Live Chat

Imagine when you enter a supermarket and don’t know what to choose among various of similar products. Who would you want to ask? Isn’t it the sale assistants? Without their support, you would find it hard to continue shopping, or in the worst case, you leave the supermarket with nothing in hand.

Similarly, when visitors enter your website, at many times they need instant help from your staff. Yeah, you know what I mean, right? You are thinking about installing a live chat support module on your website and hiring someone to work on this, or you may even have done it already.

But wait! Are you sure that your live chat support strategy have achieved its full power. You may need to look at these 5 facts and 5 tips about an effective live chat for your eCommerce business.

5 Facts why Live Chat Support is Necessary

1. Live Chat Boosts Visitors’ Engagement and Trust

When people land on your website, they have many questions in mind and need much time to find the answers. Only via live chat can you help them with instant experienced support and ensure their satisfaction with your service. Research says that 44% online shoppers prefer stores which provide the frequent service to their customers and reply quickly to visitor queries.

2. Live Chat Improves Conversions Rates and Sales

In a sharing talk within Magestore marketing team, one of my colleagues finds out that highest conversion rates occur with a zero time lag, which means most online visitors make purchase decisions within the day they enter the website. So what? Don’t make them think twice. Maybe some positive hooks such as an immediate piece of advice from your live chat team will help them close the deal faster.

3. Live Chat Nurtures Customer Relationship

That is true. Unlike one-to-many communication channels like marketing emails or social media, instant  one-to-one chatting can reveal part of the chatters’ natural personality. Meaningful and friendly live chat will make customers closer to each of your customer care staff, and your brand.

Live chat can help build customer relationship
Live chat can help nurture customer relationship

4. Live Chat Reduces Bounce Rate and increase Time on Site

In the technical perspective, a live chat window acts like a second page in customer behavior flow, so this helps minimize bounce rates. In the UX perspective, when customer join a chatting session, they will spend more time on your website and take more activities with your web pages.

5. Live Chat Helps Collect Feedback from Customers quickly

Normally, after an email sent or a social media post published about a specific matter, you will have to wait for your audience’s response. They may or may not want to answer you, you have no idea. On the contrary, with live chat, you can ask your customers in the most direct way and they can hardly ignore it. Agree?

Now let me suggest these 5 ideas that will help you make best use of  your live chat force.

5 Tips to Develop an Effective Live Chat Support Strategy

1. Educate your Chat Team with Heart

It is very important that your chat team have full knowledge of all products, features & functionality on your website so that they reply customers’ requests without difficulty. But a positive and enthusiastic attitude among your whole team is also essential to make your customers love you and stay more with you.

2. Be Available at the Most Time you can

Many global companies are successful in providing 24*7 live chat support as they have big employee bases to do that. For small and medium businesses, if you cannot be available 24*7 on live chat, you can make a quick analysis to find out the peak time on your website when most customers need you online.

3. Use Triggered Auto-Messages to Engage Visitors

Shoppers can not always ask for your support, they just get in and get out silently. Then you should get out to them first. Luckily, today we have many advanced solutions which can automatically push help message in front of visitors eyes based on their activities.

For example, when someone stays on a particular product page more than 10 seconds but does not buy yet, it is likely that they are interested in that product but still need further clues. Then a message at the right time like “Hey, my name is ABC.It looks like you are interested in our XYZ product. Can I do something to help you with it?” may be a good idea to help them find what they want with convenience.

4. Be Human

I know that many organizations put regulations and processes to the top of priority, make their front-line staff act like robots and forget what their customers actually feel. Why not think about some tactics to make your visitors find it easier to communicate. A humorous greeting, a friendly-looking headshot of your support representative or some modest jokes at times may seed a memorable impression on your prospects.

5. Track Live Chat Performance Regularly

There is always room for improvement. Take effort to analyze each of the figures and indexes that may matter, i.e.  the average visitors’ time on site, the chatting-to-sale conversion rate, customers’ review on each chatting session, and so on. Your team should make a clear goal and build a solid strategy to enhance your live chat support to the top notch.

 Have you find the above list useful to you? There must be something missing in the list and I really want to know more. If you have other hacks to improve live chat, don’t hesitate to let me know.

Let me ask you some closing questions: Have you experienced Magestore’s live chat system? Is there anything we can do to make you feel better satisfied with us? Leave your kind words in the comment box below. Thank you so much!

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Why Magestore? We believe in building a meaningful & long-term relationship with you.

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