So many wine industry businesses have gorgeous websites complete with beautiful photography, personable copy and (hopefully!) a way to buy all your DTC wines too. And then you spend significant resources getting people to your website with ads, influencers and search engine optimization.
But then what?
Build real relationships with anonymous website visitors.
Yes, your website should prominently display your phone number. But there’s a large and growing group of consumers that would rather volunteer for an unnecessary root canal than make a phone call.
We all get more emails than we’d like; digital natives consider email old fashioned, and many generations feel like it’s the new snail mail. You never know how long it will take to get a response, especially from generic role-based email addresses like sales@ or info@.
Every website has at least one online form (ours included!). But forms have earned a bad rap and it’s our own fault; over time the responsibility of replying to these gets dispersed to where it’s rarely anyone’s top priority. A significant group of consumers doubt if they’ll ever hear back from someone.
The disruption of 2020 was a wakeup call to many businesses and more wineries than ever have e-commerce fully enabled. But what if someone has a question that’s keeping them from checking out? How do you keep them from bouncing, give your team a chance to connect and get them over that hurdle?
Start with enabling real-time connections:
The pandemic forced us all to engage in dramatically more real-time — but virtual — interactions: tele-med appointments, zoom meetings, chatting with your grocery shopper, virtual tastings and more. No matter how excited we are to return to in-person interactions, consumers won’t be giving up the real-time virtual conveniences they’ve learned to appreciate.
Traditional web chat can be real-time, but it’s tough to pull off.
When it comes to letting customers connect with your business — in real time and from your site — most people think of traditional in-the-browser web chat. And when fully staffed and done correctly, traditional web chat can check this box. But in the real world, it can be tough to administer.
Many teams don’t have extra staff available to sit in front of a computer, log in and staff web chat all the time. They’ve got other things to do and are usually on the go, rarely sitting behind a desk. As a result, it can take a long time for your team to respond to incoming web chat requests. By the time you do, the leads may have gone cold or become completely useless; with traditional web chat, as soon as someone leaves your site, they’re no longer reachable.
There’s a better way to do web chat.
Here at RedChirp, we think web chat is a good idea, but it needs some major upgrades. We’ve completely reimagined what web chat should be like and built the next generation of technology to power a better experience for businesses and their customers too. When you use RedChirp web chat:
- No one needs to log in and staff it
- We’ll keep leads warm for you
- You can continue conversations as long as you need
No one needs to log in and staff RedChirp web chat.
Just go about your life. If and when you’re needed, we’ll text you! That text includes a link; click it to see all the details and reply. Not near your computer? No problem! You can reply right from your phone too.
Note: You control your available hours and RedChirp will never notify you about web chat requests outside of those. There’s no reason to worry about notifications in the middle of the night or when you’re on vacation. And while it’s not required to use RedChirp on your phone, it sure is convenient! If you reply to web chats from your phone, RedChirp will never share your personal cell phone number with customers.
Automatically notify the right people and escalate when necessary.
RedChirp makes it easy to quickly find the right team member to answer each web chat request. According to your settings, the right people will be notified in the app and by text. RedChirp will send reminders and escalate the request until someone responds.
This makes it easy to get more team members involved because they’ll only be notified if, and when, they’re needed. Once someone replies, RedChirp stops sending notifications so team members in later stages will only receive notifications if no one else is able to respond.
Plus, you can route different requests to different people. For example, you may want to send questions about club membership to different team members than questions about upcoming events.
We’ll never notify team members that aren’t working.
RedChirp knows when each team member is available. There’s no need to babysit schedules; RedChirp will automatically skip notifying anyone that is in Do Not Disturb mode.
RedChirp handles all the traffic control.
Go ahead and notify as many team members as you want! Once someone replies, no one else will be able to. That makes it impossible to step on each other’s toes.
We’ll keep leads warm for you.
The internet never sleeps, and your web chat shouldn’t either. We’ve measured that 29% of web leads come in after hours. Many businesses decide to close their web chat when they’re unavailable. Traditional web chat may make you feel like that’s the only choice, but that means you’ll miss out on almost 30% of all your leads!
RedChirp accepts web leads 24/7 and keeps them warm for you. Set auto-responses that will be texted to customers who complete your web chat outside of business hours. This provides peace of mind by confirming receipt, sets expectations for when you’ll be able to reply and keeps these leads warm without any manual effort on your part.
RedChirp can automatically customize these auto-responses with the customer’s name and even when your team will be available again. For example: “Hi Amy, this is ABC Winery. Most of our team members are gone for the day but we’ll be back online at 9:30 tomorrow. We’ll text you as soon as possible. Cheers!”
Texting is better than chatting in a browser.
One of the biggest limitations to traditional web chat is the medium; it’s confined to a web browser so once they leave your site the conversation is over. You may not have any way to reach out to them again. And they usually have no helpful record of what was said. Transitioning prospects from your website to a real human-to-human conversation over text gives you so many advantages.
Texting is asynchronous so you can continue your conversation on whatever timelines work best for each participant. If the customer starts talking to you, but then their baby wakes up…no problem! They can reply later when it’s more convenient and you can keep that connection going and growing. Fifty-nine percent of conversations in RedChirp last longer than one day. That’s not just answering a question, that’s building a real relationship.
RedChirp web chat gets you valuable contact information — their cell phone — and permission to text them later. Make immediate connections and grow your promotional text opt-in list organically at the same time.
RedChirp web chat gets your business in one of the most valuable locations that no amount of money can buy outright: your customers’ text histories. The next time they need to reorder, plan a visit or buy a gift they will already have a direct connection to your winery right in their text history.
Your customers want to text you!
If you’re wondering whether or not your customers really want to text with your business, the answer is “yes!”. In fact, there’s a huge gap between what consumers want and what they think they can get. While 89% of people report they want to text with most businesses, only 44% think they can. This gap won’t last, but the businesses that over-deliver and text with customers before the rest will have a significant competitive advantage.
You make it possible. RedChirp makes it easy.
RedChirp takes just a few minutes to learn and saves the average user 5 to 6 hours of time — per week — that they were previously wasting on phone tag . Getting it on your site is as simple as adding a Google Tag Manager Container and we’ll do all the rest. To learn more:
Call or text us: 844-789-8922
Visit: RedChirp.com
Email: Jennie.Gilbert@RedChirp.com