Today there’s a lot of live chat app software available on the market. As a shopper you may have noticed a live chat button on just about every major retail or B2B site today. The category seems to be growing.
And it’s no surprise why. As more and more customers shop online, businesses are finding value in communicating with live visitors while they are right there on their website.
The better live chat apps also offer website visitor tracking as part of the package. Website tracking allows the website owner to see data about visitors in real time.
This is valuable because it helps a sales or customer service agent see information such as what country the visitor is from and the browser he or she is using (helpful in troubleshooting technical issues, for example).
But beyond that, website visitor tracking can provide data intelligence that helps the agent know when to step in and greet the visitor to offer help — say, if the visitor has been on your product page and has now moved to your pricing page. This could be invaluable to help close sales. Website tracking also can help with other valuable information, such as identifying paths in your site that visitors take. This helps you learn, for example, if shoppers are abandoning your site at a certain page which might indicate a problem with that page.
So as you can see, for a business, website tracking provides valuable data that can help in sales and in customer support situations.
Recently we’ve been using Zoho SalesIQ as our live chat app and website visitor tracking. In the following review I’d like to explain why we chose it, and what it does for us, as well as the pros and cons of using it.
Zoho SalesIQ Review
Key Zoho SalesIQ Features and Benefits
Zoho SalesIQ has the basic features you’d expect with live chat. Features include:
- a live chat box you can easily embed on your entire site, or as we do here, just on certain pages (such as our media kit page);
- a back end dashboard so that you can see how many visitors are on and other information;
- the ability to assign agents to handle live chat;
- the ability to automate activity to engage visitors.
There’s a lot more with ZohoSalesIQ live chat, including the ability to be “offline” and capture inquiries that you can answer later. This is a big concern of small businesses, because if you’re like us here at Small Business Trends and have limited staff, you don’t have the ability to monitor live chat around the clock and on weekends. But don’t let that concern hold you back, because you can put up a message that says you’re not there and respond via email later. Or you can even automate responses to direct visitors to your FAQs and support materials if you are not available.
As far as website visitor tracking, this is where we actually get the most use from Zoho SalesIQ.
- SalesIQ gives you the ability to see valuable data. I love how you can see data that helps you understand how people interact with your most important pages. For instance, we can see the paths that visitors take through our site and how they reach our sales pages. That has already led us to plan for significant changes in our site navigation and the content on the sales pages. Without the Zoho SalesIQ website tracking data, it would not have been possible to see visitor paths as clearly.
- SalesIQ has a unique way of displaying visitor tracking information. While you can see it in basic list form, it also displays in a helpful concentric circle form (see accompanying image). The circles can be set up to help you see certain behavior in your site visually.
- SalesIQ helps you score leads. If you’re not a marketer, you might not be familiar with the concept of “scoring leads.” This simply means that you use data intelligence built into Zoho SalesIQ to assign a score to a sales lead. You can give a higher score to visitors who exhibit certain behavior or have certain characteristics. For example, if someone has visited your site or a certain page multiple times, or downloaded one of your lead magnet pieces of content, you might conclude they are more serious about possibly buying than a visitor who has visited just once. You would give the repeat visitor a higher score. And you could take it further and set up “triggers” to proactively initiate contact with a higher scoring visitor.
Zoho SalesIQ Pros
In addition to the above features, SalesIQ offers some other benefits. First, there’s a Zoho SalesIQ plugin for WordPress. I tested it extensively on a smaller site of ours and it works great. It is very simple — the plugin makes it easy to install SalesIQ on a WordPress site. You can even control the widget so that the live chat box doesn’t show, and only use the website tracking feature. If you want more control, such as the ability to put SalesIQ only on certain pages of your site and not every page, then you can grab embed code directly from SalesIQ and insert it manually.
Perhaps most importantly, SalesIQ integrates almost perfectly with Zoho CRM. So if like us you use ZOHO CRM, you’re able to have leads placed into your CRM system without needing to do a separate integration project or downloading spreadsheets or other clunky methods. You can also identify Zoho CRM leads that happen to be on your site, as well, so you can proactively communicate with existing leads.
The integration with Zoho CRM is in my opinion where SalesIQ really shines. In fact, Zoho sells several of its products including CRM and SalesIQ bundled up into a suite called CRM Plus. If you opt for Zoho CRM Plus you get favorable pricing and products designed to integrate your sales, marketing and customer support efforts. And it all works together nicely. Zoho CRM, which I will review separately, is incredibly powerful for what it does.
Zoho SalesIQ Cons
We get tremendous value from Zoho SalesIQ and consider it essential to our sales efforts today. But no live chat app is perfect, and there are some things that I look forward to Zoho correcting or enhancing. Here’s what I would like to see done better:
- More focus on reporting from the website tracking, as well as the ability to export data such as pages accessed. While the data is available in the app, it’s not necessarily convenient to get to because it requires multiple clicks. And it’s nearly impossible to extract some of it for deeper, longer-term analysis. Zoho offers integration with Google Analytics, but I’ve found that to be of limited value. The only data I seem to get in Google Analytics from SalesIQ is how many times people clicked on the live chat button. I’d urge Zoho to focus development resources on taking their website tracking reporting to the next level, to really outshine their competition.
- Make the app more intuitive and less subtle. In places it feels as if the development team went overboard trying for a minimalist approach. Even after many hours of using SalesIQ, I suddenly will discover new features, because I never clicked on some tiny little icon that I barely noticed before.
- Make the website tracking play better with touchscreen tablets. I love to check SalesIQ in the evenings on my Surface tablet. However, there’s an important five percent that I can’t seem to do because perhaps the Zoho technology requires a mouseover to see and access some of the tracking data, such as the referral source.
- The graphics for the live chat box are somewhat outdated looking. You can customize the look of the live chat box, but only to a degree. Spiffier standard graphics and more customization control would help. If your live chat app looks like it’s from 2010, it doesn’t make a great impression.
Who Zoho SalesIQ Is Best For
Zoho SalesIQ is for businesses of any size committed to maximizing their website to increase sales through engagement with visitors and capturing visitor information.
I consider Zoho SalesIQ especially good for small businesses, because the automation and data intelligence built into it allowed you to scale and grow your business. And you can do so without overwhelming existing staff or adding a lot more staff. Automation truly is a friend to small business.
Zoho SalesIQ shines when you use it as part of the CRM Plus suite which includes Zoho CRM because the integration is already built in. One of the things that frustrates small business owners like me is being promised that an app will “seamlessly integrate” only to find out later that you really need to hire a consultant for $10,000 to make it integrate and worse, you have to spend 40 hours writing out everything you want in a detailed requirements document because the consultant demands it. Not so with Zoho CRM Plus — other than pressing a couple of buttons, it is already integrated.
I strongly recommend ZOHO SalesIQ and along with it the Zoho CRM Plus suite for any small business owner or marketer that is serious about selling and serving customers. You will be amazed at how your sales increase when you get the right tools in place.
Image: Zoho
This article, “Zoho SalesIQ: Awesome Live Chat and Website Tracking” was first published on Small Business Trends