How to make communication frictionless
Turning website visitors into customers is made much easier if you have the right tools in place, especially if it’s 100% integrated with your CRM and website
I magine for a moment that you’re visiting your company’s website. It doesn’t matter how you arrived – a Google search, an email, Facebook – but you like what you see and are interested in the products or services on sale. What happens next?
Perhaps there’s a “Contact us” link or a shop. But while that solves the problem for someone who is determined to proceed, it leaves a swathe of “undecided” visitors who will most likely click the close button and carry on with their day.
The mistake companies repeatedly make is to add barriers to customers’ purchases. They create friction where there doesn’t need to be any. Here, we’re going to explain a way to entirely remove such friction so that you can turn visitors into customers.
What are the blockers?
When we talk about blockers, we’re thinking about all the annoyances that stop visitors in their tracks. On a desktop site, it could be as simple as not knowing where to go next. Especially if clicking onto a “Products” page provides a lot of options that aren’t clear.
How do you solve this? As consumers, we have become used to a chat window opening up on the bottom-right of a window to connect us to agents. This is almost a tickbox feature now, and if you don’t offer visitors an easy way to communicate then you have found your first blocker. With more than half of web traffic on smartphones, it’s vital you make this just as obvious on mobile browsers.
Now let’s look at your site from the other side of the fence: the IT team.
Perhaps the hurdles that have blocked you from integrating a chat service are a combination of expense and perceived difficulty. Maybe you looked at the options from your current supplier, or a new one, and decided they were just too much hassle to implement.
If you take one thing from this article, we hope it is this: it can be simple and affordable to add sophisticated chat services to your website.
One platform to rule them all
One of the mistakes that businesses make when choosing communication platforms is to silo the different pieces of the jigsaw. That can be especially problematic now, when so many companies have a distributed workforce and employees are as likely to be working from their home office as from central headquarters.
Instead, everything needs to link together smoothly. Your ideal should be to have one supplier, which means you’ll avoid the blame game if something goes wrong.
So, what are the parts of the puzzle? Here, at a basic level, we’re referring to your traditional phone system, chat tools and video calls. When a customer visits your website and clicks on the Chat tool, you want to ensure that your agents can escalate to a voice call and even a video call if that will better serve the customer – not everyone wants to type endless messages into a box.
To fulfil this, you need those “three” platforms to actually be one. 3CX not only integrates with customer-facing parts of your business such as your website (and even Facebook), but is also the communication tool for all of your workforce.
The final part of the jigsaw is integration with your CRM software – but before we come to that, let’s talk
Facebook. As one of the most powerful marketing tools around, it makes sense to treat it the same way as your regular site from a communication point of view: you want a system that can transform a hot Facebook lead into a customer as quickly as possible. And that means integrating it with your chat/call/video service.
Easy to implement
Not only must your choice of communications platform be easy to use from each customer’s perspective, but it must also be easy for agents to use. That means working on both their smartphone and their desk phone in the office.
It also means the software needs to be “one click” intuitive. You want to make it easy for agents to escalate a chat from text to voice and from voice to video, and it needs to be easy on every platform: if they’re sitting on a PC with a headset, if they’re on a tablet or if they’re handling calls on a smartphone.
Another big potential area of friction is ease of implementation. With 3CX, integration with your website could be as easy as adding a WordPress plugin, but it can also be integrated with custom-made CMSes. Visit www.3cx.com and chat to someone on our website!
We also make it simple to implement 3CX as a system. You can host it yourself on-premise, opt for a private cloud with your choice of provider, or we can even host it ourselves. Which brings us to our final point: it’s an easy sell to the purse holders. With 3CX, one simple licence covers chat, voice, video and more. What’s more, you can try 3CX free for one year, no strings attached.
No silos
One of the constant frustrations for customers is repeating information and speaking to a different agent who doesn’t know their history. You can bypass all this by putting all the information you have about a customer into one place, so that any agent can access it.
That, of course, means integration with customer relationship management (CRM) software. 3CX supports all the popular CRM and help desk packages, whether that’s Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Outlook, Zendesk, HubSpot, Zoho or many more (head to www.3cx.com/ docs/crm-integration-guides for a full list and step-bystep instructions).
With your chosen CRM integrated, your agents can see exactly who is calling before they pick up their phone, with the customer’s record open and ready. You can call customers direct from your CRM package too, so agents never need to shift from one software interface to another, while automatic call-journaling removes the tedium of manual call entries.
Take it easy
The conclusion? It doesn’t need to be difficult to implement a frictionless communication system. From a customer’s point of view, their journey will be seamless, whether they decide to stay in the website chat box or end up on a video call.
From your employees’ point of view, the same journey applies. Whether they’re the original person taking the call or an expert pulled in to answer a tough question (for, of course, those one-to-one video chats can be escalated to group chats if necessary), they will have access to all the information they need.
From an IT department’s viewpoint, this is all one system using one, simple licensing model. They can take as much control as they like – down to a bespoke selfhosted approach that ties in with a bespoke CMS – or they can outsource to 3CX or one of our partners to host it all.
And it can all start with a chat on www.3cx.com.