Use cases

This section does not describe any particular Sales-n-Stats features, but outlines some of the everyday tasks that can be accomplished with the help of this software.

Adding a personal touch to your online business

Building customer relationships

Sales-n-Stats enables you to identify the visitors coming to your site as being either new or already existing customers and to choose the appropriate style of communication accordingly. Knowing who your customers are allows you to provide personalized services to each of them. For example, the fact that a visitor is your existing customer is clearly indicated on his Visitor's badge. The badge shows the visitor's name (it is known to the system as the visitor himself provided it along with his other personal information during the previous purchase). It means you can at least welcome this visitor by the name - which he does not even expect in the faceless, anonymous, highly automated Internet environment. If you then take a minute to analyze the Visitor's profile, you will find more useful data stored there: the history of the customer's purchases, visits chronology, communication transcripts, contact information etc. The information obtained from the Visitor's profile can be a good basis for consistent communication: you find out the area of interests of this person, his personal preferences and communication style. Pretty soon you get to know as much about this customer as if he were living around the corner and were regularly dropping by to buy something or just to say Hello! Tactfully exercising personalized approach to your customers breeds customer satisfaction and loyalty to your business.

Finding out your visitors' actual needs

You can find out pretty much about your visitors' areas of interest even without asking them any questions. When a visitor comes to your website from a search engine (e.g. Google or Yahoo), Sales-n-Stats indicates that on his Visitor's Badge and shows you the search phrase that brought the visitor to your site. Knowing what the visitor is looking for, you can contact him and help him make the right choice. For example, the visitor is searching for “golf clubs for beginners”. Based on this search phrase you can assume that the customer is looking for an inexpensive set of golf clubs for leisure play and offer an appropriate product.

You may find it a good idea to set up Sales-n-Stats to monitor the search forms at you site. The results of site search can be used in the same manner.

Working out the right style of communication with your visitors

You must be aware that not all of the visitors browsing your site may be willing to talk with your staff. Some of them may be just not in the mood for talking, others may believe “those sales sharks are only trying to shove things down their throat to rip them off". So, try not to be importunate. When a sales manager imposes unwanted help, it is the shortest way to drive a prospective customer off the site. Sales-n-Stats helps you to deal with this problem by providing a way to find out the customers' disposition. The customers declining an invitation for chat are marked by a special sign indicating they do not want to be bothered again during this visit. If not sure whether to contact a visitor or not, you can refer to the history of previous communication with him to get a better idea of whether your help will be appreciated. Ability to provide tactful assistance may become a quality that could help your business to stand out in a crowded market.

Saving your customers' time

A visitor in need of a particular product or service often does not have the time to look for it among the other things on your site or does not have enough motivation to search through loads of information just to find an answer to a simple question. Sales-n-Stats live communication tools can be a solution for such a visitor. All he needs to do is to request assistance from a live consultant via the site's chat facilities. Using a text or a voice chat, the consultant can answer the visitor's request without making the visitor wait too long. Even if the desired product is not listed in the catalog, the consultant can often advise a similar product or a product that is even better than the one the visitor has originally requested. If despite the consultant's effort a substitute for the required product or service is not found, the customer is satisfied with the experience all the same – and probably next time he needs something your site will be one of his first considerations.

Letting the customers know you are on their side

Sales-n-Stats is a powerful means to facilitate upselling. Suppose, a visitor browses you store, puts a product into his shopping cart and heads to checkout. The system detects this action and notifies the sales manager online. The manager contacts the visitor via text or voice chat and offers his assistance. In the course of the discussion the manager can figure out what the product being purchased is going to be used for and what other products could complement the purchase. Normally, an efficient sales manager knows the produce sold at his store well enough to offer the customer some additional goods or accessories that can help to make the original product even more useful. This can turn out to be the real key to success for your store: when upselling is done, additional revenues are earned by the store and the visitor gets everything he needs to achieve his specific aims. Letting the customers know you are on their side cannot but promote future success of your store.

Providing focused support to customers placing big orders

If the system indicates there are some expensive products in a visitor's cart, the visitor is probably worth paying additional attention to as a potential source of a big order. Placing items into the cart does not necessarily mean the visitor is going to purchase them immediately, but it clearly indicates an interest in this particular item. It may be good practice to proactively contact this client and offer your assistance through live communication. The customer making a big purchase is likely to welcome additional attention from the sales crew, so both the sides will benefit from the negotiation. Even if the visitor is not ready for the purchase and abandons the cart with some products left in it, there is a good chance he returns to this site when ready to make the order. You have the ability to mark this visitor with a special sign (Marker) not to miss him when he returns to your site.

Customer services

Proactive Contact

Suppose your site works as an online catalog advertising the products and services provided by your company. Even if the site visitors do not have the ability to order online, you can still be helpful to them. Operator can monitor what pages a customer browses and how long he stays at each page to get an impression of what interests the visitor. When the visitor starts viewing detailed descriptions returning to the previously viewed pages, it's time to offer him live assistance. The probability of the visitor's becoming your happy customer is much higher with personalized contact. Of course, there are certain chances the visitor gets interested and contacts you on his own initiative. However, if you believe keeping your customers satisfied is the key to success, do not hesitate to lend a helping hand as soon as you notice it might be needed.

Responsive support

An existing customer has difficulties using a product he purchased from you. He comes to your site and clicks the 'Click for Live Help' button. Operator-receptionist receives the incoming support request and gets basic information about the problem. If the problem is not trivial, the operator can transfer it to the corresponding department that is able to solve the problem. If the customer comes to your website during non-working hours or on a day off, he can leave a message for the technical support service and get an answer as soon as they are back in office.

Resolving support tickets

If the traffic on your site is too intensive for your operators to resolve all requests in real time, Sales-n-Stats offline communication tools can be used. Your customers can leave a message using a contact form at your site. The message is placed in the message board and queued for processing. The operator does not need to search for the messages that came in lately: he just clicks the next message button and starts working on the customer's request. The reply is automatically mailed to the customer, and the message is marked as closed if necessary.

Enterprise edition of Sales-n-Stats allows you to organize the process of visitor-to-operator communication even better by providing some operators exclusively for online communication and some for processing offline messages.

Placing targeted ads more effectively

Analyzing the most popular site paths, you can get a better idea of how your visitors traverse through the website. You can take advantage of this knowledge, for example, by placing links to special offer discounts and other marketing information in the most conspicuous places to make sure this information is delivered to the potential customers.

Localizing and resolving usability issues

Improving the conversion rate, you can pay attention to the pages where visitors abandoned your site. There is quite a number of reasons why your visitors could do that, but you should make sure it is not because of some kind of deficiency in your site design functionality. For example, from a report you can infer that many customers place products into the shopping cart, but very few of them actually proceed to checkout leaving your site from the 'View Cart' page. After taking a closer look at this page you discover that the 'Checkout' button is located at the very bottom and many potential customers just could not find it instantly and thus left the site in frustration. Placing the button higher and making it clearly visible immediately reduces the number of visitors leaving the cart prematurely. Another example: a report indicates you visitors frequently abandon your site from the 'Register' page. It may be so that there are too many required fields to fill in and the visitors get bored before they finish the registration process. After analyzing the problem, you can redesign the registration page and find out whether your inference was right.

Improving and promoting your website

Making your site more attractive to visitors

Use Sales-n-Stats to explore your site mechanisms and learn more about your visitors: origin, dynamics, source of traffic and, what is very important, how the visitors interact with your site - what actions they perform, what paths they follow. Sales-n-Stats reports can help you understand which of the site pages capture your visitors' attention. Keep in mind that the length of time people spend on a site is not necessarily a measure of success – it can often be a measure of failure. If, analyzing data provided by Sales-n-Stats, you see that your site visitors wander in circles and exit the site without making any orders, it may be a sign that something is wrong with the site navigation system.

Do not force your visitors to navigate unnecessarily or to stay on your site longer than is required: restructure your website to simplify navigation. Check the frequently abandoned web pages for issues that may cause visitors to prematurely exit your site, like error messages generated by faulty program code or obvious typos. Keeping your site in order helps you attract more visitors and promote your products and services.

Finding out what search phrases really work for you

No one will probably argue that proper placement in search engines can bring anticipated traffic to your site. But what search phrases really work for you? You may rely on your intuition but solid facts are usually stronger arguments. Sales-n-Stats works on the visitor level so it is quite simple to track if a sale was generated by a search engine and what search query triggered that sale even if the actual sale was made some time later. Knowing the right phrases you can significantly save money by not paying for non-working adwords and invest into some really working ones. This information can also be very handy when selecting keywords for search engine placement.

Splitting customers base to target groups

Sales-n-Stats can help you to segment your customer base for conducting a promotional campaign or seasonal sale, or for doing a marketing research. With specialized reports bundled with the system you are able to split your customer base by the type of purchased products, total number or sum of orders, geographical location and time of purchase. The visitors who did not purchase anything can also be processed (for example, registered users, newsletter subscribers, visitors who filled in the contact form, etc). The resulting lists of visitors can be exported to text (CSV) files and then processed by third party software.

For example, you can send a discount coupon to all the customers who ordered products from your store for a sum of more than $250 during the last six months; inform all the customers who recently searched for golf clubs or added them to the wish list that you have a new arrival of golf clubs and accessories; invite all the local customers to visit your physical store for a free wine tasting or notify all the customers from your state that you are now offering free in-state delivery.