Chat improves sales conversion by giving live help where help is needed. A well-timed chat reorients a confused customer, preventing them from abandoning their purchase or their search for information.

But chat is costly to run as a stand-alone channel, and wasteful if your agents are tied up answering simple questions. When joined, however, with the intelligence of Transversal Web self-service, your chat channel is focused where live help is most valuable and when enquiries cannot be answered by other means. Transversal's chat solution is one of our range of mutually supporting tools for Web self-service, including knowledge management and customer tracking.

By using a self-service knowledgebase as your customers' first point of contact, you can answer common questions automatically on your Web site. This saves agents having to conduct chats simply to dispense routine answers. The knowledgebase is also available to agents through the chat interface, helping them to resolve enquiries quickly and accurately without having to leave the chat to look for information. Agents' answers can be saved from the chat and fed back into the knowledgebase. This dynamic, low-maintenance system reduces costs and improves customer experience.

By gathering information about customers' intent during the self-service process, Transversal's software routes each enquiry that is referred to chat to a suitable – and available – agent. Furthermore, since Transversal's Web self-service tracks customers' activity on your site, you can take the initiative by inviting customers to chat when they reach key sales conversion points or when they appear to be having trouble using the site.

Save resources and acquire more customers by making every conversation sales talk, not small talk.

These are the benefits:

• Creates the feeling of personal service
• Reduces the number of abandoned transactions by giving live help at the point of sale
• Increases cross-selling opportunities by engaging customers in dialogue
• Enables agents to handle several enquiries at once
• Prevents wasting time and resources on unnecessary chat sessions
• Keeps customer service information consistent across channels