Hope For The Muddled Masses.(The Technologist)(online chat for online shoppers)

Byline: Benjamin Sutherland

Retailers are starting to offer online chats to help customers who show signs of confusion while shopping the Web.

It's enough to make online retailers shudder. About half of all people who visit a commercial Web site intending to buy something give up because, above all, they are confused--by product descriptions, navigation and checkout procedures. To help them out, some online retailers offer shoppers "chats"--real-time typed dialogues via the Internet--with sales agents, but these haven't worked very well. Most visitors don't bother clicking chat-invitation buttons, and many who do leave after a frustrating wait. Besides, chats are expensive--they cost a retailer about $5 a pop--and only a small minority of visitors are serious shoppers. "Random isn't profitable," says Laurent Deslandres, senior Web expert at the Paris consultancy Nexstage.

Now companies are learning to profile visitors on the sly, targeting those who are confused (and therefore most likely to leave the site). These include people who shuttle repeatedly between Web pages that describe similar products, scroll up and down several times, linger or, even worse, open a new window to reread the description of a product in the shopping cart. These tip-offs identify shoppers "obviously having trouble making a decision--that's when we would intervene," says Ravi Vijayraghavan, head software engineer at 24/7 Customer, a large software developer and contact center in Bangalore, India, that plans to offer a "confusion index" service for online retailers later this year.

The largest company operating confusion-indexing programs, sometimes called proactive chatting, is New York-based LivePerson. Its 7,000 clients include Apple, AT&T, Bank of America, British Telecom, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Verizon. LivePerson, like 24/7 Customer, operates the software free of charge, taking a cut of sales it helps close. Last year the company took in $54 million in revenues; this year revenue is on track to top $75 million.

The more factors analyzed, the more effective the service. A confusion ranking rises if a shopper fills in forms slowly. It rises faster if a shopper for, say, a laptop hesitates before typing answers to questions that require a great deal of comprehension (what bus speed? how much RAM?). The confusion ranking can skyrocket if the shopper is in Montana or Wyoming, the two least computer-savvy U.S. states, according to 24/7 Customer. The scale runs 1 to 100--lucid to bewildered.

Circumstances provide clues even before a customer starts navigating. Shoppers in Silicon Valley are apparently well versed in contemporary interior design. They start ...