Live Chat and Usability

Adding live chat to an eCommerce web site can add sales, it can also provide additional opportunities to learn valuable usability information

It occurred to me recently that in all the usability blogging I’ve done, I’ve never written about what I actually have been doing for the past couple of years. I work at a company that provides live sales chat to large eCommerce web sites. Think of sales live chat as having real live sales people available on your eCommerce web site, to assist potential customers, answer their questions and help make sales.

How Live Chat Works

My company provides trained agents who are available via live chat (like instant messaging) to assist potential customers who may have product questions, or questions about completing an order. Our agents assist these customers, and if the customer completes the sale we receive a small commission. Since we only get paid if we make a sale, there is little economic risk to the company in adding our services. And since we host all the technology, agents and optimization services (me!) on our end, there is minimal technical risk to the company. The technical term for what we offer is pay-for-performance, turn-key live sales chat. The non-technical term is we help companies increase the number of sales on their web site with minimal resource and economic difficulty.

Live Chat and Usability

Beside the sales benefits provided by live chat, there’s an almost unlimited amount of real-time usability data flowing from live chats. Companies that use live chat can take advantage of this continuous flow of actual usability feedback and learn from it. This usability data use can be the basis to conduct additional usability testing and enhancements.

In addition, all transcripts from live chats are recorded and so are available for further evaluation and data mining. Add to that the ability to track which page the chatter started on, where they moved through the site and whether the completed tasks or not on each page, and you have an almost constant form of usability testing with your actual customers! Is it any wonder I get excited to come to work every day?

Three Ways to Use Live Chat Usability Data

There are multiple ways to use the enormous amount of usability data coming from live chats, but the three that are most readily available and helpful are:

1. Live Chat Can Identify Task Flow Failure in Realtime:
   Often, customers are more than willing to explain in great detail where they are having a problem completing a task, if only given the opportunity. Live chat gives them that opportunity. Experience shows that customers who communicate with a chat agent will often start by providing information about exactly where they are having a problem. With several hundred chats per hour, it only takes a few minutes to quickly identify where a new task flow problem is occurring.

2. Live Chat Transcripts are a Usability Gold Mine:
   As I mentioned, the data provided by live chat transcripts are a gold mine for usability practitioners. After analyzing just a small sampling of transcripts, it can become very clear where some major usability issues are, and what might be causing them. Extracting usability data out of transcripts is the least used, but perhaps most powerful form of usability evaluation, because it’s real customers trying to complete real transactions on the real site, nothing staged in a test lab with test participants representing Persona’s here!
3. Live Chat Provides Instant Usability Testing:
   Want to evaluate usability changes to the task flow of your web site? The live chat feedback will provide you with that instant evaluation. After you make changes to a task flow, you can use live chat to determine how well those changes worked. Yes, you can track performance with web reporting, which will provide you with the “how much” or amount of change, but only live chat provides the “why” for the change. Real customers in live chat can provide feedback that can be used to evaluate the amount and degree that the change helped (or hurt) the task. After only an hour or two of tracking live chats, it will become apparent whether the task flow change should be kept, or removed.

Conclusion – Live Chat Provides a Wealth of Usability Data

I’ve not even touched on all the other beneficial aspects of live chat, including live chat A/B testing, optimization, sales / product feedback but even without that live chat provides tremendous amounts of usability data. Companies that use live chat to provide a live sales person on their eCommerce web site not only benefit from additional sales, but benefit from a continuous and live usability feedback stream.

For more about live chat, or my company please visit touchcommerce.com.