According to Statista, in 2021, over 2.14 billion people across the world wide are expected to buy goods and services online. While eCommerce is changing the way people shop, merchants can stay stay ahead of the competition by implementing live chat software to enhance customer experience, resulting in more sales. Live chat has changed online sale generation methods, because of its range of benefits it offers eStores. Interestingly, a study by Drift revealed that only 15% of websites offer live chat.
New leads isn’t the only key metric that can be improved by offering live chat support to your website visitors and customers. The AARRR framework is built on live chat, activation and retention metrics.
AARRR stands for:
- Acquisition
- Activation
- Retention
- Referral
- Revenue
How Live Chat Makes Your eCommerce Business Grow?
Customer life cycles can be measured thanks to the variety of ways you can apply live chat support to your store. Here’s a sneak peek of the entire list of benefits that you’d gain from implementing live chat.
- Enhancing Customer Satisfaction
According to a Zendesk report, live chat support has lead to eStore customer satisfaction rates reaching an impressive 92%. Thanks to better support through co-browsing, businesses can easily eliminate communication issues and increase customer satisfaction through quicker ticket solves.
According to this software advice report, 63% of millennials prefer having basic customer support questions answered through chat.
- Improved Customer Engagement
Live chat option provides a convenient shopping experience that allows one to reach out to their customers, assist them and resultantly understand them. Live chat can make customers feel more comfortable to send product inquiries, resulting in an increase in site engagement.
- Faster Lead Generation and Conversions
Even with an impressive website, visitors will still flock to other websites without completing a purchase. Implementing live chat brings a difference amongst your competitors as customers who use live chat are 2.8 times more likely to convert than those without. Chat interaction data showed that 49% of customers bought a product recommended in the chat, while 60% of people spent more than average customers.
- Round the Clock Services
Your breaks and holidays are more peaceful when you have live chat features to take care of customer inquiries. Chatbots can make light work of customer inquiries when other parts of your business require your attention. Phew! That’s a relief!
- Better Business Insight
Collating live chat data and analyzing it helps you understand your customers’ preferences precisely. Chatting and talking with them in real-time give unique perspectives on your products and services. Here you can also find ideas to enhance your website.
- Building Long Term Relationships
Live chat can also allow to have a personalized approach to each visitor, especially those who need some help while shopping. Now, if you want your customers to come back for a purchase, you can request them to create a customer account, give them offers and discounts through live chat. Thus creating a new avenue for building valued customer relationships and loyal consumer bases for the future.
7. Expense Reduction
Live chat actually results in a decrease in cost as you can more efficiently handle large volumes of customer enquiries. As chatbots are capable of replying round the clock, this results in a direct decrease in the volume of phone calls and respective call-center bills! Of course, more answered customer inquiries leads to more conversions.
8. Trust Building
Cart abandonment happens more a number of reasons? Maybe the customer got distracted? Or maybe they didn’t trust the merchant enough to make a purchase!
A customers first purchase is a thoughtful decision. Help desks are only a first-level support option, customers may need more than just basic answers regarding the website to finally make a decision. Live chats build trust by humanizing the customer experience. When it comes to making that first transactions, trust is an essential tool that your customers need to feel.
How Can Live Chat Fight Cart Abandonment?
This can be a huge problem for eCommerce sellers as businesses often experience an average shopping cart abandonment rate of 69.57%. According to ConversionXL, there are multiple reasons why website visitors often abandon a shopping cart:
- Unexpected price surges
- Window-shopping intention
- Competitive prices elsewhere
Studies show that 53% of all online shoppers often express a lack of human interaction is the reason for abandoning a shopping cart.
Time-based Triggers for Undecided Shoppers
One of the most-crucial factors within the checkout process is time. The longer the customer is known to abandon their shopping cart, the more likely they’re to abandon a purchase. By using Google Analytics or an alternative analytics plugin, you can easily spot the duration that your customers are taking to finish a purchase. A live chat trigger can appear when a purchase is delayed.
Nurturing Customers Reaching a Certain Cart Value
Creating a meaningful data base on monitoring customer interaction is totally possible. Data from live chat triggers can help you understand how effective your shopping cart really is. Furthermore, live chat can be used to provide additional offers to customers before finishing their checkout process.
Optimizing Your Live Chat: ECommerce Development
According to reports, an online business has 722 chats per month that comes with a duration of over 14 minutes per chat. For a large business, hiring eCommerce development experts or training agents to manage your chat window round the clock is a great idea. Big or small, if you’re looking to ensure live chat is efficiently implemented customized to maximum potential it’s recommended you hire from a reputable web development company.
How to Pick a Reputable Development Company
The eCommerce development industry is overcrowded, therefore it’s recommended that you are cautious in who you hire from, quality assurance is essential! To make sure that a development company is trustworthy and quality, there are a few aspects you should check:
Job Portfolio: An abundant and active job portfolio is the first sign of a quality development company. They should have successful projects in a range of industries. Of course, they might not show all their projects and will limit the information they show—this is good as it shows they will ensure your business confidentiality.
Positive Reviews: A trustworthy development company should have plenty of positive reviews and testimonials from previous projects. You will likely find these on their site, but the best companies will also have reviews on third-party ranking websites such as Clutch.co.
Tech Support: Lastly, tech support services are crucial. At any moment your eCommerce store might run into a problem and you need help immediately. This can become confusing as many development companies provide “24/7 support” yet this only means they have a chatbot. The bigger tech support window a company has, where a client can actually talk to someone to resolve a complex problem is what truly matters. This is a big advantage of global development companies, as they are up in multiple time zones. Be sure to ask exactly what their human tech support hours are during consulting.
Below I’ll name some popular options:
- CodeClouds :The first development team I’d suggest is CodeClouds. They are a global development team that has specialists for a range of different eCommerce platforms or content management systems including: WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, Drupal. Therefore, if you want a well rounded opinion on what are the optimal choices for your eCommerce store far beyond just live chat, they have proven themselves as a trustworthy pick. Their global presence also allows them to provide 18/5 support (not chatbots, actually talking to someone). They feature dedicated developer packages that allow merchants to not only hire ecommerce developers, but also more expertise such as project managers and testers at an affordable cost. These sort of monthly plans are unique and help in ensuring long term business growth. However, they do only accept those projects that represent a long-term relationship. Therefore, if you only require a small live chat project without any additional store optimization and maintenance, they may not accept your project.
- Sourceved are a smaller and younger (concerning years of industry experience) team of about 25+ employees. Yet, they have 30+ clients, a promising work portfolio and have gained many positive reviews over 70 successful projects. Their eCommerce services are limited to WooCommerce, Magento, Open Cart and ZenCart. There smaller team means you will be limited if wanting to hire more than just a single developer, but if you’re a smaller business then they may be a good fit!To learn how to create a productive relationship with hired developers and create exceptional results—read this article on managing developer productivity.
