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Live chat can be one of the most effective conversion strategies on your site , but many businesses fail to realise its full potential because they don’t know what they don’t know. They think they’re making the most of their live chat function when, in reality, they are missing major opportunities. For others, it stems from analytics that fail to paint a complete picture of live chat performance and ultimately hinder scaling success.
Today, we will focus on the latter and give you a behind-the-scenes look at the most important live chat metric that you need to prove ROI.
Are You Only Getting Part of the Live Chat Conversion Story?
Let’s say you implement live chat on your website. You’re engaging visitors and are seeing a steady uptick in sales. That’s great! Here’s the question–are you confident many of those visitors wouldn’t have converted regardless of your live chat function? And, on the other end of the spectrum, do you have visibility into the revenue associated with those who converted on their own after engaging with a live chat rep? These are the kinds of questions you’ll need to be prepared to answer when scaling a live chat program.
So Many Metrics, So Little Time
From number of chats to average handle time, AOV to customer satisfaction, there are hundreds of metrics that can provide visibility into how your live chat tool is performing. Most live chat programs provide basic insights into leads, sales, and conversions. What these visitor data points can’t provide? A holistic insight into the return on your live chat investment. To do that, you need visibility into one important metric that most chat tools on the market fail to deliver…
The Missing Metric: Incremental Revenue
Incremental revenue is the revenue that can be attributed to ‘new’ sales. In other words, the total revenue gained from site visitors who weren’t already on track to convert. This critical metric gives you the monetary value that you are creating through live chat.
To measure the incremental revenue of live chat, you’ll need complete visitor data and the ability to isolate chat from other marketing, sales, and optimization initiatives through control methodology.
To measure the true ROI of live chat (and forecast potential revenue to scale your program), you need a holistic understanding of the customer journey from end to end. Incremental revenue arms you with the visibility you need to determine exactly where your results are coming from and the confidence to continuously improve your live chat function.
