New Feature Launch: Engage by Helpwise

Our Goals

Most of you who have been with us know that we’re pretty open to suggestions and customisations that our users ask for. There’s a reason behind it. It’s because we want Helpwise to become a complete solution for all kinds of business communication. Be it internal, inbound, or outbound. 

I mean ask yourself, wouldn’t it be better to simply use 1 platform to handle all your communications? From customer support to internal team collaboration to emails & social media conversations. With Helpwise, we’ve planned to tackle all these aspects and the release of our latest feature, Engage, is just a step in that direction.

This means, we want you guys to send in your feature requests, suggestions or ideas and we’ll try to incorporate each of those into our platform if it aligns with our business goals.

What is a chat widget?

To understand what Engage is, first of all, we’ll need to understand what a live chat widget is and how it works.

I suppose all of us once in their lifetime, have had a conversation with the customer support of a company, via the live chat widget present on their website. So most people are familiar with what they are. But for those of you who don’t know what they are, let me give you a brief explanation. 

Let’s say there’s an insurance company and they have a typical boring website that is filled with insurance-related jargon, that most of us either find too complicated to understand, or we’re just too lazy to read through everything to understand each and every bit of information about a certain insurance policy. And this leads to low conversion rates.

Now insurance companies do realise this but they’re still unable to change their website to make it more user-friendly. Now that could be because of the legal nature of the policies or they might be lazy just like all human beings. 

How to fix the problem of low website conversion rates?

So what do you do in this case? How do you fix this problem of low conversion rates or high bounce rates?

One way to fix this is by actively changing the language on the website to make it as simple and user-friendly as possible. Sure you should do that, but is that actually the root cause of the problem? Because think about it, if someone is in desperate need of something, he or she won’t really think too much about the language so much. They could just Google the meaning of a certain term! At least, that’s what I do! And after they’re done googling, they would go through the website properly and purchase the insurance they know they want!
So you see, insurance jargon or language isn’t the problem.

Well, now you’ll ask me if difficult language/jargon or user-friendliness is not the problem then what is? 

It’s the human element. We as humans are very lazy. We are wired to find shortcuts or ways that will help us solve our problems with as little work as possible, and most of the time it honestly means depending on someone else or asking someone for help. So how do we tackle something like consumer laziness that’s not really in our control? 

You give them a personal genie! That’s right, we don’t call them customer support, we call them genies because they’re the ones responsible for actively listening to the customers, solving a customer’s problems or making their wishes come true even in some cases! 

(yeah that has happened! Don’t believe me? Go check our G2 reviews!)

Solution

Okay so now how does this personal genie solve the problem of low conversion rates? 

All the insurance company needs to do is to just set up a chat support system on their website. This can be used by the customer support executives to respond to queries via the chat widget. 

The chat happens in real-time so the customer doesn’t have to wait for ages for a response to come in. It’s the most convenient and impersonal way of having a conversation without feeling shy or awkward while talking to someone you don’t know. Not to forget that you can share screenshots as well via the chat widget!

So that’s how a chat widget works in a nutshell. Now let’s talk about Engage and how it can help in starting a relationship with the customer. At Helpwise, we hold weekly discussions as to how we can improve features which will greatly increase the productivity of the general user while minimising stress factors at the same time. In one of these meetings, we discovered that one of the biggest problems a business owner faces is if they want multiple different features, they have to go out looking for different solutions. This means having to subscribe to innumerable software plans for different features. What if you could get all features inside just 1 platform? Be it, Kanban boards, tasks, calendars, video calls, screen sharing, drip campaigns, you name it! We’ve planned on incorporating every feature that’s going to help us achieve this goal of becoming a one-stop solution. 

And Engage is just 1 of those features that’s going to propel us into that direction of becoming a one-stop solution.

What is Engage?

Let’s see what this Engage feature is:

Engage is a feature of the live chat widget inbox that we offer on Helpwise. It helps you push pop-up messages/emails to the visitors of your website or even the users of your platform. Essentially, it allows you to engage with leads and users which help in increasing conversion rates & customer retention rates. You can set certain parameters on the basis of which, automated chat messages will be shown to your website visitors.

Let’s take an example- 

Let’s say you sell insurance via your website. The website is fairly intuitive and detailed but, it’s filled with terms and jargon that the customer might not understand. 

If your website doesn’t have a chat widget, they’d just close your website, and bounce to the next insurance website.

It’s always good to keep the bounce rate at a minimum. 

How to decrease website bounce rates?

1 way to decrease the bounce rate would be to add a live chat widget on your website. This will help your website visitors get in touch with your customer support team quickly. They won’t have to worry about navigating your website to find answers to their queries.
But there are 2 problems with this option
1) It’s possible that the visitor might miss the live chat button altogether
2) Your customer support has to wait for the website visitor to send a message, then only you can send a message.

Another way is to decrease the bounce rate, even more, is by using Engage! Engage would automatically send a chat message to the website visitor based on the different conditions you’ve set up.

So in the case of this insurance company, you could set up an Engage which would display a chat message saying something like – “Hey there, do you have any questions regarding any insurance policies on our website or Hey, what kind of insurance are you looking for”.

Engage can also trigger custom messages based on the content of different pages. E.g on the health insurance page, an engage would get triggered which would say – “Hey, I noticed you’re going through our health insurance page, do you have any questions regarding that or something like that”

And the best part is, your customer support doesn’t have to trigger these messages manually. You don’t even need to wait for the customer to message on the live chat first. Engage would automatically get triggered irrespective of if the visitor has messaged something on the live chat widget or not.

Disadvantages of not using Engage:

1. Not utilising the power of automation – Manually pushing messages/sequences would be too much work for the customer reps. Engage can automatically trigger these based on custom parameters that you’ve set up.
2. Inability to send bulk messages – With engage you can send personalised messages to a lot of people in seconds! Not using Engage would certainly make this task time taking.
3. Immediate answers to questions – Without engage, you won’t be able to push help articles or FAQ articles or just general answers to questions, the majority of your visitors might have when they visit your website.
4. Won’t be able to hijack attention – A lot of behavioral case studies and heat map analysis have shown that even a gentle nudge can warrant attention from the visitors. Without engage, you won’t be able to do that and you’ll have to stick with banners or images. And I’m pretty sure those don’t really work that well anymore due to ad blindness.

How engage can improve customer retention rate:

1. They force a user to take action. Be it closing the message or responding to the message. Action is always better than inaction.
2. Decrease bounce rate – As mentioned before, you’ll be able to engage your visitors which considerably decreases bounce rate.
3. Increase conversion rates – Numerous studies have shown that gentle website popups help in increasing lead counts. It ultimately leads to increased conversion rates. Of course, that also depends on your ability to convert a lead but it does ensure an influx of leads regularly.
4. Automation – Engage sequences get triggered on the basis of parameters that you’ve setup. This saves you a lot of time since half of the work is done by the power of automation.

So these were some of the reasons why you should use Engage for your website. It can certainly do wonders for you and your business! 

For those of you who couldn’t join the webinar, you can watch a replay of the webinar on this link

If you’d like to learn how to setup Engage, you can read this article https://helpwise.io/help/engage/

If you’d like to know more about helpwise, schedule a demo call with our team using this link helpwise.io/demo