Client: Blue Soda Promo
Vendor: Bold Software
Objective: To drive sales by providing live chat customer service on the company’s new website.
Overture Premiums & Promotions spun off a new e-commerce brand this summer, Blue Soda Promo. The new brand took with it a significant 750,000 product inventory. While parent company Overture targets larger corporations, Blue Soda Promo focuses on selling its promotional products, tradeshow giveaways and executive gifts to small and medium-sized businesses.
Blue Soda Promo, which also sells products by catalog, does not include its entire inventory online. The company needed to provide online shoppers with a positive customer service experience, and help drive online sales.
Strategy: Tej Shah, Blue Soda Promo’s director of e-commerce, opted to retain the live chat function he had used at Overture. Internal research showed it was one way to improve customer service by communicating with customers and prospects both before and after the sale. The company turned to Bold Software to implement its BoldChat software.
“One thing that chat has really helped us with is that only about 10,000 of our products are online, but we offer almost 1 million in our catalog,” says Shah. “So for customers who want unique, niche or specific products that are not featured on our website, agents can find them and offer them to the consumer.”
Blue Soda Promo also introduced “proactive chat” where a live chat box invitation pops up on the page if a prospect has been perusing the site for more than 30 seconds. At that point, they can click the box to close it or choose to engage in a chat. The objective of the campaign was to push a higher conversion rate by engaging those who were visiting the website, but had not yet initiated a customer service representative in a chat.
“With so many different products, it’s very easy for a consumer to come to our website and become overwhelmed,” says Shah. “We wanted to help … answer their questions.”
Results: The company reports that 85% to 95% of all inbound leads come directly from customers who were engaged in a live online chat session. The company also found that customers who made a purchase and began their interaction through a “proactive chat,” convert almost 11 times the rate of those who don’t.
Shah praised the positive results of live chat strategy and said Blue Soda Promo expects to meet revenue goals. It intends to introduce another interactive website feature in the next 90 days.
