The latest issue of ATG Insight Online Newsletter was published today and the lead article "Taking Advantage of the 'Long Tail' Opportunity" looks at ways that retailers can harness the power of the internet to reach mass niches.

One solution proposed by the article is enhancing customer experience by offering personalization for each website visitor through a number of techniques, including offering proactive customer service through click to call and chat.  As we've discussed in the past, proactive customer service can come in many forms, but includes offering contact center agents the ability to engage individual customers in a conversation based on their online shopping habits, or a set of rules that identify customers as "hot leads."

Here's an excerpt from the article:

Let's say your shopper puts a big-ticket item in her cart such as a plasma TV or a $1,000 handbag. But then the shopper hesitates; rather than checking out, she begins looking at the shipping information page. You don't want to lose her purchase. The hot new trend here is proactive click to call, a capability that lets you pop up a window and offer live help with a message that says, "If you have a question about shipping, click here to speak with a representative." Once the shopper clicks, she goes to the top of the agent queue, and her phone rings instantly, connecting her to customer service agent who completes the sale. Click to call is probably not a worthwhile tactic for saving the sale of a $10 CD, but for a $3000 TV, it's absolutely worthwhile. In some markets, click to chat can work equally well, proactively offering the prospect an instant live chat session with a customer service agent. The experience of eStara (an ATG company) in deploying this technology for our customers shows that this kind of service can increase conversion rates by as much as 50 percent.

For the best results, you can extend cross-sell personalization to the call center. When someone connects to the call center for that $1,000 handbag, you want the CSR to have access to the same history-driven cross-sell offer that would be presented on the Web site - the shoes, in the right size, that go with the handbag. You want to drive the call center with tools that can increase order size, not just reduce costs. That is the epitome of effective, cross-channel offer management.