We’ve all heard the news: e-commerce is going to be the downfall of the retail industry. And while online shopping is definitely going to be a major part of how people make purchases in the future, this doesn’t have to be the doomsday scenario you might be imagining. In fact, leveraging trends like co-browsing can actually be a way to increase your profits using habits that online shopping has created.
To give you a brief breakdown of this term, co-browsing, or collaborative browsing, is when two people are navigating on a website simultaneously. Whether that be with a sales representative using a chat box, a voice or video call, or even screen sharing, co-browsing mixes the convenience of online shopping with the experience, and responsiveness, of shopping in a store. Additionally, co-browsing has been proven to improve customer happiness and support better sales figures.
Interested? Here are five ways that you can make the most of the co-browsing trend by analyzing your data using business intelligence software.
Analyze Your Bounce Rate
Your customers are on a journey through each page of your website, and they’re not always ready to talk to a representative. So, how can you determine when it’s best for someone to jump in and ask if they need help navigating the product listings, weighing the pros and cons of each option, or determining what exactly they need from your business? Set up a BI dashboard that visualizes the bounce rates from each page. By examining when people are most likely to exit your website, you can target your co-browsing efforts on the pages where you are losing customers. And with the data constantly updating, you can iteratively ensure that you’re getting the best ROI for your efforts.
Analyze Communication Methods
Maybe when customers are looking for a new piece of furniture, they are best helped by a sales representative reaching out through a chat box. But if they’re trying to buy a car, they appreciate someone who can video call. And if they’re shopping for a computer, having someone who is able to share their screen and explain tech specifications is optimal. Whatever you’re selling, you need to know how to best serve your customers, which is something you can test out and measure visually using BI software. Logging sales figures alongside co-browsing methods in visual graphs on a BI dashboard, you can consistently ensure that your sales reps are maximizing every interaction online.
Analyze Customer Service
Whether you sell a product that requires servicing, something that needs installation or set up, or your customers just have a lot of questions, ensuring quality customer service is key to maintaining your business. With BI, you can measure quality of interaction and map that data onto product returns, repeat callers, and return customers online. Looking at dashboards like this in real time allows you to determine effective customer service co-browsing techniques, problem spots with certain product types, and even troubleshoot specific locations where a certain issue may be more prevalent.
Analyze Online to In-store Relationships
Statistically, roughly 30 percent of customers prefer to buy something in-person because they want to get a feel for a product before making a purchase. Still, many of these people will do some research online before coming into the store. Tracking whether a positive online interaction led to a sale in a store is made easier with BI software. By creating a dashboard visualization that shows where customers looking at a specific webpage are from regionally, and then adding to that with an in-store, sales-by-region graph, you can begin to make estimations on whether your online sales efforts are having real-world impact.
Analyze Cart Abandonment
We’ve all done this; shopped online, adding things to our carts, and then when it comes down to making the purchase, we close the window. For retailers, this is like someone walking out of the store at the checkout line. Many people back out because of the work involved — entering credit card numbers, filling out shipping information, going through multiple pages just to buy something. Sometimes a human interaction at this stage, an offer of help or a reassurance of identity security, can encourage someone to make a purchase. But how can you measure if you’re helping or hurting? With BI, you can analyze interaction type, value of purchase, type of product, and any other metric you can think of quickly, easily, and visually, helping you meet your sales goals in every way you can.
If you think that BI could help you increase your profits, but aren’t sure where to get stared, request a demo of Dyntell Bi, a cost-effective, cutting-edge BI solution that can help you increase sales with the power of your own data. Learn more here.