Human Availability & Website Visitors = Great Investment

The Internet has made buyers much more sophisticated. According to a 2011 WebVisible/Nielsen study, 80 percent of consumers say they have researched a product online before buying. Many consumers will investigate multiple sources in the process, from websites that feature product reviews to social media such as Facebook and Twitter.  Data released last week from a GetSatisfaction internal study found that for nearly 90% of consumer respondents, a company’s website – not a social network – is the preferred place to research products and find information that leads to purchasing decisions.

This data certainly supports investing to improve your prospective customers experience when visiting your company’s website (and it makes one wonder whether social media investments are disproportionately high right now based on where companies are really getting their customers from).  When the customer lands on your website, if you can’t immediately provide them with a way to engage in a personalized fashion, a way that respects their product knowledge, at just the right aperture in their pre-purchase deliberations, you’ve perhaps lost your best opportunity to influence their buying decisions. For, the window of reaction time to the customer opportunity does close quickly and today that reaction time needs to be immediate.

Many visitors now expect real-time engagement when they visit your website. It’s what they get in the offline world, when they step into a store and are greeted by offers of help and information by a real, live person. Indeed, many sophisticated sales prospects today want to control the pace of their online interactions, similar to the way things work in the offline world. Unfortunately with all the buzz of social media many companies have been distracted from putting their focus on investing to improve customer conversions at their websites (am I talking to you?).  Forrester Research estimated that for every $100 spent on driving traffic to websites, companies spend only $1 converting that traffic into business.

What the offline and online world have in common is that customers are as impatient as ever. When they are in a buying mood and visit your website, if they don’t quickly find what they want they also have the websites of your competitors too.  It’s not like they have to drive across town; they just type in another URL, right?

If you have ever wondered what is in the mind of your visitor when they land on your website you may be well-served to think beyond only UI and basic Human Factor considerations and include Human Availability as a variable.  Human Availability in this sense is the visitors’ anticipation of what is important to them at the moment your website loads, e.g. product information, entertainment, incredible pricing, help, and how you can augment the visitor experience with a real human to meet the visitor expectation.

If what the visitor anticipated at your website isn’t easily discoverable or doesn’t address their immediate needs, then you’ve got a big problem on your hands because the visitor will likely move on to other websites (with the anticipation that what they’re looking for will be found elsewhere). The ability to quickly react to the customer is an obvious way to combat the customer leaving (i.e. “bounce” or “abandonment”).  Text chat has been employed for over a decade to help website visitors get a quick response when content addressing their immediate need isn’t apparent or available.  Providing the Human Availability option to the website visitor helps to disintermediate a visitor’s decision to leave.

With 2.2 billion internet users, finding, attracting and converting a customer is like discovering the Higgs Boson particle: a microscopic science.  When you can get them to your website, how you deliver Human Availability can be the difference of conversion, or not.  If you simply want to be present at the customer’s moment of interest, call center type text chat should work just fine.

However, web-based customers are more sophisticated today.  Legacy chat systems have not addressed the organizational need to quickly convey trust to prospective customers.  This is where Human Availability is making large strides.  It is now possible to show the names and faces of customer-facing employees, package this into LDAP-type directory, and display Human Availability to visitors.

For an example of what I’m talking about, visit www.edinarealty.com/pages/contact-edina-realty. If you click on “chat with us” on that page you’ll see a directory open up that offers the visitor a listing of people willing, ready and able to help.  It’s an elegant and simple way to give the visitor another way to engage.

This type of transparency is more empowering to the customer because it conveys that your organization is not afraid to hide its people.  In addition, it expresses your organizational limpidity to put the capability to engage with your company where it belongs: in the hands of the customer.  Customers have come to expect control over the pace and tempo of engagement, and Human Availability is major a leap forward in giving visitors another option in what they do when they get to your website.  Now that’s a great investment!