Integration and Analytics of Zopim Chat to a Website: Case Study

ZOPIM CHAT: INTEGRATION AND ANALYTICS

CASE STUDY

How to drive more online conversions with correctly implemented and supported live chat on a website.

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The Team Project Manager WordPress Developer Web Analytics Expert Customer Support Department Manager “Live chats provide us with essential information on clients concerns and desires. It’s such a pleasure to analyze chat transcripts and note which new services our clients request, what aspects of our work concern them the most and what information our content yet fails to provide.”

Anastasia, Conversion Expert

PROBLEM For years live chats on ecommerce websites have proven to be an essential deciding factor for prospective clients.

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According to a survey conducted by Forrester, 83% of customers seek some kind of live support when making purchases online, and 44% of consumers say that the presence of online chats on the website itself, was one of the most important features ecommerce website could offer. Our Mobilunity team perfectly understands the importance of having online assistance available on any website, especially those that sell products and services, and it’s one of the main reasons why we recommend installing such chat support widgets to all of our ecommerce clients.

However, online chat services differ in the features they offer to both website visitors and support agents. One of our clients was using Livezilla, one of the pioneers in live chat software - but had a strong feeling that their online support was underperforming. The client was managing several online stores at once and the task of our team was to suggest solutions, which would be easy to implement on multiple websites. In order to achieve this goal, we had to address several issues such as: Finding the best alternative to existing client’s live chat

software, one which wouldn’t require maintaining the script on one of the client’s servers and one that would provide more flexible options in terms of widget customization.

Analyzing current website traffic, segment users, suggest and implement the plan of driving more visitors to live chat, where those could be further converted by Support Agents.

Development of a WordPress plugin, which would would allow customization of live chat in admin area of every website.

Provide 24/7 online customer support assistance processing all live chat requests.

This case became an excellent example of successful cooperation of Development, Web Analytics and Customer Support teams.

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THE CASE STUDY MARKET RESEARCH & BUSINESS ANALYSIS

Before we started analyzing existing live chat solutions on the market, our Project Manager conducted an in-depth interview with the client to figure out what specific features were missing in the present version of live chat and what requirements our customer had for the new product.

According to this survey, we figured out that ideally live chat software should: Be cloud-based, not hosted on client’s server or website Have a responsive widget that looks good on mobile and desktop versions Allow easy widget customization and configuration Have no limits in terms of number of chats processed daily Allow several Support Agents to get access to the dashboard Assign visitors to different departments (sales inquiry or existing client) Provide basic analytics on users visiting the website Allow setting triggers based on visitor’s interaction with the website Send completed chat transcripts via email Automatically create events in Google Analytics Provide weekly statistics Based on these criteria our Project Manager started analyzing the most popular live chat solutions. Analysis is presented below: Zendesk Chat (former Zopim)

MyLiveChat

Tawk.to

Olark

Cloud-based

+

+

+

+

Responsive widget

+

+

+

+

Widget customization

+

+

+

+

Triggers

+

+

+

+

From $11.20/ agent/mo

From $29/ agent/mo

Free

From $17/ agent/mo

Visitor analytics

+

+

+

+

Events in Google Analytics

+

-

-

+

Transcripts sent via email

+

+

-

+

API

+

-

+

Criterion

Multiple Support Agents

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Several chat services providers met all of our requirements, so we chose the most affordable option for the client - Zendesk Chat (former Zopim) and the client has been satisfied with this choice for the past 3 years.

WEBSITE ANALYSIS

Since our tasks involved driving more conversions from live chats, our Project Manager introduced one of our Web Analytics experts to the project. Her task was to suggest how exactly chat should be implemented and what additional features could be used in order to receive more chats from proper visitors. All suggestions from our Web Analytics expert were based on Google Analytics data. It should be noted here that one of Zendesk Chat’s features is automatic tagging of all live chats with Google Analytics events, so the data on chats started gathering in the dashboard without any additional tweaks from our side and, we could analyze how visitors reacted on live chats and triggers, which pop-uped there.

Screenshot of Zopim Livechat Events in Google Analytics for September 2016

Based on visitors’ data on clients’ ecommerce websites our expert was able to: Define the top visited and top viewed pages on the website, and suggest wording of custom triggers for each

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Analyze the average time spent on top landing pages to suggest when exactly triggers should pop up Define pages with the highest abandon rate and suggest correct triggers for them Analyze visitors geography, compare conversion rates and number of requests based on different locations Come up with the best color variations for every website to increase the live chat widget’s click through rate Based on those analytics, we defined Zendesk’s Chat customization plan for every website and set up proper triggers.

Screenshot of Triggers settings in Zendesk Chat admin area

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WORDPRESS INTEGRATION

Even though Zendesk chat admin panel offer a variety of customization options, our client preferred that we provide a solution for customizing every website separately from its admin area. Since all clients websites run on WordPress, our Project Manager involved one of our WordPress Engineers to help offer a proper solution.

We’ve decided to create a WordPress plugin for the client based on the ofďŹ cial https: Zendesk Chat //wordpress.org/pl ugins/zopiplugin, m-live-chat/ but enhance it with more features required by the client, which included: Change appearance of widget as badge, button or window with an image Set widget color Change texts for online/offline conditions Select countries, in which live chat will be hidden Set pages/posts, on which live chat will be hidden Thanks to a JavaScript ht ps:/ api.zopim.com/files/meshim/widget/control ers/LiAPI, veChatAPI-js.html offered by Zendesk Chat, our WordPress developer was able to add these

customization options to the WordPress plugin.

Screenshot of the custom Zopim WordPress plugin

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TECHNICAL SUPPORT

Since our client fully outsourced customer support services to our team, our Customer Support Department Manager set up the processes in relation to how all chats would be served, and educated the team on how to provide the best assistance to visitors online. Our Customer Support Department Manager was tasked with resolving issues such as: Lack of information on new product. Once we’ve received all product related manuals from the client, one of our Customer Support Team Leads completed an online education course on the new product in our internal system, which also included several tests to be passed. All our Support Agents passed the course and successfully completed the tests within one week.

Identifying Different types of requests. Since the nature of live chat requests was different and could be split into 2 general types: sales questions and existing customers inquiries, we set up 2 separate departments in Zendesk Chat. Now prior to starting the chat, the website visitor chooses one of the options on the nature of their request.

Low conversion from chats. To prompt users, who started chatting online, proceed to purchase during the same session, we created a list of special discount codes, which were available only via live chat. This way all users were motivated to place an order.

Additionally, we set up the process of writing “chat follow up” emails whenever we received a chat transcript. Such emails always included a brief summary of online conversation and a direct payment link.

KPIs reporting. the work of our Customer Support Agents is measured on a regular basis and reported to the client. Together with our customer we defined and agreed on KPIs such as: chats served, sales from chats, waiting time and chat satisfaction. We set up automatic reporting in Zendesk Chat and analyzed KPIs weekly in order to modify our processes and improve the service.

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Screenshot of the custom Zopim WordPress plugin

RESULTS

Once the client fully switched all websites to the new live chat software with the triggers option enabled, we observed a positive impact on both, the number of chats, and the conversion rate. The conversion rate from chats increased by 58% within 2 months. On some websites the change was indeed dramatic - whereas the chat conversion rate increased from 6.67% to 14.29%.

Being inspired by such positive changes, our Web Analytics expert kept working in cooperation with the Customer Support Department Manager on changing and testing new trigger texts. In agreement with the client we also set up a process of regular review of top landing pages and triggers.

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CHALLENGES & SOLUTIONS The Implementation of Zendesk Chat scripts on any website, typically is not seen as time-consuming and is actually well-documented by Zopim process, but even with this integration we faced a few challenges: Images vs texts in widgets Setting a beautiful image instead of trigger is a luring option that Zendesk Chat offers. We indeed experimented with it during during the holiday season and set “seasonal offer” images especially designed for those websites. It turned out that the number of chats did not increase even with the image promoting the offer and on some websites chats even decreased. Now it is customary for us to set custom triggers rather than setting generic fancy greeting images.

Chat removal Our client had a couple of websites, where clients tended to request free assistance at once instead of purchasing the service (it was caused by the nature of keywords domains ranked by and thus, received traffic). For one week we decided to remove live chat widgets completely and measure the effect. It turned out that organic conversion rate dropped by 60% in one week, so we quickly reverted back to live chat.

More agents than needed Our current Customer Support Team counts more than 20 agents in total and purchasing a separate licence for every agent would drastically increase the cost for our client. However to secure 24/7 support covering emails, chats and calls procession on several websites, we indeed had to involve the entire team. On the other hand, having more than 3 agents working in live chat at the same time was unnecessary. To analyze the performance of every support agent correctly we decided to have fixed nicknames for every agent. Once logged into Zendesk Chat, every support agent had to set his or her nickname as a visible name in chat. In this case all transcripts were marked with that name and it was easy to measure performance of each and every agent.

Several sources of leads Since our Customer Support Team works with different sources of leads including website forms, calls, emails and chats simultaneously, it was hard to track which particular interaction led to the sale (since usually the same client interacts with the service in several ways before completing a purchase). To fix this issue we came up with unique source identifiers, which were added to the payment link, so that the payment link from the chat follow up email was different from the payment link sent after the call conversation.

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