Surfaces USA Gets Chatty on Its Revamped Website

Nearly three-quarters (72%) of online shoppers consider live chat “very” or “most” important when buying gifts, according to consultancy the E-tailing Group, so it stands to reason that consumers would appreciate the functionality when doing other types of shopping. Yet among the 100 leading online merchants surveyed by the E-tailing Group, only 38 offered live chat.
 
Surfaces USA, which sells countertops, flooring, and other surfacing products, implemented live chat on its Website in May. And while social media director Karen Silvers admits the company hasn’t yet figured out how to measure the return on investment of the functionality, she says it’s happy with the addition to the site nonetheless. “As of now it’s a good tool to get people to test our brand-new Website,” she says.
 
The designer who was revamping Surfaces USA’s site earlier this year advised the company to add a live chat function. Silvers checked out competitors’ Websites and saw that none of them offered it, so she figured it would be a point of differentiation. 
 
In fact, during user testing prior to the launch of the new site, “everyone who tested the Website, the first thing they saw was the live chat feature, and it gave them confidence in the company,” Silver says. “For me it gives a sense that the company is professional and knows what they’re doing.” The live chat is prominently featured in a box on the top of the left-hand navigation bar throughout the site.
 
Surfaces USA opted for the entry-level version of BoldChat from Bold Software with a Web client interface that allows the employee to log in to the tool from any Internet connection. Implementation and training were “pretty straightforward,” she says. “I had to play with it for maybe 20 minutes” to become comfortable with it.
 
“BoldChat was able to customize a lot of our window screens and what-not,” Silvers adds. Her only beef is that Bold’s logo, not that of Surface USA, appears on the conversation box. To have her company’s brand appear instead, she would have to upgrade to a more expensive platform.
 
Although Silvers has been handling just about all of the chats so far, “as soon as our conversations hit maybe 50 a day we’ll probably assign a salesperson to doing it.” Most of the time she is simply responding to conversations initiated by site visitors. If she’s working on the site, however, and notices that someone has been on a particular product page for a longer-than-average amount of time, she will initiate a conversation, using the tool to ask if the visitor needs help or has any questions.