Chatbot + Livechat Strategy for Christmas

We’re starting this post with a tip: if you haven’t yet gotten your e-commerce ready for Christmas, you should start right now so you don’t have problems later at a critical time of year for consumerism. 

You’re just in time to optimize your processes the most, improve customer service, conversion capacity and after-sales service. All this with a single tool.

Well, to be more precise, we should say that two tools are working together: a livechat and a chatbot.

The truth is, that when they’re joined together well, the user experience is very good and completely transparent. In the consumer’s eyes they’re not aware they’re interacting with people and a bot. It’s something standardized and satisfying in terms of feeling attended efficiently and in real-time.

Why should you opt for this strategy at Christmas? 

You should actually opt for this strategy year-round, not just at Christmas. Even so, it’s true that during e-commerce’s busiest period is when you’re going to make even more of a profit with the combined use of a livechat and bot.

The vast majority of stores have their highest peaks of visits for the year so we have to ensure that everything goes smoothly at Christmas and that, of course, includes customer service management.

Let’s look at a few simple application tips.

Implement it now at the technical level

This shouldn’t be put off for a number of reasons. The first is the very nature of the chatbot and the Artificial Intelligence that drives it. Almost like people, conversational chats enhance their “skills” with training, which is why they work better with the passage of time and interactions. So, the sooner you set it up, the better.

Since we’re talking about training, implementing your chat ecosystem now also gives you an adjustment period for agents or managers to get used to the process. It’s always better to do the tests now in a smoother period so that everything is down pat when the ‘Rock and Roll’ begins.

Develop a consistent strategy

If you install your chat system just in the online store, you’ll probably notice an improvement in the user experience but, given that we always want to go one step further, a strategic projection will help you a lot to also improve their shopping experience and conversion.

Depending on how complex the strategy you want to carry out is, you might need more time. We always recommend that you automate some actions based on your website’s user behavior.

This is the time to make data-driven hypotheses. Check your website’s performance last year during Christmas. This will give you an interesting record to work with (pages where traffic has come in, pages where the site was abandoned, number of page views, bounce rates, most common searches in the internal search engine, etc).

With Oct8ne, in addition to being able to extract information from Google Analytics, you have your own chat history. You can consult that information externally and cross-reference the data or, what’s even more intriguing is integrating it with your analytics tool.

Program your triggers based on information you’ve been collecting and see how they work in the period before Christmas. That way you can make corrections and adjustments without losing sales opportunities.

Automation is critical in this strategy. Keep in mind that it enables your store to personally attend customers even when agents aren’t available. During the Christmas season, specifically, shopping hours are very long and there is greater demand even at hours that are not usually productive.

Planting for the future 

Getting your e-commerce ready for Christmas implies going one step further still. All that “extra” traffic is an opportunity to build business later if it’s managed properly.

The Livechat + chatbot combo can also help you in this. First, because a good shopping experience is the best way to retain customers, but you can also prepare some more specific actions.

This time we’ll use the bot to generate leads for the near future we’re talking about. Setting it up is simple, at least if you use Oct8ne, and it lets you collect user data like: name, surname or email addresses to carry out actions later.

The main difference with trying to do this through a classic form is a loss of interaction. While the first method is reactive, the proactivity of the chat makes it more attractive and consequently, it achieves the goal more effectively.

Have you already gotten ready for Christmas? Hurry! You’ve still got time to fine tune your strategy!