s more, customer experience improved too. This was especially noted in a sharp reduction of the “making it hard to cancel” complaints!

Technical support helps all of us make the most of products we use. In our experience with thousands of dealers/end customers for our manufacturing, telecom and high tech clients, we have found chat to be a powerful problem solving tool, sometimes better than voice support in resolving issues. Providing chat support enables advisors to manage many customers at the same time, increasing productivity. Already trained dealers find it especially easier to interact on chat and even complex instructions may be conveyed clearly at far lower costs than on the phone.

Today, customers/dealers prefer chat over many other channels simply because this real-time, text-based medium provides immediate assistance and personalized service. EnChatment, anyone?

Several analyst reports have been finding that chat has fast evolved from being used in reactive, service-oriented solutions to proactive, sales oriented solutions that could deliver conversion rates that are 20% higher. It is empirically known to increase advisor productivity and reduce costs across several touch points of the customer lifecycle.

As Guy says, it takes “building likeability and trust” to build relationships with your customers. High first “contact” resolution and making it easier for customers to use your product or service requires providing them with a multi-channel, multi-access environment. Clearly, chat must be seriously considered in this mix, since it is now time tested—having helped organizations grow their top and bottom lines with robust solutions that are cost effective as well.