We continuously try to drive home the fact that instant messaging conversations are one of the most powerful marketing tools available to businesses in this digital age. Yet, few of the results are ever made public, not to mention the methodology through which these results are obtained. It is because of our belief that big and small organizations can benefit from digital conversations that we want to share the success of our client with you. Here’s a short resume of what we found after handling more than 25 000 conversations with visitors on our client’s website:

1 in 60 visitors start a live conversation on their website

Our service increased overall lead generation by 53%

37% of leads were generated outside of regular business hours

ClubConnect, which caters to health fitness clubs located in the United States of America and Canada with a nationwide presence found us through the recommendations of the LiveChat Marketplace. The LiveChat Marketplace regroups most live chat management services with verified customer reviews and these businesses’ contact information.

Since our partnership with ClubConnect first began in March 2018, our team has had more than 25 000 conversations with visitors on their website and generated more than 4885 qualified leads.

More specifically, the goal of our conversations with visitors was to obtain leads through free trials for their service.

Additionally, they hired us to ensure that visitors could obtain support from a fellow human at any time through their website, even during off hours. Their previous experience with live chat management showed them that beyond providing 24/7 support, they needed a more human and empathetic approach to conversations with visitors. What pushed them towards our service was in part the fact that they lacked the internal resources to handle the flow of visitors and conversations.

Getting Started

Having experience with live chat management, ClubConnect knew the value of having a human presence on their website at all times. Our role was simply to pick up the conversations in their place and create a strategy to qualify prospects and generate more quality leads.

The process to do so was fairly straightforward in the sense that ClubConnect already had experience with live chat management. Thus, we were able to take their knowledge and improve on it all while conducting our own tests and experiments. Being our first client in the health and fitness industry, there was a learning curve we could not avoid which is where collaboration with the client was especially useful.

Our experience with other industries helped our team create new or improve existing chat flows, greetings and develop our knowledge base of the client’s business. Working with ClubConnect’s team we selected the initial positioning on web pages for our chat windows.  

Once our knowledge base was set up, our agents and account managers learned every piece of information available about the client. Further, with the client, we created a glossary of terms used by the client and its visitors. This list of key terms allowed us to use language native to the industry, the client and their visitors.

In addition to our knowledge base and key terms, our team created custom escalate forms to make sure that the health fitness clubs received their leads with the information required to follow through with the lead. These forms ensured that our agents were passing along the right information to the client. This information collected included: the contact information of the visitor, the visitor’s location and more details as to why they contacted us through the live chat.

As a means of tracking data, we also created a custom set of tags to help our team identify the outcomes of each conversation with visitors. For example, the tags include things like “support”, “dud”, “lead” and serve as indicators for our conversation to lead ratios. We consider a “dud” to be any contact through the chat that is not a conversation. For example, if a visitor opened on the chat, said hello and left immediately, this would be considered a “dud” and thus would be excluded from our measurement of conversation to lead ratios.

The First Months

Our initial first months were dedicated to gathering data about the client’s visitors. Given the learning curve that was mentioned before, our improved knowledgebase and conversation transcripts provided us with critical insight on the success of our conversations with visitors. Because our goal is always to maximize conversions, some AB testing was done in regards to chat positioning, greetings, and the chat flow.

What we found was that our initial placement of the chat was too broad and therefore wasn’t performing on specific pages. With this data, we were able to identify specifically which pages had a higher conversion rate. We identified these pages as those visited by potential customers with a high purchase intent. With these findings, we were able to remove the chat greeting on low conversion pages.

Beyond the positioning of the chat, any information gathered during the initial period allowed us the perfect the chat flow in a way that encourages visitors to follow through with a free trial. This information further served to identify conversations that lacked clarity or could be improved. Analyzing the initial conversations allowed us to identify any weaknesses in the way our agents had been trained and improve on that immediately by providing extra training to some agents. Furthermore, we were also able to see which aspects of our knowledge base about the fitness health clubs needed clarification from our client.

After the Break-in Period

After the first few months of our partnership with ClubConnect our team periodically reviewed conversations, and double checked conversations with bad ratings to see how we could improve them. Beyond this, we looked at other chats with missed conversion opportunities so that we could adapt our chat flow and train our staff to better respond in the future. Live chat management is an on-going process which requires tweaking to fit changes in the market or the client.

Our account managers also communicated with the appointed representative at ClubConnect on a monthly basis to patch any information gaps. Further, our monthly calls helped us stay in the loop and provide information to the client in regards to the outcomes of the conversations with their visitors. Communicating on a regular basis with Club Connect helped to make changes to Crowdbase (our knowledge base) when we received new information or realized that information was missing. Agents were notified every time new information was added to the knowledge base of their client so that they could rapidly share the information with visitors.

Results of our Work with ClubConnect

Interestingly, our work with ClubConnect has shown that 37% of leads generated through our service were generated outside of regular business hours. In other words, more than a third of the leads obtained were generated from conversations that happened when the fitness health clubs were closed. These results further reinforce the need for 24-hour customer support, seven days a week. Had our agents not been available to handle inquiries from conversations, many of these leads would have been lost opportunities.

Overall, we found that our average initial response time for conversations was 23 seconds. While 23 seconds may not seem like a long time to wait for visitors, it’s a number that our team is working to decrease as we move forward.

Further, ClubConnect found that having CrowdChat agents present on their website at all times increased overall lead generation by 53%. It is pertinent to note that outcomes of support inquiries or questions transferred to business are not included in our stats. Therefore a lead may, in fact, have been generated following the transfer but is excluded from these statistics.

Over the course of more than 25 000 conversations with visitors for ClubConnect our team has learned much about the health and fitness industry. Along the way, we’ve adapted our strategies to fit their needs and continue to evolve with the client as their business progresses.