When you’re shopping at your favorite shoe store, you want to find your size in a pair of boots that caught your attention, but you’re not able to find it. You wonder: do they have them in stock at the moment? And if they don’t, are they going to make half-sizes available as well?
Trying to find a helpful member of staff isn’t working, since there is no one around. You only find a plaque on the wall that says you can reach a representative by calling a phone number on the wall. While you could do that, it seems to be a lot of effort for a simple question to be asked.
As a result, you begin to wonder, “Do I really want these boots?””””
As a result, eventually you decide that it wasn’t meant to be and leave without buying anything.
If you don’t have live chat on your ecommerce website, this is exactly what will happen to your website. In most cases, customers are not going to wait around for an email response or in a phone queue to ask a question about the product that they are considering. Customers will leave your store if they are unable to get a quick answer to their questions.
Live chat has five major advantages for ecommerce stores when it comes to customer service
You don’t need live chat for your ecommerce site, but if you’re still not convinced, take a look at these five ways live chat helps your store drive sales.
- You can save both you and your customers a lot of time by using live chat
It has been reported that 73% of customers feel that a company that values their time is the most important part of good customer service. That’s right: good customer service isn’t about providing a free shipping service, making returns quick and easy, or being nice – it’s about not wasting the customers’ time.
It is one of the most efficient ways to respect your customers’ time by offering them live chat support. It enables your customers to get answers without ever leaving their shopping experience, and it does not require them to get on the phone or wait for someone to respond to an email.
In addition to saving time for your company, live chat can save you money as well. By using the system, customer service representatives can serve multiple customers at the same time, making their work more efficient.
- Live chat gives customers the opportunity to ask questions before they become hesitant
Customers who are looking for an answer to a question but are unable to find it right away are likely to hesitate before making a purchase. The questions quickly turn into doubts once they cannot find the answer.
Let’s say your customers have a question about shipping costs to their city, but there is nowhere for them to get an answer while they are on your website. Whether or not the shopper feels confident that the shipping costs will be reasonable, the shopper may start to doubt if the purchase is worth the cost of shipping.
When will my order for an item be delivered if I order it today?
Is there a special deal I can get if I buy more than one item at a time?
Can I get a free sample from you?
Live chat can also be used to address other common types of questions such as:
Is the information about my credit card secure?
Can you tell me how true to size this item is?
In the event that I am not satisfied with this product, will I be able to return it?
A customer may lose momentum within the purchasing process, even if a team member responds to an email query within a few hours of receiving it. If you had been able to answer those queries in real-time, it would have taken a lot less effort to get that shopper to want to come back to your store.
Live chat gives customers a chance to get answers as soon as possible, so they can continue shopping in confidence.
- Customers’ communications are kept on brand with live chat
When your ecommerce website features live chat, the customer experience is seamless since it is incorporated directly into your website.
As live chat is a written communication, it allows you to continue the conversation you started on your website without requiring your customers to change their mindset. You can instruct your live chat representatives to respond in the same tone of voice as your website as a whole.
The other forms of customer service entail customers making a phone call or sending an email from a separate “contact us” page, which takes them out of the careful customer experience you’ve created through your website.
- With live chat, you can gain valuable insights into how your customers behave
Live chat allows you to ask customers for feedback immediately after they have solved their problem within the chat – this is more convenient for the customers than a follow-up phone call or email survey.
Furthermore, since it happens in real-time, there is no delay – which is why positive feelings from a helpful phone or email support interaction can decay over time. This way, you are capitalizing on the momentum of a good interaction that has just happened.
- You can humanize your ecommerce store by using live chat
There is a friendly chat window that offers instant support from a real person, which makes it feel more like being in a physical store than just having a number customers can call or an email address they can use to contact someone.
Live chat can also be programmed to appear in the form of a friendly “How may I be of assistance?””” query, mimicking the experience in traditional stores. (Bonus tip: You should take advantage of the opportunity to be human by instructing your representatives to have genuine conversations – for example, make sure they do not sound like robots.)