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How would you feel if you went shopping in a store and there was no one there to answer your questions and help you process your order? If you're like me, you might have had that experience at a "box" store. Sometimes it can be frustrating trying to find what you're looking for.

David Cancel and Dave Gerhardt point out that visitors to most websites have a similar experience. Visitors are on their own to navigate the site and can find it hard to answer their questions. They are afraid to give their email addresses to access "gated" information because they know they will be assaulted with an email follow up campaign.

In Conversational Marketing, Cancel and Gerhardt share their experiences with a conversational approach at their company, Drift.

Cancel and Gerhardt suggest there are now "kinder and gentler" ways to approach visitors and build a relationship of trust. When the visitor feels comfortable that the business can satisfy their needs in a friendly way, they are much more likely to proceed with a personal or virtual meeting with a salesperson or a demonstration.

There are two ways to offer immediate friendly assistance to a website visitor. One is by having attended live chat. Alternatively, having a chat bot can provide some assistance when a human isn't available. With these tools, visitors can get assistance 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

According to Cancel and Gerhardt, technology is also available to alert a representative when a key customer or key target prospect is visiting the website so they can receive special attention.

A chatbot can lead a visitor to a calendar to schedule an appointment to get more information or a demonstration with a live person. This can create some immediate progress to a transaction and avoids delays for email or "telephone tag" responses.

The book includes guidance for how employees should interact with website visitors on live chat, the logistics for rotating attending live chat to distribute the workload, and tips for developing questions and conversations for chatbots.

According to Cancel and Gerhardt, incorporating live chat and chatbots into your website can dramatically improve the conversion of your website visitors into customers.

If you're like me, you have already experienced live chat support and might have encountered a chatbot. Just yesterday I tried making a telephone call for customer support with no response and was able to get my issue immediately resolved with live chat.

These are valuable additions to your marketing and customer service toolkit to make working with your business a much more pleasant experience for your customers, encouraging long-term relationships. If you have a business with a web site, get and study a copy of Conversational Marketing.

Buy it online at Amazon.com: Conversational Marketing: How the World's Fastest Growing Companies Use Chatbots to Generate Leads 24/7/365 (and How You Can Too).

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