giosg Blog

Improving lead generation will help your sales build their pipeline and ultimately close more deals. This is a no brainer, right? But 63% of marketers say that lead generation is their biggest challenge. And when it comes to the B2B space, things tend to get a little trickier as there are often multiple stakeholders involved in the purchasing process. Your website plays a significant role in this very complex B2B sales process, especially in lead generation. That’s why we’ve gathered a few tips (five to be exact) for better lead generation on your website:

Live chat and chatbots are both great features to consider during a website revamp. Our customers often tell us that one of the main reasons they have started using chat or chatbots is finally having a proper website to showcase the tool on. As with chat tools, websites also need to be continuously optimised and improved to get the most out of them. And since websites are the crucial part of a chat functioning, we wanted to take a glance into the future and see what website mistakes you should avoid in the year 2020.

An intelligent chatbot differs from the typical chatbot as it is able to learn both autonomously and from the customer service agent. Instead of providing the incorrect answer, the intelligent chatbot will ask for assistance from a customer service agent. Today, implementing this type of chatbot is easy.

Be where your customers are and use the channels they use. This is the principal idea behind every modern customer service channel strategy. It's no longer about how efficient a company makes their phone or email channels - because what's the point if your customers avoid using them? It's really about providing customer support via the channels that your customers prefer, which brings us to social media channels.

More than 1 billion people in over 180 countries use WhatsApp making it the most popular messaging app. For many, WhatsApp along with Facebook have become the preferred channels to connect and interact with brands globally.

For over a decade now, gamification has been used by businesses to improve employee training, participation and motivation. Gamification takes elements of video games and applies it into non-gaming contexts, like a specific process inside an organisation - truly taking the motto “work hard, play hard” to a new level!

Chatbot projects often have a reputation for being time-consuming and costly to implement. However, chatbots today come in all shapes and sizes with various capabilities and levels of advancement. This is great news, as not every business will need a chatbot with AI capabilities! In fact, sometimes less advanced bots like button-based bots can be just as effective.

Online customer engagement software provider Giosg introduces Interaction Designer, a new tool that enables companies to easily create and publish interactive content without coding. Users can build different interactive elements to engage and reach out to their website visitors or customers.

It’s been more than two decades since, Bill Gates coined the phrase “Content is king!” and the mantra is still very relevant today - after all, content is what drives the world of online. Creating valuable content is instrumental for acquiring and retaining customers. Moreover, consumers today are quite happy to consume brand content, with 90% saying they like the idea of businesses using custom content to engage with them online.

During the 8 years in business, giosg has transformed into a leading chat provider in Finland while challenging the top spot in the UK and Sweden as well. In addition to acquiring customers, we have also built long lasting partnerships with resource partners and through integration partnerships. Moment Group is one of these partners and our shared history goes back 5 years already.

They offer a complete chat solution for their customers with chat agents. As our resource partner, Moment Group provides the chat agents and giosg functions as the platform. After 5 years, we thought it would be nice to round up what it has been like to work with us during this journey.

So we asked.

This is a story told by Pasi Toivokoski, Chief Chat Officer at Moment Group.

The recruitment of students is competitive and if you’re not in the top tier of higher education institutions it can be challenging, to say the least. And with the current climate, applications have taken a dive - data from The Russell Group of leading research universities shows a 3% fall in EU students in the current intake, which is believed to be due to uncertainty over Brexit. Not only has the amount of international student applications plummeted, recent Ucas figures show a decrease of 1% in British student applications as well.

Conversions. Conversions everywhere. The things we are all longing for - right? But as we blindly aim towards increased clicks and purchases, we simultaneously forget our all-important brand. We push people towards filling-up their shopping carts and forget to put focus on their overall customer experience which should represent who we are as a company. The eCommerce trend of recent years continues in 2019: customer experience is about convenience and personalization. These two in turn transform singular customer transactions into true customer engagement. How?

Using time and money efficiently are top priorities for most businesses. The challenge usually lies in finding the right balance between saving resources and providing a top notch experience, especially when it comes to customer support. Naturally, that’s where live chat comes in...

As a business owner faster lead generation, efficiency and saving both time and money should sound interesting, right? Many people associate live chat with the B2C sector and e-shops - you know, that chat window that pops up, available for questions and complaints. That definitely is one purpose of live chat, but it can be a whole lot more -  a lead generator, a goal measurer and a targeting marketing solution.

The interaction between businesses and consumers has completely changed, due to the increase in mobile usage and the rise in digital.

Are you interrupting your online visitors - or are you leaving them hanging? 

Most industries working with large amounts of data have already recognized the value of AI and machine learning technology. By using machine learning algorithms to build models that uncover connections and identify important insights in data, companies can make better decisions without human intervention. This means that companies can work more efficiently and gain an advantage over competitors.

Ecommerce websites can use real-time analytics and machine learning to recommend visitors items they might like based on their buying history – and to promote other items they could be interested in. And, this ability to utilize the data collected to provide even more personalized shopping experiences (or implement targeted marketing campaigns), is the future of retail. Visit any major eCommerce sites and you may notice that this future is already becoming a reality. 

What is cart abandonment? Imagine a scenario where you walk into a supermarket and start filling up your shopping cart. While shopping you bump in to a neighbour, have a quick catch up, and following the “distraction” you forget all about your weekly shop and head off home. 

This scenario is pretty unlikely in real life. However, in the world of eCommerce, it is just another day in the office. In fact, it is anticipated that four out of five shoppers leave their carts without converting.

Despite your well-laid plans, shoppers will visit your site and start shopping, only to be distracted by an email, a notification from another platform or even human intervention. And, they may never return. This forms the basis of cart abandonment. In simple, it happens when buyers add an item to a website shopping cart but never complete the transaction. 

So how can you avoid shopping cart abandonment? Here are our top three tips to abandoned cart recovery:

giosg is a vibrant, growing and innovative company formed by effective professionals with a cheerful attitude. To illustrate this we have published our new logo, which is a part of a bigger brand update of giosg. We found that our old logo did not represent our values today, company culture nor our overall way of doing business so it needed a makeover. We are proud to represent this makeover through our brand new brand video!

Your eCommerce website acts like your online, virtual shop window, and unless it engages prospects immediately, they will leave and visit a competitor. December is the time of retail decline as the Christmas purchases are more and more often made already in November - so what will help you to minimize this trend?

After the excitement and chaos of Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Cyber Week dies down, it’s been proven that UK retail sales drop in December.

UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) released data showing that in 2017, shoppers reduced their levels of spending after Black Friday by 1.5%, even when Christmas is around the corner. What is this all about?

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.”

— African Proverb

Black Friday, Cyber Monday and other major "holidays" can make any customer service agent sweat. Who can blame them though, as the service lines and chat windows pop up one after another. 

The popularity of Live Chat has been growing amongst all ages but it’s quickly becoming the most desired method of contact especially (and unsurprisingly) for millennials. They are more likely to prefer chat over other generations, with two top reasons being limited wait time and convenience. And as the popularity of Black Friday and it's online equivalent Cyber Monday grows all over the world, customer service agents manning live chat services have had to up their game!

Black Friday first began in the US and has spread like wildfire internationally. Last year 91% of retailers in the UK and 81% in the US offered Black Friday discounts and promotions, according to a SaleCycle’s study.

AI has not yet reached the point of being a mainstream phenomenon and still needs a fair bit of elaboration, but it's certainly getting there. When that time comes, companies will need to be ready to compete in a digital environment where adaptation to AI is a prerequisite for all. For that exact reason, we compiled a list of the upcoming AI trends to give you a head-start, provide you with insight into the AI industry and prepare you for what's to come in the world of AI not only for 2019 but beyond.

[Derived and updated from our previous blog by Petri Vilpponen]

With Halloween coming up, we have started thinking about the horror stories we face as businesses - Disappointed customers, high returns, low sales, cart abandonment...

And as we learnt from Game of Thrones, the night is dark and full of terrors, we wake up in the morning thinking things at work are as we left them, but that may not always be the case. With so much going on outside working hours, the experiences you deliver then can really make or break your brand in the eyes of your customer. Why? Because if something goes wrong, you need to be able to come to the rescue and deliver in the same way as you would during the day. 

So how can you maintain your service quality and capture leads after hours, even with Michael Myers creeping on you?

AI is being used in so many impressive, creative and beneficial ways across pretty much every sector out there. The common denominator, regardless of industry, is that AI often works behind-the-scenes to optimise operations, helping us work more efficiently and make better decisions. To the extent that, more often than not, people aren’t even aware that AI is working its magic to deliver better experiences. 

Investment in AI is showing no signs of slowing down - actually it's quite the opposite. Companies clearly see and understand the importance of optimising business operations and are not shying away from using the latest technologies. In fact, in a 2018 NewVantage Partners survey which surveyed Fortune 1000 business and technology decision-makers, virtually all respondents (97.2 % to be exact) indicated that their company was already investing in Big Data and AI. 

The term artificial intelligence (AI) was first introduced a while back in 1956 by John McCarthy known as “the father of AI”. Since then, and especially in the 21st century, discussions have generally been split up into two categories - opportunities and threats/fears. And whilst the title of this article suggests the latter, the intention here is to walk you through the pros of AI and the ways in which AI-powered chat can work in tandem with humans to help them be better at their jobs, more efficient and allowing them to focus on those tasks that really need that human touch.

“It's so simple and easy to use, it requires no IT or implementations to your own systems, and when you think about a basic marketing budget - it costs mere pennies.” - Minsu Rauramo on AI at giosg

We conducted an interview with Minsu, our AI expert, to show you that implementing AI into your business can be a walk in the park. Whether you're a business owner, marketing or sales specialist - this blog aims to demystify AI by pulling back the curtain and providing you with practical insight to help you get started.

Facts, figures and detailed insights are often lacking, when it comes to customer service. That's why we wrote this jargon-free article with 4 examples of how different companies have succeeded in providing excellent customer experience online. We hope that by sharing how Finnair, Delete, XXL and If Insurance have improved their CX, you will gain actionable ideas and factual information for your own strategy.

In an initial implementation meeting with a customer, clear goals and KPIs for a chat service are always planned. The most common early stage goals often include characteristics like:

• Sales orientation
• Involvement to a multichannel customer service solution
• Supporting role in other functions like helpdesk, recruiting, online store, booking etc.

We have been doing a lot of research around customer experience recently, really delving into into all things CX, not only defining concepts such as customer journey and touchpoints, but also figuring out ways for companies to deliver real and tangible experience improvements to their customers. We have also taken a long, hard look at how and why customers and their needs have evolved, and dared to make some predictions of where we think customer experience is heading.

Right now, you probably have a bunch of different tabs open on your computer or your phone. If you’re searching for specific information, you probably go to the browser bar rather than reading through the site you’re already on. You may already have the information on one of the tabs, but why bother when a quick search gives you faster results.

Live chat is five times more effective than traditional customer service channels, it is easily personalised, and it can be applied at any stage of the customer journey. You might wonder how exactly this is done? Let’s have a look at how to implement live chat throughout the journey.

The new technology wave in the travel industry 

The modern consumer craves experiences carefully tailored to their preferences, I am a big fan of being able to save my favourite homes on AirBnB or read reviews of people like me in Booking.com. I want recommendations of cool restaurants for my upcoming trip and promotional emails for discounted flights to places that I visit regularly. Technology is enabling brands to deliver these increasingly personalised experiences, but more specifically, technology in the form of artificial intelligence (AI).

Choosing a university is one of the most difficult decisions for young adults. It’s often the first important decision they make by themselves, and it can be quite a nerve-wrecking process. Googling “Which university should I go to?” gives you 734,000,000 search results. Quite overwhelming when trying to make one of the biggest decisions of your life. The process can be even harder for international students trying to navigate a different education system without help or advice.

Business goals, football goals, life goals, the list goes on. Goals belong everywhere. In an online business environment goals tend to be total online visits, bounce rates, CTRs and total engagements among others. However, have you considered what goals are actually relevant to you?

Following these generic goals does benefit your business, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. Following numbers for the sake of it seldom pays off, so let’s explain why a dynamic business goal approach is the way to gain competitive edge - in football terms.

PropTech - does it ring a bell?

It’s a fact, as a traditional real estate player, you are already losing rentals, house sales and valuations to PropTech companies.

Much like in all other industries, technology is revolutionising the property space. New technology companies, free from legacy systems have started to pop up, ready to improve a dated, difficult and often daunting purchase journey

Fortunately, real estate incumbents are not yet at a Blockbuster, Blackberry or Kodak point of no return. Yet, it is no longer enough to post a house on Rightmove or wait for a potential seller to reach out to you for a valuation.

As an established player, you have the chance to catch the technology wave, you have the experience, the reputation, the customers- so why let new players snatch your hard-earned market share?

As a business owner faster lead generation, efficiency and saving both time and money should sound interesting, right? Many people associate live chat with the B2C sector and e-shops, a chat window that pops up, available for questions and complaints. That definitely is one purpose of live chat, but it can be a whole lot more; it can be a lead generator, a goal measurer and a targeting marketing solution.

You should keep in mind that the generations who grew up with phones in their hands are the business leaders of tomorrow and expect to have an answer within minutes after sending a request. Calling back a week later won’t necessarily make the impression you were looking for, be there or be square.

Conversational marketing has been a buzzword in the marketing field for a while now. This has caused businesses to start wondering whether they could benefit from conversational marketing. Do companies even recognize conversational marketing as a separate activity from inbound marketing? What is the difference between the two? We started thinking about this too - are we conversational marketers? Let’s see what these concepts mean and how to utilize them while figuring out what kind of marketer you are.

A report released by the Finnish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment states that 15% of today’s jobs will be replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI). At giosg, we actually think the percentage will be a whole lot higher. However, new jobs will emerge and with AI taking over your everyday tasks, you'll have more time to innovate or do whatever it is that you like to do. The term Artificial intelligence frightens some and fascinates others, this is no surprise since we naturally fear the unknown. 

“In the future, online meetings and discussions with the same sales representatives in different kinds of digital channels may be seen as personal as face-to-face meetings and phone calls are seen today.”

If you take a quick look at your online sales, what do you see? Have you got a successful digital business model generating all the leads and sales you need? Or maybe you have not yet got the results you expected? Whatever your situation, we are confident that the model we propose below will add significant value to your digital business and considerably improve customer experience.

On Monday morning, our crew gets greeted at work by cheerful people and delicious coffee. Later in the day, we are kept awake by an ongoing, steady flow of caffeine and smiles. Sounds good right? In our opinion, the best way to start the week. And all thanks to Lyhty ry!

I bet many potential customers are scrolling your website at the bus stop or whilst sitting on the train, you wouldn’t want to miss out on reaching out to them, would you?

Chatbots are your first line of customer service and a crucial part of your virtual assistance solution. As exciting it might be to have a face to face conversation with a robot, the technology still doesn’t live up to online users’ expectations.

[A summary of a presentation titled 'Tavoitteellinen Chat osa 2: Kohdentaminen, mittaaminen ja tekoäly` at a seminar event on the  27 of April 2018 in Helsinki by Otto Nyberg.]

Is AI better at decision-making than people? Maybe…it’s logical, it doesn’t complain, it can sift vast amounts of data and make automated, information-driven decisions and it doesn’t get tired. AI is an automated assistant that does the work of a small army of analysts, and does it better. So how does it work, how does AI help us making those difficult decisions?

Goal-oriented chatting is more than just live chat, it’s building a strategy of goals and measuring results to keep growing your business. So what is it?

Finnish Centre for Pensions (FCP) is a statutory co-operation body whose responsibilities include research, expertise and service related to the Finnish pension system. FCP’s key values are looking courageously into the future, heeding customers and furthering competence and our strategy emphasises public familiarity with the earnings-related pension provision.

To gain customer insight into eServices development, we conducted a customer survey one year ago. The data collected clearly suggested that a group of our customers would prefer self-service in an online environment over to some of the more traditional service channels. When weighing our options, we came to believe that live chat could help us better engage with this customer group. As an organisation, we like to learn by doing. That is why we decided to start a trial period with giosg in September 2017 with two goals in our mind; one was to see how customers would receive the channel and the other one was to test how customer service employees can adapt to live chat and how they feel about using this new channel. 

We've officially got under 2 months to go until the new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) takes effect.

You've probably all got May 25th underlined in your diaries- gearing up to GDPR D day is all every business blog, webinar and publication seem to be talking about these days.

So why the need for yet another GDPR guide? Well, firstly and simply because a lot of our clients have been approaching us with GDPR concerns, and as the date draws closer, we anticipate getting more of these.

But more importantly, because after conducting some research, we found that a scary amount of UK companies are lagging in their prep, especially within the real estate industry.

And since we work with a lot of real estate agents in the UK, we thought this would be particularly relevant.

Implementing a chatbot is an excellent method for interacting with your (potential) customers 24/7/365 while keeping cost in check. If you are not yet considering jumping into a chatbot and AI bandwagon, you should!

However, before you reap benefits mentioned above, you need to do some work. Building a chatbot that delivers results requires both time and effort. We at GetJenny have helped our customers to launch dozens of chatbots (and quite a few of them on giosg platform), and we believe we’ve found the right steps to a successful chatbot launch. We hope that sharing some of our lessons helps you to carry out a  successful chatbot project as well.

Customer experience in an online environment is about service quality; how well you can meet your customer's expectations. Offering live chat service on a website has proven to be an effective tactic to attract leads and convert them into customers.  Still, as an eCommerce professional, you are also painfully aware of the cost of offering real-time personal support which is why you need to continually look for ways to target your sales and support efforts more efficiently.

Finland has been ranked number one among the countries that drink most coffee, and our Helsinki office is no exception. Our office practically runs on coffee and we take it very seriously. We brew a lot of coffee, around seven cups per person per day to be precise. In addition, our team is also particular about getting their coffee at its very best regarding optimum brew time and temperature.

The hype around AI applications that is about to swipe through industries and the customer service function, in particular, is enormous, but so far we've seen little real-life experiences how the chatbots function, how's it like to implement one and what the results are. That's why we put together an interview with one of the early adopters of chatbots, If Insurance.

Disruptive innovations are reshaping the way financial services are structured and consumed. Setting up a 'virtual branch', that allows financial service providers engage with potential customers on another organisation's domain, is a great way to meet evolving customer expectations using rapidly advancing technology. By integrating real-time credit counselling seamlessly with the purchase journey of a partner site the context where the service is provided is significantly better than in any other form of digital service.

Take booking for a holiday, for instance. Many of us have a ready-made list of dream holiday destinations in our mind, but the reality is that a loan can sometimes be what is needed to bring our plans for a honeymoon, birthday celebration or annual vacation to live. Then, what better moment to be offered financial advice than when we are online browsing for travel services and comparing options? 

These days, most house hunters browse for properties online, and they expect to get a response from property companies around the clock, not just during office hours. We work with some of the real estate companies in the UK, including Knight Frank, Connells and Savills, so we were keen to get a greater understanding of the current state of online engagement in the British property sector.

To achieve this, we set out to analyse data from eight of those UK real estate clients, focusing our attention on the website visits of 2,710,592 individuals during a one-month period (May 2017).

The infographic below highlights some of the top findings and conclusions of this exercise. Whilst the data suggests that property companies are off to a good start, it also clearly shows that there is a lot more that they can do to be in sync with the needs and demands of their online visitors.

When talking about machine learning in a commercial context, people often think that their conversion rate will increase just because advanced calculations relating to machine learning are being made in a server room. That is not the case. In order for machine learning to improve the conversion rate, there needs to be a complete use case where a machine learning algorithm figures out something interesting and the customer is able to use this information to their benefit.

In a standard example, you would have a treatment that has an effect of, let’s say, +10% on conversion if offered to every visitor. An example of this would be offering free delivery to every customer in an online store. If you instead targeted this treatment with machine learning, that 10% would set an upper limit to how much your conversion could improve. In the best case, we would find exactly the visitors that bought because they got that treatment and not offer this costly treatment to anyone else. This would land at the same +10% improvement in conversion. In such a case we would have optimised the benefit, i.e. minimised the expense while maximising the return.

In order to reach something better, you need a slightly different setup. If you had a treatment that has a positive effect on some of the visitors and a negative effect on others, you could actually reach a better conversion rate with machine learning than you could by offering that treatment to everyone. This would be a case where you reach some conversion rate precisely because you use it together with machine learning; a case where you could not reach the same conversion rate without machine learning.

In today's digital age customers expect to receive top-of-the-line service and user experience when and where they want it. This puts companies under pressure to find new ways to impress customers and differentiate from the competition in an increasingly populated digital marketplace. To build an environment that nurtures innovation and meets the ever-evolving expectations of customers many businesses are now collaborating with smaller tech firms (like us!).

As a part of this, in November 2015, Danske Bank launched a new service called ‘Dreams come true’ with the help of Giosg. The solution provided uses intelligent analytics to first, find potential customers in the business’s partner network and then secondly, to offer these customers an opportunity to get real-time professional advice and financial solution when and where they need it. 

In 2015, Connells Group, one of the UK’s largest real estate groups – operating across a number of well-known UK estate agency brands, was looking for new ways to drive revenue from its websites. Their biggest revenue stream was the market appraisal bookings for properties but, at the time, website visitors could only book one through online forms or by phoning the estate agency branches directly. As both of these options required a high level of commitment from the website visitor, finding an easier option for the customer to get in touch seemed like the most natural way to increase the number of market appraisal bookings.

After some careful consideration, Connells Group decided to implement giosg solutions on a number of its brand's websites, enabling them to have a discussion with the website visitor via live chat. Eventually, this ability led to a significant increase in market appraisals. But adapting to a new way of connecting with customers wasn’t without its challenges.

Imagine a situation like this: You have just found a new home that you have been dreaming about for quite some time (Yay, great news! Congrats!). However, as this is not your first time moving it doesn’t take long before your excitement slowly starts to wear off as you realise how much stuff you need to get done before you can completely relax and enjoy your new place. Sounds familiar, right?

What if there was a way to make everything moving-related much more effortless? As mentioned in our previous blog, estate agents can connect with the end-customer in real-time with the help of our Network solution on the business partner’s site (e.g. on a property portal site). Similarly, the giosg Network also allows estate agents to offer their business partners’ complementary solutions (in the right context) on their website. More precisely this means that instead of contacting every service provider on individual sites, the customer can start a conversation with, e.g. a company offering relocation services while still browsing on the estate agents' website. 

From the business point of view, this creates a win-win situation for both parties of the partner network. The estate agent can generate extra revenue from collecting access and lead fees and the partner can boost their sales by converting visitors on estate agents' website into customers.

Doesn’t this sound like a good way of creating powerful network effects? And not bad for the overall customer experience either, eh? Then, here’s something to get you started!

Digitalization has reshaped the way financial services are structured, marketed and  provided. Customers today want personalized, flexible service regardless of when, how and where they want to bank. Banks are churning out smart solutions, cloud platforms and mobile apps, and consumers are embracing the change.

In a bid to speed their online presence many banks are collaborating with smaller tech firms (like us!) to build an environment that nurtures innovation and meets the ever-evolving expectations of customers. This collaboration helps all parties; smaller companies can offer banks the benefits of high specialization without major investments. In return they gain market visibility and a brand boost from collaborating with well-known banks. The collaboration also serves as an excellent platform for sharing ideas, experiences and know-how.

Until recently, however, many smaller companies have struggled to meet the bank-level security requirements. This has often forced banks to choose compliance over great technology. In an industry where confidentiality means everything, security is considered near-sacred. Banks are also faced with increasing legal requirements, most recently in the form of the tough new General Data Protection Regulation. Fortunately this is finally being recognized by companies like giosg that are investing into security like never before. 

In the digital age providing customers with omnichannel customer service has become more of a rule than an exception. Reliable, receptive and timely responses are the most important characteristics that come to mind when thinking about what is important to the customer, regarding service. Still, from the business point of view, there is a big difference in how these objectives are achieved.

Although customers today expect to receive the same level of service regardless of the channel they use, the fact still is that some support channels are more cost-efficient than others. As mentioned in our previous blogs (here and here), the biggest shortcomings of the phone support compared to live chat are higher operating costs and the mere impossibility to have more than one conversation at the same time. Live chat, on the other hand, changes the work of the customer service agents from one-at-a-time processing rate to taking care of 3 to 7 tickets simultaneously. That enables customer service to solve tickets quicker and, also cuts costs as fewer callbacks are required.

Even though self-service is certainly an essential part of digital customer experience, it is much better for both the customer and the company to get the necessary information right in the first time. Handling forms with incorrectly filled in or missing information takes a lot of customer service agents time whereas forms filled correctly can be processed and solved almost automatically. With CoBrowse technology the agent can provide hands-on assistance online so that all sections of the form can be filled the first time correctly.

It is good to make sure you have the best practices in use to direct customers toward the most efficient customer service channels to generate the right value for both your customer and your business. A client of ours, If Insurance (If), provides an excellent example of how a company can enable efficient and smart handling of customer requests in an online environment.

We sat down with Indrek Vainu who is the Product Manager at AlphaBlues, an artificial intelligence start-up that automates customer service with chatbots. Indrek answered some of the most common questions that we get from customers about chatbots.

In the past decade or so, the way people search for homes has changed drastically as more and more house-hunters now start their search by looking on one of the major property portals. Recent research in the UK showed that 47% of the population had used a property search website during the last 12 months.

Technology will undoubtedly continue to take away barriers to information, so that portal visitors have even easier and more efficient ways to search for properties that match their requirements. Innovations are also changing the role of an estate agent so that the real issue real estate companies need to address is how to be more responsive to potential customers.

Estate agents are apparently always looking to get more listings but how to find those seller leads on property portals? The answer is quite simple: try asking portal visitors if they already have a home that they need to sell before they can buy a new one.

Customer service is usually the first place we contact if we need more information, want to make a complaint etc. This means that customer service is the main opportunity for service recovery: turning a scratch in Customer Experience into something great. So that the customer ends up feeling more satisfied after the company has solved the problem than if everything had gone as planned in the first place.

With that kind of responsibility, customer service needs to take ownership of every step of the customer experience formulation, starting from the first touchpoint. Otherwise, the opportunity for service recovery is lost in the process. For example, when I recently needed to call customer service of a big insurance company, I spent the first 50s dealing with automated menu making choices and then another 50s listening to elevator music before I was connected to customer service.

By contrast, many of our client companies continue to reach under 10s response times in live chat. From customer’s point of view, this means that with live chat there is basically no waiting time. Plus there is no need to switch to another device as you can just type the question while browsing on service provider’s website. So, like this online technology reviews firm points out, it’s no wonder that millennials prefer live chat over other channels in their day-to-day communication.

Finnish car dealer Käyttöauto has experienced the radical change in consumer behavior that is almost too familiar to the automotive industry. It wasn't more than a decade ago when potential car buyers showed up on car dealers' doorstep to browse trough the selection. It was relatively easy task to find out how committed these buyers are, what kind of car they are looking for and recommend one from the dealer's selection.

Nowadays, majority of the browsing occurs on car portals. Each car from a single dealer competes against numerous car adverts from other dealers. This competition happens mostly without car dealers having any power on the outcome - the car portal's search engine determines the order in which the cars are shown. Car dealers' role is traditionally left to sit and wait for the consumer to contact them.

Computer-controlled bots who can communicate with customers. That has been the dream of customer service professionals for quite a while now. Corporate giants have been testing them since the last decade but so far, we haven't seen them implemented at scale.

Once again, there's an industry-wide hype around chatbots but this time, that hype will pay off. And there are two simple reasons why they will actually make it.

Live chat has several business benefits,  for example, it has proved to be more cost-efficient than other service channels (like the phone). Still, none of this is possible without the necessary human resources to provide customers with personal, timely and accurate support. That is why one of the most critical considerations when implementing live chat is resourcing.

When trying to make sure they can utilise the full potential of live chat as a service channel, companies usually have at least three alternatives. The 1) is to use the same customer support and sales resources they use with phone and email. The 2) is to outsource the chat personnel to a resource company, and the 3) is to adopt an model that combines internal and outsourced resources.

Different alternatives have all their advantages and disadvantages which is why it is good to take time to review each option carefully before making a move.

An estimate of 4 trillion USD worth merchandise was abandoned in 2016. Every time consumers are asked for a reason for this behaviour one of the most common answers is higher than expected shipping costs. What this usually means is that either lower or free shipping costs haven’t been offered in the first place, or the customer hasn’t qualified for them. Either way, this is a great example of a situation, which could have been turned into a victory quite easily. In this particular case, for example, by reminding the customer of a perk (e.g. free shipping for orders over 100 EUR).

Then, how to identify these situations so that you can give the customer a gentle push towards completing the purchase? Like discussed in our previous blog, there are four (4) conditions that e-retailers should pay attention to when trying to turn online visitors into customers. Visitor's shopping cart information is the first one of these. That is why in this blog we will focus on explaining how having real-time visibility of visitor's shopping cart size and shopping history can create a lot of opportunities for enhancing online customer experience and increasing sales.

For all of us at Giosg, it's a true honour to host Petra Mengelt from Euroloan, a seasoned expert of customer experience in the financial industry, on our blog. We have learned a lot from Petra while working with her and listening to her in various stages and conference halls across the Europe. We are sure that her words will shake up your expectations whether you're working to push the financial industry into an era of superb (digital) customer experience, or assessing the experience as the customer.

The Banker said “No!”

Remember the times when mum and dad were getting ready for a meeting at a bank back in the day? Is dad’s tie correct and mum’s skirt long enough? Do they look goodenough to make that critical first impression on the loan officer?What will he think when they arrive, hat in hand, to get the loan for the new appliance?

It’s dusk and your customer service is closing the chat service for the day. They are tired after handling up to 7 messages at a time for the whole day (like Finnair’s agents do).

They’ve been there when your visitor has felt lost. They’ve been there when your visitor needed details. And while helping, they’ve been collecting leads for the sales peeps, maybe in the dozens (like YIT does).

If you have a live chat on your site and your site's goal is to get leads through forms (like the one on your 'Contact us' -page), you are probably already using behavioral Rules to initiate a chat conversation with the visitors most likely to abandon those forms. 

In our previous blog post we listed four ways to use automated Lead Call after your chat agents call it a day.  This is a hands-on article on how to create a Rule that triggers a Lead Call asking for a phone number, name and an open-ended question when a visitor navigates away from a form-page without filling the form.

A summary of a presentation held together with Danske Bank at Banking Horizon 2016 event on 18th of October 2016 in London. The presentation was about how online retailers can utilise partnerships and provide consumers with all the relevant services throughout the partner network. 

Like mentioned in a recent Finextra article, there’s one fundamental thing that separates banks from many other businesses; customers don’t want to do business with them. Customers don’t want a mortgage; they want a home. They don’t want a loan; they want a car, or a holiday trip, or something else. Banks for a customer are a means to an end. And those banks that get this also recognise that they need to be offering services beyond the banking product.

Then, how can banks offer services online? A typical situation now is that a website has been designed to bombard visitors with everything possible. Still, for example, new and returning visitors often have different kind of needs which means that it would be wise to personalise the offering to meet the customer's actual situation better.

The most important thing, when trying to engage customers online, is to take a look at what customers are experiencing and then think about how to get their attention and help them. One way to do this is to use different kinds of situational reminders, like personalised and informative banners or proactive live chat, on a company’s website.

Let us show you how!

In 2014, Finnair faced the same problem many customer oriented companies face: customer service costs a lot. Customer service is important and engagement with the customer is directly linked to upselling, but the costs associated with traditional customer service channels are sometimes unbearable. Each call takes several minutes out of a service agent’s workday and each minute costs. 

Have you ever thought that instead of spending more and more money on trying to get website visitors back to your site once they have left, you could offer them better service in the first place?

Beyond the buzz, personalisation offers online retailers real potential. 86% of consumers consider personalisation to have some impact on their purchasing decision and businesses that personalise their web experiences see sales increase by 19% on average.

The definition of personalisation is changing continuously. For some time, personalisation signified exclusivity which has traditionally been expensive. However, rapid developments in technology have made personalised communications, products and services more affordable and accessible.

Offering different things to different people based on their known or predicted preferences may still sound like a lot of effort but this is where machine learning comes into play. Giosg Target, our machine learning tool, analyses hundreds of thousands of possible behavioural patterns and then decides how likely each individual visitor is to convert. Based on the information we collect, machine learning algorithms determine the optimal personalised intervention to maximise the chances of conversion.  

In this blog we will talk the two strategies for converting online visitors; proactive and reactive chatting. We will also give our recommendations based on what we have come to find from our experience and results.  

Let us start by explaining shortly what the difference between these two approaches is. A reactive chat means that the online visitors have to, by themselves, click on a button that would prompt the chat to start. A proactive message is an automatically configured message that appears to the visitor.

Now, let's imagine you are a sales rep in an electronics warehouse, a customer walks in and you see him looking at one product for a long time, wouldn’t you go up to him and ask if he needs any help? The likelihood is that he is looking for some information that will satisfy his requirements in order to make the purchase. Well, the same idea applies to a website.

A Forrester research study has shown that a reactive chat will give a return on investment (ROI) of 15% while engaging online visitors with proactive chat will give a return on investment (ROI) of 105%. We have also seen these same results in the field,  although they vary by industries and domains. So in the end of the day, when done right, meaning carefully placing the proactive messages in order for the visitors to be prompted and converted, it is just good service.

Most industries working with large amounts of data have already recognised the value of machine learning technology. By using machine learning algorithms to build models that uncover connections and identify important insights in data, companies can make better decisions without human intervention. This means that companies can work more efficiently and gain an advantage over competitors.

Ecommerce websites can use real-time analytics and machine learning to recommend visitors items they might like based on their buying history – and to promote other items they could be interested in. And, this ability to utilise the data collected to provide even more personalised shopping experiences (or implement targeted marketing campaigns), is the future of retail.

Live chat has great potential for it meets the customer at the point of the buying cycle where they're going to have questions. Meaning that agents can connect with customers at the point of sale and gently nudge browsing customers into the checkout line. 

Besides increasing sales (if that wasn't enough), live chat can help you gain also other type of competitive edge; excellent customer experience. For let's not forget that customers actually like it. A survey conducted by Forrester research says that 44% of online consumers indicate that having live chat available while making an online purchase is one of the most important features a website can offer. And other surveys also state that more than half of customers are more likely to return to a website that offers live chat.

In our previous blog posts (here  and here), we gave you hands-on instructions on how to create rules and how to do A/B testing. This time we are going to show you how to create a pop-up discount code which you can use to gently nudge your online store visitors towards making a purchase.

Like discussed in one of our earlier blogs, hesitant visitors are a common problem for many eCommerce stores. Still, there is no need to despair as there are ways to improve the situation and help the visitors to overcome their hesitance.  

After you have identified the people that are hesitant, you need to decide which incentives you are willing to use to turn them into buyers. Adding coupon discount codes to your website can help you to draw more customers in, give them a great shopping experience and encourage them to come back and buy from you again at a full price.

In a previous blog post (here), we gave you hands-on instructions on how to create rules. This time we are going to show you how to perform A/B testing for rules to compare two versions against each other to help you determine which one performs better.

You can use A/B testing to e.g. compare proactive and reactive approaches against each other. For example, you can show half of the group a custom autosuggest chat message and offer the other half a  static chat button element (which they can click if they want to start chatting). In addition, you can take an action, like autosuggest chat message or free delivery pop-up, modify it to create a second version (e.g. change the text, picture or color) and then, show half of your traffic the original version and the other half the modified version. Let's try!

Hesitant visitors are thorns in the flesh of many eCommerce leaders. Around 35% of visitors bounce before getting even started. And out of those who get started, almost 73% vanish at the final strecth and abandon their shopping cart.

So, what can you do to help your hesitant visitors to overcome their hesitance - to push them into purchase? In this blog post we'll go over the two-step process of identifying them and choosing the right method to push them into purchase.

One of the top most cited reasons for not purchasing online is the cost of shipping. Customers see shipping costs as the number one barrier to buying, and the situation is made even worst if there is no up-front information available about it. Since offering free shipping would also entirely remove this obstacle related to shipping costs, it is safe to assume that free shipping would make converting these visitors into buying customers significantly easier.

Therefore, to increase conversion rate, it is good to remind customers of an existing perk, like "free shipping on orders over xxx". Let us show you how!

The brutal fact is that roughly 70% of shopping carts are abandoned and the number is most likely going to increase as more consumers shift to online and mobile shopping. By 2018 the expected value of mobile commerce will exceed six hundred billion dollars but the difficulty is that there are numerous potential causes leading up to mobile conversion rates being even lower than with desktop shopping. 

This may sound like a challenging situation, but can actually provide a great opportunity for differentiation and competitive advantage if approached the right way. Because, no matter the channel, at the end of the day the problem usually roots in the same cause: Your online store fails to meet the needs of the visitor. As highlighted in this previous blog, most purchase funnels are still built on someone’s best guesses of an optimal path. And, this doesn’t really match with the expectations of today's customers as 70% of them say they want more personalized shopping experiences.

To succeed in the future, businesses need to rethink their customer experience. And what better time than now because getting into customer’s head and finding ways to analyze their behavior enables enhancements. And, a rich and personalized live customer interaction and showcasing products in more engaging ways also contributes to a better customer experience and to higher conversion rates.

What does personalization mean and why does it even matter?

Let me start with a real-life example. Couple of years ago a friend of mine decided to enter a triathlon race. That was not something I had ever dreamed of before, but since I have a relatively competitive nature, it didn’t take too long for me to jump aboard. If he could do it, so could I.

At this point, I was not concerned about the fact that to actually finish the race; I needed to improve my non-existing swimming skills significantly. Instead, I was determined to make sure that I have the best possible equipment for completing the task. The one thing I needed the most was a new bicycle.

I spent the next weeks searching for information and making comparisons online. All this only to end up going to a brick and mortar store to make the purchase. So, what exactly happened and what did the online store lack?

While most companies track web store conversion, the diversity of possible factors affecting conversion, and it's evil twin, abandonment, makes it a difficult process to manage. A variety of online customer service tools exist today, but knowing which customers to approach is still difficult. Also, providing live customer service is valuable in many cases, but not in all. As customer service is also costly, the effort should be directed in a way providing best value.

This may sound like something out of a science fiction movie but the process is actually quite similar to human comprehension. Machine learning tools use data to detect patterns from extremely large data sets and then adjust actions accordingly. By doing this they also constantly learn more and improve their own understanding.

In the previous blog, I discussed at a general level, five considerations relevant when/how to direct salespeople online. This time, I will go deeper into the first level: Sales strategy.

Sales strategy defines the top level of what and to whom chat agents sell. It defines the stage of a purchase process during which the chat is activated. Also, it offers guidelines for sales persons operating the chat. The sales strategy has a strong link to goals,metrics, the allocation of resources as well as post-chat processes guiding how the chat agents work. More specifically, a chat sales strategy reflects for e.g. the choices made related to the visibility and proactive features of the chat.