It’s live! Access exclusive 2024 live chat benchmark data & see how well your team is performing.
Get the data
It’s live! Access exclusive 2024 live chat benchmark data & see how well your team is performing.
Get the data
It’s every marketer’s dream to walk into their CMO’s office and say ‘Ha! I told you this [insert marketing tactic here] would work. We crushed our pipeline target and here’s the proof!’ The analytics component of every sales and marketing technology should be built to facilitate this conversation.
What about live chat? Can you connect your live chat service to actual revenue? What if you could demonstrate that live chat is helping fill shopping carts, drive whitepaper downloads, or increase demo requests? Cue chat attribution, or as we call it, ‘Chattribution’.
If you still think live chat is just for technical support, you’re in the wrong decade. Live chat has matured into a proven digital engagement channel that can not only provide customer support but drive sales and marketing conversions. Research shows that engaging in live chat can boost conversion rates by 45%. But demonstrating exactly which conversions were influenced by which chat is easier said than done. That’s why Comm100 built a platform that makes this relationship crystal clear.
With Comm100 there are two ways to do chattribution:
Conversions are actions taken by visitors which your organization considers valuable. This might be something obvious like making a purchase, or if you’re B2B, something indirect like downloading a whitepaper or signing up for a free trial. You can set up Comm100 to track how visitors interact with your website, focusing on when those interactions involve chats. This makes it easy to demonstrate the ROI of live chat and identify ways to increase revenue. Here is a short guide to how it works:
URL Tracking
The simplest way to set up conversion tracking in Comm100 is using URLs. Typically, whenever a visitor completes a desired action on your website, there will be a specific URL which can be associated with it. Some examples of this might be the URL of a checkout completion page or a form submission page. Make a list of these URLs and group them based on types of conversion. From there you can set up Conversion Actions in Comm100.
Pro Tip
For faster setup and easier ongoing maintenance, use the “contains” rule to group large clusters of URLs relating to the same conversion action – for example, all checkout page URLs containing the phrase ‘/checkout-success/’.
Custom Variable Tracking
When conversions occur without a trackable URL, you need another option. For instance a pop-up lead form that, when completed, doesn’t trigger a redirection to a different web page. In these cases, there is often a code-level value change on your site (e.g. Form-submit = 1). Comm100’s custom variable tracking can register this change and use it to register conversion actions. Tracking conversions this way requires some web development know-how but introduces a lot more scope and flexibility.
API Tracking
You can use Comm100’s RESTful API to define successful conversions based on interactions with any element on a web page, like watching a video or clicking a download link. Whenever a visitor causes a specified API to fire, a conversion will be logged in Comm100. Since API setup is more technical than the previous options, we recommend using it when there is no URL or customer variable which can be associated with a conversion.
Associating chats with conversions
By default, the last chat a visitor has with you before converting gets all the credit, even if the conversation happened 3 weeks ago and only contained 1 message. Depending on your attribution model, you may want to customize this. When defining new Conversion Actions in Comm100, you can choose to associate the first or last chat with a visitor, chats that happened within a certain time frame, or chats with a minimum number of messages with a conversion. This way you can ensure that way you track conversions in Comm100 is in alignment with your reporting infrastructure.
PRO TIP
Append data from the pre-chat survey, custom variables, and CRM fields to the chat transcript of converted visitors. For example, if you are tracking a purchase, you can add an Order Number custom variable to associate the order with the conversion. Doing this can tell you much more about the identity of your converted visitors.
Assigning a Dollar Value to Conversions
Understanding that live chat is driving conversions is valuable but expressing that value in dollars and cents is what will really get the attention of decision makers. When setting up new Conversion Actions in Comm100, you can choose to place a dollar value on them. Coming up with these values can be tricky, especially when a conversion isn’t directly related to a sale, but with some simple calculations it’s usually possible. For example, to measure the value of a free trial sign up, multiply the rate of conversion to a paid subscription by the price of the service.
The Conversion Report
This is where your time and effort spent setting up conversion tracking pays off. This robust report allows you to see how effective live chat is at influencing conversions by comparing the rate of conversion of chatted visitors to non-chatted visitors. You can also segment the data by department or agent to identify the stars in your organization. Finally, you can see the total value generated by conversions over time. Armed with this information, you can adjust how live chat is deployed on your site, dig into why some agents are more effective than others, and demonstrate the value that live chat brings to your business.
The Comm100 Conversion Report
Proving live chat’s impact and demonstrating ROI requires contextualizing it within your entire sales and marketing ecosystem; the actionability and insightfulness of your chat data increases substantially when combined with other data sources. Comm100’s integration capabilities make it easy to include your live chat data with other relevant sources so it gets to where decision makers are looking:
Google Analytics: Comm100’s Google Analytics integration enables you to view visitors’ live chat-related actions as events in your Google Analytics dashboard. Specifically, you can view visitors’ actions such as when they complete a pre-chat survey, start a chat, leave an offline message, and even when they’re invited to chat. Use this data to see how live chat influences your goal completion rates. For example, if you have a goal defined as a visitor reaching a checkout success page, use chat action as a filter of the goal completion to see whether visitors who chat are more likely to reach that page than those who don’t.
An example of live chat data from Comm100 integrated with Google Analytics
Salesforce CRM
For many B2B organizations, the single source of truth for customer data is their Salesforce database. If you want live chat to be taken seriously as a marketing and sales channel, show that it’s generating leads and influencing opportunities. Using Comm100’s Salesforce integration you can create new leads and contacts in Salesforce right in the Comm100 Agent Console. Make sure to mark the lead source as ‘live chat’ so that when the deal closes, live chat gets due credit. In addition, when a known lead or contact chats with an agent, you can append that conversation as a case to their record. Doing this will register live chat as a touchpoint in their buying journey and give your sales team more information about a potential customer.
Live Chat reporting API
Comm100’s Live Chat reporting API allows you to export raw report data from Comm100 Live Chat and push it into other business intelligence and data visualization systems to create custom and on-demand reports. It is then much simpler to compare the value generated by live chat versus other contact channels and prove once and for all how effective it is as a sales and marketing tool.
There is no better tool for enhancing customer engagement than live chat. It is a direct line to customers on your website and mobile app that can shepherd them toward profitable behavior. But to prove its value to yourself and internal stakeholders you need to express it in real dollars and cents. Use Comm100’s conversion tracking and integrations to make sure live chat gets the credit it deserves.
