Stan: I have never used a live chat tool for Airsled. I have as a consumer that goes on companies’ websites.
Stan: The reason why I came to the realization that it would benefit my company is that we sell products globally and so, there are a lot of customers or interested buyers during non-US 9-5 hours that want to reach out to us and get a response quickly because they want to make a purchase decision quickly. So [live chat] has helped us create that communication channel to get people information, especially international folks, access to us more readily than if we were just doing 9-5 hours or email type of correspondence.
Stan: A lot of people when they use the TextChat have several questions. The first is, do we have products in stock? Once we let them know that we have it in stock and we give them an estimated delivery timeline, they’re more motivated to follow-up with the purchase. Number two, they sometimes ask us about specifics about the different models that we offer, so they’re on the fence. They don’t know whether to go with model A, B, or C, and we give them enough insight to help them make a decision rather quickly. The third type of question that they ask us is, do we ship outside of the US? Because, when they go to our website, we don’t really advertise that we ship globally even though we have global customers. So once they know that we routinely sell products outside of the US, they’re more apt to send us their information over email for us then to kind of proceed with closing a sale.
Stan: Yes, and it’s actually a relatively common theme for us. We have a customer in Australia that reached out to us by TextChat and he was a little bit reluctant to purchase the product because of the high shipping cost, so a lot of our communication with him-back and forth-was through TextChat to get him comfortable with our sale cycle, with the lead time, with the pricing. What actually happened is that this customer purchased an Airsled and ended up posting an Instagram video on his account, so a lot of his colleagues and folks in that line of work in Australia saw that, and started reaching out to us over TextChat with a little bit more regularity.
All of a sudden, we were using this TextChat platform as a real-time communication tool––albeit it was late for us, it was early for them––to create that energy with that community of potential end users in order to sell more products, which further helped people gain notice of our products. And now we’re exploring an actual distribution partner in Australia.
So it was these kind of little bits and pieces of using the platform with this one customer that led to one sale which led to social media work he did, which led to more sales, which led to an awareness that is now helping us have a conversation about potential distribution in Australia. So I think that to us, is a really great story of how we started with one person through the platform, and that quickly blossomed to where it is right now for the Australian market.
Stan: I think the immediacy of it. It’s basically when people are pressing that button or communicating with us, they usually have a high degree of confidence in our product, but they just need maybe one or two things clarified and with how quickly we can do that, we can convert them from being more than just curious to being an actual customer, because of the speed of the information sharing.
Stan: Just anecdotally, we know. When we use TextChat, we are very empowered to give people a discount code on the spot that we don’t advertise. We know that they’re contacting us because of interest and curiosity. We don’t lead with a discount code, but if we start to sense that [it] may help them truly make that purchase decision then and there, we will give them a discount code to be used at our checkout. We can gauge how frequently we’re seeing that discount code being used. Having the ability to give somebody a discount code on the spot has been very, very, successful for us.
