How do you utilise the customer service chat in a situation where you don’t have time to open a chat conversation with every online visitor? Global tour operator TUI Finland is a good example for how a targeted and proactive chat can be used to increase sales. TUI Finlandin tapaus on hyvä esimerkki siitä, miten kohdistetun, proaktiivisen chatin avulla voi kasvattaa myyntiä.
Company websites often require the customer to be active and initiative if they seek service via chat. Additionally, online services often have too many visitors for the customer service staff to be able to reach out to all of them.
TUI Finland had this issue: the site had plenty of visitors but it was near impossible to distinguish potential customers from those who were just idly stuffing.
With so many visitors it was impossible to open the chat to everyone
We set out to investigate the situation by taking a look at the customer data of TUI Finland. We located potential customer groups and selected the situations in which the chat was proactively opened. Such situations accounted for less than two precent of all visitors. In short, the chat was not displayed to all visitors but rather opened only for visitors following certain patterns.
We tagged the customer service chat conversations and used said tags to monitor whether the opened conversations were commercial. If the conversations classified as commercial under certain rules were less than half of all conversations, the rules were modified. At the same time we were monitoring how the site should be modified: if the chat conversations seemed to be repeating the same information, we considered clarifying the information provided on the site and, in addition, where and when the chat was displayed.
By refining the rules, we gradually arrived at a model where most of the discussions were commercial. As a result we saw increased online sales and found that the satisfaction of the customer service staff improved as they no longer had to answer the same self-evident questions again and again.
“TUI Finland has been using the Lekane chat service for years now. TUI doesn’t aspire to offer service to all online visitors and therefore we use Lekanes smart algorithm to identify which customers might need advice or additional information based on their behaviour on the site. The chat, which relies on robust technology, has clearly increased our sales. Customers that use the chat service are more likely to buy services than those that are merely surfing”, states Tiina Sirén