In today’s fast pace, convenience first world, customers want, and more importantly expect, great customer service. They expect that wherever they are, the companies they want to do business with should be too.

Live chat in e-Commerce

For users, it is much easier to engage with a store through the availability of live chat. Having this option is much more welcoming and less threatening to customers who may not feel comfortable speaking on the phone to a sales representative. Additionally, some people might not feel like waiting for replies to the emails sent (which could arrive in days). So a quick solution lies in chat. In fact, research shows that companies using live chat end up doing roughly 30% more direct sales with their customers as compared to companies who do not offer live chat.

Using this type of communication you can help to decrease the rate of shopping cart abandonment, improve conversion, grow average order value, reduce cost per acquisition, and most importantly creates a good relationship with your clients.

One important aspect of live chat is letting the customer come to you. We all can relate to that feeling of walking into a store and almost immediately getting bombarded with questions from the employees who start sharing the “latest and greatest” sale they have. The way chat can help solve this problem is when the chat agent strategically times the chat with the customer. This gives the customer time to get acquainted with the website explore and shop at their own pace.

So at the end of the day, customers are turning more and more to the chat channel to do their business due to a multitude of reasons: accessibility, quick answers, non-threatening environment, and an environment in which they can control the interaction.

Want to increase sales?

In this case, you need to have sales people to answer questions from users. Live chat in your online store must be enabled normally 24/24, but many smaller companies keep it open solely during the day when more customers are likely to use it. If you don’t want to keep the live chat service open on a 24-hour basis, then make sure to announce your available schedule to the clients in the Contact section of your website.

It is very important to prepare your team or the man who will take care of this activity. The operator might be too busy, does not have time to “tell” ok, still does not know what the client missing, but the client must be informed of this. A default wait message or animation is great in these cases.

If you’re already using live chat in your store, do you do it correctly?

My advice is to try a free month of live chat solution, and then you can see if it’s worth it or not to continue with it. I say this because most companies have such applications, offering free access for a period of 30 days. More recently these applications offer support on mobile, so you can answer your customers even if you’re not in front of a computer (but that means knowing your merchandise and website).

If you believe that investing time and resources in live chat helps increase sales, you can always switch to a paid version of the live chat application that you use. A customer chat service is considered to be a good investment by many sales experts.