The rise of e-commerce has made it possible for businesses of all sizes to reach broader target markets that often span even across continents. However, brick and mortar stores are still in existence and are thriving too.
The reason is simple; people like the personal touch offered by such physical stores. They can take help from customer support executives wherever they feel lost in their shopping journey. Store executives can make suggestions, often upselling to the customers, and convert more visitors into buying customers and further into loyal followers that swear by their brand.
But there is still hope for e-commerce portals. Such a level of personalized assistance gets achieved by integrating a simple tool on your e-commerce store - live chat for customer support.
Making an e-commerce store is super easy these days, thanks to the plethora of content management systems (CMS) specializing in e-commerce. Top players include Magento, Shopify, Woo-commerce and the likes.
This is a no-brainer that these e-commerce CMSs allow for a smooth integration of live chat software within their framework to increase conversions and sales. You can achieve Shopify or Magento live chat integration in just a few clicks.
Let’s discuss how e-commerce live chat integration can boost the sales of your e-commerce store significantly.
How Live Chat Integration Boosts E-commerce Sales
Eases Lead Generation
The journey that a visitor takes before becoming a loyal customer starts with providing their contact details and requirements for the business. Every business knows this is not as easy as it sounds.
Companies spend thousands of dollars for bringing visitors to their page, but if they all browse around and leave without engaging, it’s a huge loss.
Live chat makes it easier for you to trigger a conversation if you feel that the visitor is not able to find what they are looking for and need shopping assistance.
If your chat executive is quickly able to understand the visitors’ requirements, chances of them getting converted into customers are high.
When your chat executives are offline, you can put a chatbot for collecting user’s contact information and requirements. By doing this, your chat executives can contact them whenever they are live again. It works much better than a standard inquiry generation form that is tedious to fill.
Tip: Strike a balance between automation and personalization. Too much customization requires your chat executives to be online 24X7 which might not be cost-effective for many businesses. On the other hand, using a chatbot all the time beats the purpose of integrating live chat for customer support.
Increases Lead Conversion
Only a tiny percentage of visitors buy from a website in their first interaction. Once you have generated a lead, it becomes easier for you to track when the same user returns to the site.
Live chat helps you in bonding with the user by utilizing the information from their last interaction to personalize your subsequent conversations. You can make real-time product suggestions that suit their needs and cut them the hassle to browse on their own.
By acting at the right time to assist the visitor in their shopping journey, you can drastically boost your macro-conversion rate.
Tip: A proactive approach is excellent, but it should not be intrusive. Meaning that if a visitor is doing fine on their own, don’t interrupt their journey as they might get distracted. You can use automatic triggers based on individual events for the same.
Promotes Up-Selling And Cross-Selling
If a user is asking for your suggestion on live chat, you have gained their trust. At a time such as this, it will be appropriate to suggest a product of higher value than they were looking for (up-selling). You can also recommend some accessories or related products that go well with their requirements. For example, a visitor buying a laptop might as well buy a laptop bag, and it doesn’t hurt to ask.
Tip: Ensure that you have indeed gained the trust of the visitor before trying to up-sell or cross-sell.
Boosts Referrals
Besides shopping assistance, live chat is also helpful in resolving after-sales support issues and grievances.
Excellent customer service is a significant brand differentiator that helps in carving a niche among the stiff competition. If a customer is satisfied with your service, they spread good things about your brand on social media and other platforms which increase your brand value.
Better brand perception and direct referrals help you in getting more sales and more customers. Live chat integration helps you getting in close touch with your customers to assist them throughout their association with your brand.
Helps You Improve Your Product/Service and Your Website
Live chat facilitates one-on-one conversations with your target audience, which is critical for understanding various vital facts about your products and brand. Besides you also get a lot of quantitative and qualitative data about customer behavior.
At the minimum, you readily get to know the most frequently asked questions on your live chat. Analyze their causes and include them in an FAQ section to reduce the load on live chat executives and improve the user experience. Better still; make changes in your site navigation or user flow or even your product or service to remove the issues in the first place.
For example: if users are needing help in adding a discount coupon or they are facing difficulty in selecting their preferred payment method, your checkout process needs to be optimized.
Tip: It’s recommended to adopt a data-oriented approach to maximize the benefits of your live chat for customer support. Use post-chat customer surveys to measure the efficacy of your live chat support.
Analyze the quantitative data to gauge whether operator performance metrics like chat response time are meeting the benchmarks. Generate and analyze live chat transcripts to get valuable information about customers.
Conclusion
E-commerce is a boon for businesses as they can market their products or services to a global audience. E-commerce content management frameworks like Magento and Shopify have further eased international e-commerce. But the personalization that is abundant in brick and mortar stores is difficult to achieve in online stores.
Integrating live chat software in your e-commerce store can work wonders in adding that missing personal touch so that your sales increase significantly.
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Robin is a Technical Support Executive. He is an expert in knowledge management and various Knowledge base tools. Currently, he is a resident knowledge management expert at ProProfs. In his free time, Robin enjoys reading and traveling.
