Why do visitors leave?
Because the site asked them to wait. Every measured cause comes back to a delay: the page that loads slowly, the form that promises a reply “within two business days”, the phone number that rings out at 19:00. A visitor has a question. If the site cannot answer it now, the visitor leaves and asks the next site.
How much does speed matter?
Google’s 2017 research with SOASTA found that 53% of mobile visits are abandoned if a page takes longer than three seconds to load 1. Three years later Deloitte, working with Google across 30 million sessions and 37 brands, measured what a tenth of a second is worth: a 0.1-second improvement in mobile site speed lifted retail conversions by 8.4% and lead-generation page bounce rates improved by 8.3% 4. On South African mobile data, where the connection is often the slow part, a lean page is the difference between a visitor and a bounce. It is why our sites are hand-built to load fast on mobile data.
Why do forms fail?
A form is a request to wait. The visitor types their details, presses submit and gets a promise. The Baymard Institute’s running average of 50 studies puts online cart abandonment at just over 70% 2, and the reasons its own research lists are familiar to anyone who has filled in a form: too many fields, an account demanded before the answer, no trust that anyone will read it. A contact form is a cart with nothing in it yet.
| What the visitor wanted | What the form gives them | What a chatbot gives them |
|---|---|---|
| “Do you deliver to Sasolburg?” | A reply on Monday | “Yes, two to three days.” Now. |
| “How much is a service?” | A callback | The price list, in the chat |
| “Can I book Thursday?” | An email thread | Booked, confirmed, reminder set |
| “Ek soek ’n kwotasie” | An English auto-reply | An Afrikaans answer |
What happens after hours?
The Harvard Business Review audit of 2,241 US companies is the best evidence there is on what a slow reply costs. Companies that tried to contact a web lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as those that waited even an hour longer, and more than sixty times as likely as those that waited a day or more. Only 37% managed the first hour; the average among those that replied at all was 42 hours; 23% never replied 3. Drift’s secret-shopper test of 433 companies found the same shape: 7% answered within five minutes and 55% had not answered after five business days 5.
A South African business closes at 17:00 and its website does not. The enquiries that arrive between then and 08:00 are the ones with nobody to answer them, which puts every one of them in the sixty-times-less-likely bucket.
What closes the gap?
Answering in the moment. A website chatbot trained on your own pages, prices and FAQs replies within seconds, at any hour, in the language the visitor wrote in. It captures the name and number inside the conversation instead of behind a form, and on the plans that support it, it books the appointment and takes the deposit before the visitor opens another tab. The visitor who would have left with a question leaves with an answer and a booking.
Questions people ask
Is a live-chat widget the same thing?
No. Live chat is a person, so it is only as fast as the person and only available when they are. A chatbot answers every visitor at once, including at 02:00. The two can run together: the bot hands a conversation to a person when it needs one.
Will a chatbot slow my page down?
One line of code loads the widget after the page. On our sites the whole page, widget included, loads fast on mobile data.
What does it cost to try?
The website chatbot has a free trial of fifty messages over seven days with no card. Paid plans start at R299 a month plus a R250 once-off setup.
Sources
- Google / SOASTA, “The Need for Mobile Speed” (2017): 53% of mobile visits are abandoned if a page takes longer than three seconds
- Baymard Institute, “Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics” — the running average of 50 studies
- Oldroyd, McElheran & Elkington, “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads”, Harvard Business Review, March 2011 (audit of 2,241 US companies)
- Deloitte Digital with Google, “Milliseconds Make Millions” (2020) — 30 million sessions across 37 brands
- Drift, “The 2017 Lead Response Survey” — a secret shopper against 433 B2B companies
Where we do this
We run why website visitors leave without making contact for businesses across South Africa. Upington, Vereeniging and Bloemfontein each have a page covering what is different about doing it there, down to the suburbs and the languages.