Three reasons why your e-commerce needs a livechat
A business thrives when it has positive relationships with its customers, but to make this bond work you have to focus on one vitally important factor: personalization. The online buyer needs an agent who is always available to help them with any obstacle, just like in a physical store.
The main goal of any business should be to provide each visitor with a positive customer journey. When users have a good shopping experience, they’re likely to become regular customers and, if all goes well, ambassadors for your brand, store, or service.
And how do you achieve this commitement to customer personalization? Over half (51%) of consumers demand that a business be available 24/7, but agents not only have to be online, they also have to solve various problems or attend to any needs that customers might have.
This is where the role of a livechat comes in. Consumers are fed up with waiting and they want an appropriate response for their specific issue before making a purchase, which is why more and more online stores use a chat to respond to their customers.
Why does an e-commerce need a livechat?
#1. Higher level of satisfaction
Imagine you go to a store and have a question: You approach the clerk and he says that you have to send an e-mail or give them a call to get a solution. If this doesn’t make sense in a physical store, it doesn’t make sense for an e-commerce either.
Online chats logically get a higher level of satisfaction. When consumers seek the immediacy and availability to solve any small problem, a livechat offers help with a simple click. When an agent takes care of a customer, they can accompany you throughout the purchasing process and make sure you’re happy with your choice.
Conversely, when a consumer has a complaint or wants to file a claim, the agent can listen to him, understand him, and offer a solution or compensation. Easily streamlining this process and taking care of the relationship with your customers without having to change departments will help keep them loyal.
Furthermore, livechats are the most successful communication channel among younger generations and have become the preferred mode of contact with millennials: 60% prefer to use a chat before calling or sending an e-mail because they get a much faster, more efficient answer.
Concentrating on this type of audience is important; not just because it’s a fad. Young people between 18 and 33 years old are the largest sector of the population in the United States and each year they spend approximately $600 billion.
But, back to the global view, if consumers are looking for an immediate answer, keeping a 24-hour phone service active is much more expensive than offering a livechat. As such, if you’re not available, you can send a contact form and when you return as active, redirect customers to the chat through a link and continue attending them in real time.
#2. Better communication
Livechat is gradually being introduced to satisfy customers and provide a fast contact route, but at the same time, this trend is evolving into a fully automated process because many consumers end up asking similar questions.
One thing is clear: customer service is not yet within the reach of a chatbot. Although Artificial Intelligence is getting better every year, the questions and needs of a consumer can be pretty complex so much so that a chatbot might not be able to differentiate nuances and understand what a customer really needs. Smart? Yes. Human? No.
Providing a customer service channel is not only a swift way for users to send their questions and keep them happy, which translates into greater loyalty, but it honestly has to be helpful personalizing each customer’s treatment and giving them what they want: someone who listens to them and can help them.
Basically, the challenge of customer service is to approach it using the same model as stores that have been around forever, having a person that takes care of you and recommends new products that they know might interest you. You should make it clear to customers that you are available for anything they need.
#3. More conversions
All businesses look for ways to increase their income and provide good customer service, it’s one of the main pathways. At Oct8ne we already gave you the data regarding the impact that customer service has on sales, so we’ll cover another topic.
According to a study done by Forrester Research, an independent market research and technology impact firm, nearly 44% of online consumers in the United States believe that having real-time help during the purchasing process is one of the most important characteristics that an e-commerce can offer.
According to the company, 92% of online consultations occur before the user arrives at the checkout and thanks to real-time attention, customer commitment increases. As we’ve said before, if an agent accompanies the customer throughout the shopping experience and ensures that they’re satisfied, they will be able to reduce the rate of cart abandonment.
The research itself reveals that in order to increase conversions with customer service, once the livechat is installed, we need to train agents so they learn how to speak with customers, we must analyze transcriptions of conversations for future optimization, and we can’t forget to adapt livechat for mobile customers.
#EXTRA: How can I install a livechat?
Having a chat available in our e-commerce means offering personalized, real-time customer service, of course. But to be able to attend someone online the same way you would in a physical store, we need to break the visual barrier that communicating through text messages entails.
Oct8ne is a visual customer service software and it won’t take you more than five minutes to install it. You simply have to paste a script code within your page’s HTML and the Oct8ne tab will appear on the web once you save the changes. It doesn’t matter which platform your page uses, Oct8ne is compatible with most of them.
