I was about to hire my first employee last week.
As alli has grown so has the amount of support requests.
I wanted to bring someone on to handle Intercom chats, just to offload a few brain cycles.
Then I took a second look...and the results may SHOCK you!
...or not, if you already have a SAAS.
It turns out that...
The vast majority of sales chats lead nowhere.
- The leads who chat don't convert to trials.
- The trials who chat don't convert to customers.
- The customers who do chat churn.
Here are the raw numbers:
In the last month for alli, I've had 61 sales chats.
Only 3.27% of my chats converted.
Let me repeat that to emphasize...
Out of 61 total chats, only two became customers.
...And one of them was a friendly conversation with someone I already knew!
It gets worse.
In total over the last three months, I've had about a dozen lengthy conversations with leads.
Lengthy means they asked multiple questions about the product, and the conversation lasted at least 5 minutes.
And guess what..
100% of the lengthy conversations with leads have either NOT converted or churned in month one.
One. Hundred. Percent.
So it turns out that being constantly available for sales conversations, at least for my SAAS, is a waste.
...And alli might not be the only such case, according to Andrew Rogers and Gary Brewer of BuiltWith.com:
"Gary noticed an inverse correlation between the number of emails from a prospect and propensity to convert. Good customers didn’t email they just bought, they got it. After 3–4 emails with a prospect probability of purchase dropped to a point that it didn’t make sense to continue replying…"
...But what about customer support issues?
Well, let's check the data there too.
- Only 23% of my customers have EVER contacted me.
Of the few customers that have contacted, basically all chats fell into one of these categories:
a.) A quick billing question
b.) An error on the site that was quickly resolved
c.) Feature idea or request
Normally, in a post like this, you'd expect this to be wrapped up in some sort of grand pronouncement...
But I'm not sure if there is one.
The fact is, I still want to be available for my best customers when they have an issue or idea.
Delighting our best customers on the rare occasion when they need our help is probably worth the sacrifice of dealing with time wasters and tire kickers.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to check Intercom again for the 20th time this hour.
P.S. If you want more search engine traffic, you might like my company, alli.
That's because she takes away the SEO voodoo and guesswork.
...But please don't message me! ;)