Live chat is the ultimate way for modern sales and marketing teams to engage personally with customers, but sometimes the process of choosing the right live chat tool can feel overwhelming. With so many tools and shiny new features emerging in the market, decision paralysis can easily kick in.
Live chat leads to conversations and conversions whether you work in sales or in marketing, you know that there is no single playbook when it comes to success. We now live in an on-demand world where potential customers can research and buy everything they want with just a few clicks, changing the nature of the game for marketing and sales teams. Lengthy contact forms and cold-calls are increasingly a thing of the past. So how do you succeed? By using live chat to engage with leads and customers where they already are. “Website visitors who chat to you first are 82% more likely to convert to users” Today, 53% of buyers are more likely to buy from a business they can message. On top of that, website visitors who do chat are 82% more likely to convert to users. By not being available in real time, you have no idea how many opportunities you’re missing out on. Through using live chat, your marketing team can proactively engage with your leads and customers in real time, while your sales team is capturing and converting more quality leads, which they can move through your pipeline even faster. Choosing the right live chat tool for your business however, the process of finding a live chat solution that fits your needs can be daunting – how do you begin to evaluate the options available? General principles for choosing the right agile tool selecting the right Agile tool to support your business needs and methodology is essential.
The following five capabilities will aid you in choosing a solution that supports your team and their approach to Agile.
1. Facilitate Collaboration and Communication Look for a solution that facilitates communication and collaboration between team members. The Agile tool should enable team members to communicate with one another and have complete discussions that eventually reach a conclusion. Consider a tool that has permissions so you can determine who should be a part of a conversation. It should be possible for any stakeholder, whether business analysts, software developers, marketers, or whomever, to observe and participate in the conversation as the project moves through its various stages from inception to delivery.
2. Track History and AccountabilityFind an Agile tool that makes it possible to look at the history of the discussion and “connect the dots” between conversation, action, and deliverable. The tool should provide a means for reporting on the various segments of the project lifecycle as well as the project as a whole.
3. Searchable Central Storage is one of the searchable tool that supports all Agile project functions is better than using multiple tools because it creates one source to store and find key project information, needed to make decisions. For example, performing project tracking on a whiteboard while holding conversations necessary to develop user stories in Sharepoint means delays in finding information and possibly missing out on important details. Additionally, an Agile tool that enables you to store content in a single database provides the ability to look at multiple projects at once and perform cross-project reporting and analysis.
4. Ability to ScaleDr. Alistair Cockburn, a leader in the Agile movement, has spent many years studying the ways in which teams perform. In a talk he gave in 2012, Cockburn said, “Software development is unique; it’s a pure activity in itself. So while we understand the ‘Laws of Physics’ that drive the way people work with software, actually, software development becomes the reference point and other things are like software development. So we can take our understanding of what happens in software design teams and apply them in business design teams, marketing design teams, advertising, startups, entrepreneurship, all kinds of other activities.”The notion of an Agile tool being confined to a software development team may drive the initial implementation but bear in mind that the development team may grow. Other departments may want to utilize the tool for their projects. Finding a tool with broad capabilities may not seem like the most efficient choice, but time may prove it to be the optimal selection.
5. Analytics are essential to any project, both for viewing the process in real-time and for post-mortem evaluation. You’ll want to know how much time individual tasks took to complete, and why they took as long as they did. Analytics will also help you determine what met expectations and what did not. An agile tool that can provide a drill-down into the data will be helpful in setting up future projects for success.
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