The launch of Citricle Live Support had a huge impact on the market and it affected the way business owners use their personal computers to manage their business. We are convinced that our software has the potential to increase the sales of an online store.

To better illustrate that, we will give you a real life example of one of our customers. His name is Chad Gorby and he is the owner of Colorado Kayak Supply, a company that sells kayaks and kayak accessories.

Chad is investing huge amounts of money on his advertising and SEO, and that explains his success. In fact if you search for the word “kayak” on Google, his website (coloradokayak.com) will come up on the first page, and that’s the result of him taking his business very seriously. He is selling a lot of products in the United States and all over the world.

However advertising is not the only explanation for his rapidly growing sales. Chad realized that although pay-per click will bring people to his website, he still needs to do everything that’s possible to actually convince those people to buy his kayaks. Most people think of advertising and SEO as the only ways to increase sales, and that’s a wrong perception. Although I agree that you cannot have online sales unless you actually have visitors, you will still have to figure out how to transform the visitors into customers. Afterall your final goal is not to have people viewing your website but to have them buy the products you sell.

This is exactly where a live chat software can come in very handy. It gives your sales department a way to reach the visitor and try to turn him into a customer. They can type a message to any of the visitors, offer him the right guidance to choose the product that he needs. But that’s not all, it works both ways: the visitor can ask for live help when he decides he needs it. With a click of a button he can get the answers to all his questions from one of your sales operators. It’s just like in a real store! Communicating with a person will give you a lot more chances to sell, rather than letting the person browse your products and leave.

We had people that asked us some very interesting questions, and we have the right answers for them. Here are a couple of them:

Question 1: With all these toll-free numbers that are available to us, why would I need a live chat software? Why can’t the visitor just give us a call if he is interested?

Answer: Toll-free numbers are great and we strongly encourage using them. However studies show that most people will make a call only in the moment  when they are already decided to buy from you. Even if they want that product, it doesn’t mean the person will buy it from you. If you don’t give him enough information, he could simply click the back button and choose another website. I am sure you aren’t the only one that sells the product he needs. Making a call requires more time than just clicking a button. Making a call doesn’t give you the guarantee that there’s someone out there to answer your call, while if the chat button shows “online”, they do know someone is ready to answer.

Question 2: What about the people that don’t type too fast?

Answer: Most modern people that use a computer regularly can type fast enough to handle a chat conversation. If a person does not regularly using a computer, that person will prefer to go to a supermarket and buy their product instead of shopping online.

In conclusion, it’s very important to understand that while advertising and SEO are two important things, they will bring you visitors, not customers. What you need to do on top of that is turn the visitors into customers. That can make the difference between success and failure.

For more information about our software, click here.

Citricle launches Live Support, a new live chat and real-time traffic monitoring software solution for online stores and websites that wish to provide Web visitors with instant access to customer support and sales staff to answer questions or to help guide during the buying process.

Apart from the live chat features, Citricle Live Support enables Website owners to view a list of referral and traffic source data such as:

• What the visitor searched on Google, Yahoo, MSN or other search engines.
• What page does the visitor come from (referrer).
• Where is the visitor from (country, state, city, zip code, etc).
• What page is the visitor currently viewing (not just the URL, but it includes a browser that shows the content of the page).
• The system information (operating system, browser, screen resolution, system colors, system extensions).
• Type of visitor (new or returning).
• If the visitor is returning, you can see the dates in the past when the visitor visited you before and the chat conversations you had with that visitor.

It can be really fun to just sit and watch what your visitors are doing and it comes really handy to your marketing department, helping you to better understand the behavior of your website visitors.

Now with the real-time statistics system built into Live Support, you no longer have to wait until the next day to see how many visitors or pageviews you had in a day. You can actually refresh the page once and the statistics will increase the page views count by 1. Other reports you can see include:

• Countries
• Referrers
• Search keywords
• Browsers
• Operating systems
• Screen resolutions
• Extensions (flash, java)

But of course, the main focus of this product is to live chat with your visitors, a feature that can be so useful in many ways:

• Offer better customer support.
• Present your products or services to your visitor and try to sell  it, after all it’s not only about “what you sell”, but “how you sell it”.
• Get in touch with potential customers even if you don’t have their contact information (phone, email). As long as someone is browsing your website, you can contact that person.
• Let your visitors know that you take your business seriously and you are always at their service, at the tips of their finger. That will give previous customers or just visitors a reason to return to your website sometime in the future.
• Look professional.

What makes Citricle Live Support even more interesting is that it requires absolutely no server-side software or server maintenance from your side. All you have to do to get it up and running is to copy a small HTML code into the footer of your website. In case you don’t know HTML, we can even try to install it for you at no cost.

For more information about Citricle Live Support, click here.