Running an eCommerce business is no easy feat. In between shipping your orders, maintaining a social media presence, managing your staff, plus a hundred and one other things – the million dollar question is – how are you taking care of your customers?
Enter a strong and efficient customer service strategy. Why? Because a large proportion of shoppers insist that a high level of customer service is what dictates whether they’ll buy from your business, and vice versa.
Which means your CX set-up can have a direct bearing on the future success of your business, especially if you operate in a competitive space and have a relatively small market share. So, it’s important to utilise every potential tool at your disposal, including interactive and real-time solutions such as live chat.
Live chat not only enables you to provide support and solutions to customers in real-time, but it can also play an integral role in a hybrid chat tool that makes use of AI-powered chatbot functionality and elevates your customer service onto a whole new level.
In this article, we’re going to look at the five main reasons why implementing a live chat feature is so important for your ecommerce business!
You can provide instant service to your customers
No one has time to wait around these days. And that includes when making purchase decisions. So, one quick reply from your customer service team can literally be the difference between winning or losing a sale.
If a shopper has a query about a product or service in a physical setting, a sales assistant would promptly be sent over to provide assistance. With a live chat, this same level of instant attentiveness can be replicated, just in a digital format.
However, ignoring this CX offering could lose you sales, as it’s been reported that many buyers will abandon their purchase if they can’t get access to help quickly.
Instead, they’re likely to find another store that offers the same/similar products or services as you rather than wait to call or drop an email.
In short, a live chat option gives you the opportunity to be on-call 24/7 and provide immediate service that prevents you from losing sales.
Live chat is more efficient than other CX options
Not only is live chat way more efficient than other traditional support options like phone calls, but it also doesn’t squash the customer service quality, either.
By that, we mean live chat agents have the capacity to deal with more than one customer at a time with the same level of professionalism as if they were actually conversing with them.
Plus, agents can view each query and decide which ones are more urgent, allowing them to appropriately tackle them in the most beneficial order.
Ultimately it’s a lot less time-consuming than the phone option, too, which only allows agents to provide quality service to one user at a time. Whatever the problem, customers won’t be waiting in a queue, and will instead get their issues resolved as quickly as possible.
You can deliver a personalised shopping experience based on a customer’s history
Some of the best live chat tools save customer information so that you can build a personalised shopping experience dedicated to their specific wants and needs. Plus recommendations and suggestions that will result in a perfect retail journey for them. Details that contribute to this include:
- Chat history
- Buying history
- Time spent on each page
- Which pages they were browsing
This info will also prevent you from asking repetitive or unnecessary questions, and instead, let your buyers know that you value their custom and take note of their likes, dislikes and buying habits.
For example, if you notice that a buyer has been on a product page for a while, you could develop a curated experience by opening up a conversation with them. You could clarify queries related to payments, shipping, returns, etc. to help them finalise the buying process.
You can keep customers on-site longer to increase revenue
It’s a known fact that the longer a consumer stays on your website, the more likely it is they will make a purchase from you. This is because they’ll have more time to browse your products/service and develop an allegiance with your brand. Not to mention recognise the value of what you offer as a business.
Regardless of whether customers new and old discovered you via word of mouth, on a shopping app or on a website, implementing a live chat function helps to keep people engaged (and prevent them from abandoning their baskets).
This relates to the previous point, as agents can strike up a conversation relating to specific customers’ habits. Or, if you’re noticing that consumers are adding products to their cart but not checking out, a live chat option can help to prevent this from happening.
You can generate leads even outside of business hours
Online shopping isn’t strictly done within the traditional 9-5 working hours. Many shoppers will browse on weekends, or in the evenings after the said working day.
However, with a live chat, you can either have 24/7 options where agents are at the disposal of potential buyers (and can tend to them whenever they require help, whether it’s in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning) or set up an after-hours form.
The latter prompts browsers to leave their details and query and lets them know that a team member will respond straight away during online hours.
This also allows you to collect as much customer info as you can, which helps to build relationships with potential buyers and convert them into loyal (and regular) customers.
Scale up your eCommerce business
Live chat is an extremely valuable tool in the world of eCommerce. With online shopping making up a major percentage of business revenue, it’s imperative you have tools in place that make the shopping experience feel as natural (and easy) as possible.
At the end of the day, shoppers want to know they’re still dealing with real people, even from the comfort of their own homes. And having a dedicated team of live chat agents will help to achieve this.
