Live chat can be a wonderful tool to boost sales on your ecommerce website.
Just as you may already operate email, social media and a telephone channels to provide support, so can instant messaging via live chat become an essential part of your customer relations arsenal.
Many users consider email to slow to get a response, and picking up the phone to much hassle. Live chat is a perfect medium. In the UK 10% and USA 20% of users indicated live chat to be their preferred communications channel according to a study on Shopify – the top reasons being speed and efficiency offered by live chat.
Live chat can also be the channel that scores highest for customer satisfaction; 92% according to Zendesk. Above other mediums ranging such as phone, email and social.
Of these sites 14 already offered live chat as an option. It was noted that those that did not were generally either extremely large or very small and niche travel sites; either way providing a live chat service may have been costly.
Many of the sites without live chat (and some with) provided extensive searchable FAQs and help sections; which is a pragmatic way to encourage users to self-serve and to keep call centre operating costs lower.
Source: Digital Commerce 360 and Live Person
Live chat isn’t just about providing customer support; it can also be used as an effective tool to gather insight about how users interact with your website.
Smart operators will train their staff to not only support customers, but to listen and observe their behaviour to be passed the individual or team managing the website. Live chat is a great way to capture customer feedback, and to interact with those customers and explore common problems.
Live chat also allows companies to write well written FAQs; allowing customers to self-serve better without having to use live chat, phone or any other medium beyond the website to achieve their goals.
Gibe generally recommend Olark as our Live Chat tool of choice.
Live chat can have negative effects from your site if implemented badly.
We, of course, recommend your team is trained to use live chat and can provide a responsive service, otherwise it can be a negative experience for customers.
Typical pitfalls we’ve observed include:
Users will quickly realise they aren’t talking to a real person unless you’re using a super-smart AI.
If users realise they are talking to a machine it may be perceived as a negative experience. The advantage of chat is speed and efficiency - if the bot gives dumb answers it will cause frustration and users will wonder about your customer service – what do they need to do to talk to a real person?
That said; there are those who would suggest building a bot is the future. If a chatbot can truly replace a human and give the human user the answers they are looking for then there is, sadly for call centre staff, an obvious cost saving incentive to implement one.
If you’ve already got a sales team it won’t take much to train a couple of team members up and at least trial live chat on your website.
The evidence from many studies speaks for itself – live chat will pay dividends as long as used properly. It’s highly likely that it will soon become regarded as a corner stone of your service offering and will help set you apart, or keep up, with your competition.
Still not convinced?
Here are just a few more articles suggesting live chat software can improve conversions, sales, be used to gather UX feedback, give an edge over competitors, avoid checkout abandonment, upsell to customers, be used to gather post-chat survey data and that users may prefer it.
Hugh is our Head of Production with over 15 years of experience in the digital and marketing sector. He's passionate about great project delivery and loves the "big picture" view as well as getting stuck into the fine detail.
