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How it works
Sales-n-Stats is designed to work 24/7 performing a wide variety of tasks. The system features online monitoring, communication, data collection, reporting and automatic reactions.
Online monitoring
Online monitoring allows you to supervise the visitors on your website and to control their actions in real time. For the purposes of monitoring, your website is logically divided into several distinct areas (zones). Sales-n-Stats Operator Terminal provides a visual presentation of your website divided into zones with all the visitors browsing the different site zones at the moment. The visitors are presented there by 'visitor badges' - virtual identification cards providing brief summary of personal data and some essential information about their behavior on the site during the current visit in graphical form. The visual presentation of each visitor in the Operator Terminal allows you to estimate the overall number of visitors on the site and in each particular site zone, as well as to find out what each of the visitors is doing.
When the site is overcrowded, to reduce the number of visitor badges displayed on the site monitor and focus on a particular visitor group use special filters that sort the visitors in such a way that only the visitors who meet certain requirements get displayed (for example, existing customers, visitors with product items in their shopping cart or visitors who visit the website for the 1st time). You can use some predefined filters shipped with Sales-n-Stats or create your own.
Communication tools
Communication tools enable you to organize both online and offline communication with the site visitors. Any visitor in need of assistance can initiate communication with a Sales-n-Stats operator. Communication is established by means of online text chat or Voice over IP technology. A text chat or a voice call can be started by the visitor by clicking a special button located on the website he is browsing (such a button is built into any site monitored by Sales-n-Stats). When live support is unavailable, the visitor can still request help by leaving an “offline” message (a message that the operator receives when he goes online). Sales-n-Stats queues the incoming help requests from your visitors to ensure that each visitor gets a timely response.
You can initiate communication with any site visitor by yourself. If in the process of supervising your visitors' activity you notice that any of them is experiencing difficulties or might need a consultation, you can contact him personally from the Operator Terminal by starting an online chat. To contact the visitors who are offline send a message to their email addresses.
Sales-n-Stats communication tools facilitate employment of outside resources in the process of communication. For example, 'Push' functionality allows you to easily send a file, an image or URL to a visitor during a chat session. 'Canned' messages functionality simplifies your interaction with the visitors allowing you to keep some predefined leading questions and frequently used phrases on your system and insert them into your messages to shorten the response time.
Visitor's Profile
For each site visitor the system creates a Visitor's Profile – a place that stores personal data associated with this visitor, the history of the visitor's interaction with the site (the actions performed by the visitor during each of his visits to the site) and (if applicable) the history of the visitor's communication with the customer service/support staff.
The personal data entered by the system into a Visitor's Profile is collected from various forms that the user completes on your website (name, address, etc) and from the service data received by Sales-n-Stats in connection with the user's presence on the site (user's IP address, browser type, referrer URL, etc).
Actions
An 'action' is a fragment of the visitor's interaction with the site which may consist of one or more steps but is recognized by the system as a logically finished act. Actions are singled out on the basis of what steps or step sequences taken by a visitor are relevant for your business. For example, typical actions for an e-commerce site may be a visitor's registration on the site, adding a product to the shopping cart, checkout, etc. When a visitor performs certain actions and provides personal data, it is saved to his Visitor Profile. One of the greatest advantages of Sales-n-Stats is that it can be “taught” to recognize any actions which you think are relevant to your business.
All the actions the visitor performs on your site are also stored in the system. View his Visitor Profile to find out what actions were performed during each of the user's visits to the site. Profile also stores the complete history of communication of the visitor with Sales-n-Stats operators. To find any messages sent to or received from a visitor or view the transcript of any chat in which the visitor has taken part, open the 'Messages' section of his Visitor Profile.
A Sales-n-Stats operator can use the information contained in a Visitor's profile to analyze the visitor's previous experience interacting with the site and to provide personalized services to this visitor based on what he might be interested in.
Reports
Reports produced by the system allow you to receive different kinds of statistics about your website and to assess the efficiency of business methods used on this site.
The system provides a toolset that allows you to create various types of reports using the information gathered by Sales-n-Stats about the visitors and their actions on your site. According to your needs, receive web statistics, reports by actions, visitors reports, e-commerce reports, marketing reports, etc, based on various parameters.
The system provides a number of preconfigured reports for e-commerce sites. However, you can create an unlimited number of your own reports that meet the needs of your business. You have total control over the look of the reports you create: the layout of any report, as well as the font and color of the text can be adjusted using the built-in report constructor. If the resources of the report constructor do not meet the requirements of your own complex report, you can edit macros that generate the report. Many reports can be presented graphically as bar charts or pie charts. All the reports are printable.
Automatic reactions
Automatic reactions are operations which Sales-n-Stats can be set up to perform under certain conditions in response to customers' actions. You can define what action needs to be performed and what conditions need to be met for a certain reaction to take place.
The possible reactions that can be performed by Sales-n-Stats include displaying a message or a web link to the visitor who performed a certain action, making an HTTP request (GET or POST methods) to an external web application, executing an external application on the visitor's local machine, executing a macro, displaying an alert message to the operator and posting a message to the personal profile of the visitor who performed an action (without sending it to the visitor), modifying a Visitor's Profile field. For example, when a visitor places an order, Sales-n-Stats can display a thank-you message to him.
Functional roles in the system.
The major functional roles in Sales-n-Stats are administrator, operator and visitor.
Note: In Live version of Sales-n-Stats administrator and operator have exactly the same privileges in respect of access to the system resources, so these two roles are typically performed by the same person.
Sales-n-Stats administrator
The person in the role of Sales-n-Stats administrator is responsible for supporting the operation of Sales-n-Stats Data Center and Operator Terminals. The administrative part of the job presupposes doing what is needed to get Sales-n-Stats up and running: the administrator installs Sales-n-Stats and adjusts it to work with a specific website or a group of websites (defines site zones for better monitoring, adjusts general settings, sets up possible actions and reactions, etc).
Sales-n-Stats operator
The operator's functions depend on the aims and policy of your company and may include supervising the visitors of a website/group of websites, providing guidance to the visitors experiencing difficulties (site navigation problems, storefront errors), advising, consulting, upselling and any other activities involving person-to-person communication. Communication may be realized via text chats, voice calls or offline messages. The operator has the ability to answer assistance requests from the site visitors, as well as to contact specific site visitors proactively to offer assistance or special services.
Website visitor
The functioning of Sales-n-Stats is for the most part transparent to the site visitor as site monitoring, collection of data and creation of reports do not interfere with the process of the visitor's interaction with the site. While on the site, the visitor is occupied with browsing the site content, filling in the site forms, placing orders and doing whatever the site is meant for. In practice, the visitor may not even know that he is being supervised. Probably the only case in which the site visitor employs Sales-n-Stats tools is when he initiates online communication with a customer service/support staff representative (Sales-n-Stats operator) or leaves an offline message. The visitor can also be affected by reactions automatically performed by the system in response to some of his actions (for example, the visitor can get a message as a result of some action).
Sales-n-Stats: Live and Enterprise editions
Sales-n-Stats web control and communication center comes in two versions: Live edition and Enterprise edition. Preference for one version over the other is determined by the type of business that you are going to use Sales-n-Stats for.
Live edition meets the needs of small and medium-sized businesses. It is a single user version that allows one person to have full control over the system and best suits the companies where a wide variety of tasks is handled by the same person (for example, in situations where a self-employed business owner needs to be informed about all the aspects of his online business and himself defines the content and structure of the website, ensures personal contact with the visitors, analyzes the processes that take place on the site and their effect on the results of his business activities). Live edition of Sales-n-Stats provides exceptional performance and ensures efficient data exchange between the operator and the website in the process of collecting detailed information about any kind of activity on the website and providing it to the operator in real time. The same interface allows the operator not only to view and analyze the collected data, but to communicate with any of the visitors in person.
Enterprise edition is designed for larger companies and enterprise corporations in which several staff members need to have simultaneous access to the information gathered by Sales-n-Stats and to be able to communicate with the website visitors at the same time. Enterprise edition thus represents a multi-user version of Sales-n-Stats that enables several specialists to simultaneously access centrally stored data over a network and to communicate not only with the website visitors, but with each other as well. The collaboration environment provided by Enterprise edition increases the overall productivity of your online business allowing specialists from different fields to use the same system at the same time for their diverse purposes. Multiple operator terminals enable support staff to provide assistance to a larger number of visitors and to divide responsibilities regarding the functioning of the WWW section of the business according to the sphere of competence of each specialist involved in the process.
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