News Article
Let Your Fingers Do the Talking
Selling Power
June 2001
Remember when e-mail seemed like a quick way to get messages to and from customers visiting your Website? Not anymore. Customers today become impatient when they have to wait even an hour or two for a response to an online inquiry. If you want to turn Website browsers into buyers, consider investing in real time messaging technology which lets reps communicate instantly with potential customers.
One of the best applications for salespeople is Digi-Net Technologies' recently released Groopz v2.0 because it allows a sales rep to reach out and begin a dialogue with a site visitor instead of waiting for that visitor to initiate contact. Here's how it works: a new feature called LeadScan lets sales reps configure Groopz to identify their best prospects. The criteria can be based on demographics, pages viewed on your site, length of time looking at a specific page, etc. When a visitor meets the established criteria, the rep receives a visual or audible notice and can then send a message such as, "Hi, I'm Joe. Is there anything I can help you find on our Website? " The message pops up in a dialogue box on the visitor's screen.
"When you think of eCRM, the assumption is you already have the customer," says Todd Johnson, Digi-Net's director of marketing. "We've tried to take the same type of technology and make it so a trained aggressive sales rep can bring a new customer into the fold."
Remarkably, only about one out of every 25 customers contacted by reps closes the dialogue because he finds it intrusive or thinks it's an ad, Johnson says. In fact, one of the first users of Groopz reports it is closing 80 percent of the sales in cases where reps proactively contact site visitors. And the reasons may have less to do with reps' persuasiveness than with the simple fact that there's a human being offering to answer a question or steer a visitor in the right direction. Forrester Research recently determined that four out of every five online shopping carts are ultimately abandoned, due largely to incomplete information at the point of sale. "We've put the one element at the point of the sale that can provide any missing piece of information," says Johnson.
