Today everyone has a website and many other online platforms so everyone can easily and efficiently offer their services, products and ideals to many potential consumers. The site is like a virtual store. Even if there are no mere products, it has the sale potential or the potential for providing any service.
To make a purchase, the customer should contribute time, money as well as his effort. Some sites offer direct purchase of products or services online, while others allow customers to first contact them and then pass to further treatment by the company, but on all of the websites you reach on one way or another to a direct connection with the business.
The evolution of contact on websites:
The evolution of contact can be set as nothing less than remarkable. At the initial stage sites allowed contact in a business card format. Searching the site would lead the visitor to a category of contact or contact details where an Email, phone or fax of the company would be listed. This option required the user to not only reach the site, but also find the company’s contact information in it and be forced to take another step forward and contact the company himself. This situation, where all the weight of the contact and the beginning of the contract negotiations between the company and the customer totally depends on the customer’s desires. This is not a trivial problem, because many times the steps the customer must pass to reach the stage where it is in personal contact with the company is long, exhausting and ultimately leads the customer to despair and to leave the process. The leaving means the automatic loss of the customer without any possibility to win him back again without him being the initiator. This creates a situation where many potential customers are “lost” despite initial interest that they have shown in the product or service.
The second stage of the contact’s evolution is reflected in the possibility to directly contact the company using an email with a predetermined pattern in a dedicated area on the website. In this format all the customer has to do is to leave contact information, and hope that his request was accepted, and that he will be contacted later when for most the time for replying is unknown. Another problem in this method is mistakes – mistakes can happen to everyone especially errors in filling out forms. Even when we fill out a form manually we seldom pay attention to mistakes and when we fill out a form online we often do not have the option to go back and check that the information is correct. In this way, writing a single wrong digit in the phone number or a single wrong character in the email can lead to a situation where a customer is missed. When not returning to a customer who filled in a form a state of discontent is created and often the client does not want to make further contact with that company.
Another problem is created within the framework of eCommerce is the loss of a customer’s purchase motivation. Many times when someone browse the site and is interested in your product – that’s the time to perform the sale in front of him. In many cases of filling a contact form, it takes a long time to return to the customer and you lose the sale moment.
The third and current phase of online contact is a software that allows creating personal relationships with customers in real time while browsing the site, while the most important benefit of these programs is that the one who leads the initial contact is a the company representative and the telemarketing and sales people of the company and not the customer himself. This changes the balance of forces and returns to the optimal situation for the company – a situation where the company not only initiating the contact but also controls the dynamics created by the initiative. So you can realize and optimize the art of sales of each site. SiteHood is an optimal example of this kind of contact mechanism for websites. The software allows company owners to connect in real time with potential customers browsing their site through a live chat for websites as well as keep track of customers and returning customers. In this way companies completely dominate the movement in their sites and fully exploit it for their advantage.