Acquiring customer intelligence via live chat

Customer intelligence is the name of a process involving collecting and analysing information about your customers.

This includes:

• Who the customer is
• What the customer does on your site/when interacting with you
• When the customer interacts with your company
• Where they are
• Why they’re looking for your services or products, or why they’re reaching out to you

It’s important to acquire customer intelligence in today’s climate of increasing customer expectations. With it, you’re better equipped to meet customer needs and wants, while dissolving pain points.

The key, then, is finding ways to effectively acquire customer intelligence.

Enter live chat software.

Real-time data

With live chat software, you can get detailed, real-time data about your website visitors as each journey unfolds.

For example, consider some of the analysis features WhosOn live chat has to offer.

Site entry alerts can let you know any time a visitor lands on your site. With reverse IP tracking, you can then identify real people and businesses — meaning you can recognise return visitors. Reverse IP lookups can also give you geographical information about your customers.

An aerial view of waves crashing against a shore. — *Site entry alerts*

An aerial view of a field. A road runs through the upper right corner. — *Site entry alerts*

Then, WhosOn’s live visitor tracking allows you to follow the visitor’s journey through your website. This can help you recognise commonly sought pages and products, as well as any problem pages that have a higher bounce rate. With all this customer intelligence, you can craft optimised chat invitations.

You can also use live chat software analytics to handle campaign management. That is, collect the data that tells you which campaigns have led each customer to click through to your website or to start a conversation.

Live typing previews

For a conversational edge, live typing previews give you customer intelligence in the form of what the customer wants to say — as well as what they eventually send.

Live typing previews give chatting agents a chance to see what the customer is typing — before they’ve hit ‘send’. This means an early advantage for agents who can use that information to detect the customers’ needs and moods efficiently.

We don’t always speak exactly what’s on our mind, be it out of politeness, or out of an inability to effectively word our thoughts.

Live typing previews give insight into what customers are trying to say, whether they send it or not.

Sentiment analysis

Another key part of customer intelligence you can glean through your live chat channel comes thanks to sentiment analysis technology.

Sentiment analysis allows the chat software to scan the messages your customers send for positive, negative, and neutral sentiment.

This leads to useful customer insights in the form of real-time chat mood indicators, and also an overview of total sentiment scores following completed chats. In short, you get a clear view of customer satisfaction, both on a customer-by-customer basis and overall.

Chat surveys

You can also leverage your chat surveys to acquire customer intelligence.

For opening data, you can use pre-chat surveys. These surveys will allow you to help the customer more efficiently and route them to the right department right away. But they also provide customer intelligence concerning the who and the why of your customer interactions.

Post-chat surveys, meanwhile, offer a great way to collect feedback. In terms of customer intelligence, this means insight into what your customers want from you, what they think of your service and resources, and so on.

Web and chat reports

Live chat software like WhosOn also comes with a host of reporting features that give you an overview of different areas of customer intelligence.

Chat transcripts are, amongst other things, records of people voicing opinions and issues about your company and products. You can use them to help you to identify trends and customer pain points. This can then help you pinpoint areas that need improvement, and also inform your future decision-making.

Visitor lists are another example of a handy report full of customer intelligence. It’s a record of every visitor to your site, alongside detailed breakdowns of their data profiles and online journeys.

With WhosOn, as a further example, you get the WhosOn Data suite. This is a portal that allows you to access, analyse, and export the customer intelligence stored in your chat data.