Part 5: Keys to Effective Measurement With Live Chat

Congratulations! You’ve made it to the final installment of this five-part series where we’re breaking down exactly how to optimize your approach to live chat. Here’s a quick overview of what’s been covered so far:

• Part 1: Are You Serious About Generating Revenue With Chat?
• Part 2: Keys to Effective Targeting With Live Chat
• Part 3: Keys to Effective Testing With Live Chat
• Part 4: Keys to Effective Engagement With Live Chat

Today, we’ll wrap up the series by exploring one of the most important, yet overlooked, aspects of live chat optimization–effective measurement.

Measurement matters: the big picture

Why are you hoping to optimize live chat in the first place? Aside from improving the online customer experience, you’re likely looking to deliver revenue growth for your business. Or, if you’re on a marketing team, you’re probably hoping to maximize your teams’ investment of time and resources.

Live chat optimization can’t happen without a way to accurately measure and act upon results. And the justification of optimization activities is impossible without visibility into where ROI is coming from. Unfortunately, many of the tools on the market today fail to deliver this much-needed information. This leaves many business owners and marketing teams in the dark, missing out on:

• Key Insights: Data about web visitor chat journeys (accept rates, wait times, etc.).
• Clear Visibility: The ability to paint a clear picture of where live chat ROI is coming from.
• Room for Improvement: Identifying live chat failure points and potential obstacles.
• Smart Insight: Intelligence needed to purposefully create more revenue.
• Customer Happiness: The ability to measure and act upon customer satisfaction levels.

How do you know whether the actions you’re taking are effective? Is there a way to determine exactly what actions are creating the most value? How do you know whether having a live chat feature is more valuable than not having one at all?

To evaluate and prove the value of your live chat feature, you’ll need a way to accurately measure the individual elements of the function as well as the program as a whole.

The secret sauce: attribution & control

In marketing, attribution  refers to “the identification of a set of user actions (“events” or “touchpoints”) that contribute in some manner to a desired outcome, and then the assignment of a value to each of these events.” To achieve attribution, you must have a way to tag your data across your processes and technologies. For example, those using a CRM typically integrate the system with their websites and other marketing tools to gain insight into what’s working, what’s not, and why.

The same concept applies to live chat, where attribution is mission critical to optimize an end-to-end program. Without visibility into where your results are coming from, you’ll have no way to identify future opportunities for optimization and prove value. But, to achieve accurate attribution, you’ll need a way to separate your control group from the experimental group through Control Methodology. You can gather endless amounts of data, but none of it will mean anything without a way to compare and contrast your findings.

For example, if you’re wanting to answer the question “Do we gain more revenue from our website with or without a live chat feature?” you need a way to run an experiment that is capable of scoring, profiling and equally representing  live chat users and a self-serve control group to accurately measure resulting data.

You deserve transparency in your reporting

There are too many tools out there that provide numbers without insights, data without intelligence. MarketLinc is committed to doing things differently by helping you gain visibility into every facet of your live chat program in one, easy-to-use dashboard. Our unified reports can help you track a site visitor’s journey from chat engagement all the way through to the sale, so you can:

a) make smarter optimization decisions and
b) prove the value of your live chat program.

The big takeaway

Getting more out of your live chat function through strategic optimization does not need to be complicated. By turning results and data into actionable insights, you’ll have everything you need to enhance all four pillars of chat optimization: targeting, testing,  engagement, and measurement. When it comes to deploying an effective live chat solution, you should  always know what’s working, what’s not, and how to improve the results of your program.

‍