Everyone in sales and marketing has experienced the explosive growth of interactions as more consumers enter the online market using more devices. What’s somewhat surprising is that 51% of these consumers choose who to do business with based on past experience—not products. In other words, bad customer experience at any touchpoint can kill hard-won opportunities. And even those who do a good job of attracting consumers make missteps along the way to conversion.

The Hurdle of Cart Abandonment

Capitalizing on visitor interactions requires a hard look at your digital spend and how effective you are at converting. One of the major problems is cart abandonment. Even when digital marketing is effective, some industries experience average cart abandonment rates as high as 83%. With all the commerce platforms and vendors in business today, there are growing numbers of abandoned journeys and abandoned shopping carts.

For marketers, it spells frustration. There are many reasons why these visitors don’t convert. According to the Baymard Institute, the most common reasons include not being able to find what they need, finding a better price elsewhere and poor site navigation.

The challenge in addressing these losses of opportunity has been that consumer behavior is tricky; they change their minds and often in unexpected ways. Having the ability to capture those shifts in real time has become extremely important in understanding which offers to present dynamically at the right time to engage them.

Make it Easy for Customers to Complete Transactions

Every website has a purpose, whether it’s selling retail products, signing up for insurance, healthcare or anything else. Something must get done. You can assist visitors who are not going down the right path or seem to be lost by using AI and machine learning to monitor and analyze their movements. This helps them get where they need to go faster while proactively removing any obstacles or issues they’re experiencing. But engaging too soon can be an annoyance.

Engaging at that pivotal moment – but only at that moment – is the ultimate in personalized customer service. Depending on your marketing strategy, engagement could be a pop-up offering a chat, an offer of a callback or not interacting with them at all. You may learn from their behavior that it’s better to reach out after their visit. At this point, agents and sales reps can be provided with all the relevant context and history to boost their chances of converting the sale.

Focus on the Outcomes of Probability

Once you have your customer profile, location information and more and you’re tracking visitor journeys, you can look at the outcome of probability: Is this visitor going to complete the sale, or abandon the cart and go elsewhere?

Knowing this allows you to approach only those identified as unlikely to be converted, whereas those successfully self-serving can be left alone. This also helps the sales reps’ focus their time where it’s likely to be most needed.

Take Leads All the Way to Conversion

Get more from your digital spend when you leverage the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Using real-time insights, you can proactively engage with prospects at the right moment through the best channel – chat, content offers, email, mobile and more – increase conversions and drive more sales through your website. And the more you know about your customers, the more effective you’ll be at launching new marketing campaigns.

Register for the on-demand webinar, Turn Web Visitors Into Customers, to learn how Genesys solutions can help you get drive conversions with your digital spend and sales engagement —and keep satisfied customers coming back.