Imagine you’re trying to purchase a pair of shoes at your favorite shop around the corner, searching for your size. However, you were unable to find it. You would be first wondering whether they are out of stock or whether they are available in half-sizes.
You would try getting some help from the staff in the store, but there’s nobody around. There’s simply a note on the wall that tells you to dial a phone number to speak to a representative. You may try this, however, a lot of people would not be able to take the effort to ask this simple and quick question.
So you would begin to wonder: “Do I actually need these shoes?”
Ultimately, you choose it wasn’t meant to be and leave the store without buying any pair of shoes.
This is precisely what happens on your e-commerce websites if live chat is not provided as a feature. Most customers aren’t ready to wait for a long time over the phone call or for an email response about the product they are interested in or planning to buy. Once customers can’t get a response quickly, they’ll leave the store and purchase the same elsewhere.
With the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a drastic shift in consumer shopping behavior from Brick and Mortar stores to the digital e-commerce world to avoid any possible contact. With ever increasing visitors, B2C (Business to Consumer) websites are ramping up their infrastructure to cater to larger audiences.
The infrastructure that provides a very fast page load time, caching of websites, single page navigation, very attractive UI, multiple payment options, faster delivery, etc., might not be a value addition without the Live Chat option. A lot of people value such businesses where every effort is made in saving customers’ time and providing a good Customer Service experience. Using Live Chat we can serve a lot of people immediately.
Some of the common questions received through the online store are,
- If an item is ordered today, when will it be delivered to the customer’s place?
- If I buy more than one item at a time, will there be any special deal?
- Are there any free samples before ordering the products?
Other types of common questions that can be answered through live chat are,
- Will my credit card information be secure?
- How true to size is this item?
- Will I be able to return this product easily if it doesn’t work for me?
Even if a customer care executive answers a query via email within a few hours, the customer might already lose their momentum associated with the purchasing journey. It’ll definitely take a lot more effort from Marketing teams (even by spending a lot of money with campaigns) to get that customer back to the store than it would have if the sales team would have answered the customer queries in real-time.
With live chat, customers can get answers to their questions immediately, helping them shop with confidence. By integrating live chat right into your e-commerce website, we would make the support experience as seamless as possible for customers.
While every other form of service communications requires that customers make a call to customer service or send an email to the store using a separate “contact us” website page, which would move them out of the best experience designed on the website.
Using live chat, customers can be able to share the feedback right after solving their problem inside the chat window, as this is much easier for everyone than using another software to track the requests and getting a phone call for a follow-up or sending a link for filling a survey through email.
Additionally, live chat can help gain insights with analytics which is impossible if the interaction happens over the phone or through email. With the usage of live chat, customer behaviors can be tracked on the website as and when they happen. These insights when customers opt for using live chat would help reveal the problem areas within the customer experience on the website and user interface. With multi-lingual support, there is a great opportunity to serve a lot of International customers by engaging with larger demographic areas.
Another important feature of live chat is that it enables screenshots and supports multimedia exchange when customers might not be able to explain their issues as desired. Hence, through screenshots or via photo or video interactions, they might be able to better convey their concerns or issues. This helps the customer service team to provide assistance in a better way.
Many times while interacting with customers, there might be a need to browse along with the customer so that customers can find the right product or the expected option very easily. Co-browsing sessions will be of great advantage to help the customers find what they are looking for in a quick manner.
Another important feature that is gaining a lot of demand these days is screen sharing which helps the agent to show their screen to the customer and share a few documents, marketing approved images, or videos that can help in explaining to the customer about a particular product or a service in the website where the focus is on selling jewelry or real estate properties.”
A lot of businesses require to track the customer interactions as most issues that are addressed by the live chat support team cannot be closed instantly. So, immediately after the interaction, a ticket or support case can be created. Also, by integrating CRM access to live chat support, customers can go through the conversations and the stored information related to past chats. This enables the customer service team to provide a better service that is a personalized manner.
