How Live Chat Helps with Conversion and Retention

In order to build trust with your customers online, it makes good business sense to provide open and accessible communication pathways between you and your target market. Even when using live chat, you still want your customers to feel the same personalized and caring touch just like they would at a brick-and-mortar store.

Today, live chat customer service is a top contender on customer satisfaction charts and is a preferred way to communicate with a business when compared with other channels such as email, phone, and social media. The reason? Live chat is the fastest way to provide assistance and engage visitors and potential customers on your e-commerce website.

If you’re still not able to interact with your visitors in real-time, it’s time to learn about how live chat customer service helps drive conversions and retain customers.

Why live chat

According to research from Econsultancy, live chat is king among other customer service online channels. Their statistics show that 73% of customers are happy with a live chat experience as compared to 61% for email, 48% for social media, and 44% for phone. The primary reason why live chat outshines other channels is its ability to provide immediate responses through real-time conversation with human representatives, as proven by Invesp in their infographic.

Additionally, live chat is a versatile channel that allows website visitors to multitask and continue browsing your web pages while engaging with your live chat to get quick answers to their questions. Taking this into consideration, as well as the fact that live chat is available on mobile devices, it’s easy to understand why it’s become so popular.

Live chat lets you provide a personalized shopping experience

Even though chatbots exist and so many other channels offer automatic responses as solutions to improve customer service, your customers still prefer talking to actual people. Live chat allows your representatives to guide visitors through your sales funnel, offer solutions, cross-sell, upsell, and consider any customer needs and preferences while doing so.

Especially for an online store, being able to interact with your visitors while they are still browsing your page is a great way to reduce your cart abandonment rates. Why? Because visitors don’t need to leave your store and interrupt their shopping experience to find answers and solutions elsewhere, potentially giving up on the purchase and finding another solution somewhere else.

Live chat features that impact your customers

Professional live chat solutions offer much more than just a support channel for your company. When choosing the best live chat for your business, look for features that can impact your metrics and boost your sales.

Monitor and engage visitors with proactive invitations

One of the major challenges of providing customer service online is the inability to keep track of visitors browsing your store and the way you approach them.

However, by being a platform present within your own website, an online chat allows you to overcome that obstacle easily. Withtarget="_blank" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener" aria-label=" (opens in a new tab)"> proactive invitations, you’re able to identify which session your visitors are browsing and send them a customizable automated chat pop-up, inviting them to talk to your representatives.

Proactive invitations are definitely one of the most powerful live chat features- they let you reach out to visitors and offer assistance. Proactive invitations make a huge difference when building trust with your customers and coaxing them to come back to make repeat purchases.

Predict messages and reply in real-time

Phone calls also allow companies to chat in real-time with customers, so why is live chat still considered the fastest way to respond to clients? It’s simple! Your visitors won’t need to wait for a customer service representative to be available.

Instant replies don’t exist through phones. Your team isn’t able to make use of automated instant replies without forcing customers to listen to recorded messages. During a chat session, your team can quickly send pre-configured instant replies without sounding like a robot or breaking communication.

Top-notch live chat solutions make it possible to know what a customer is writing before the final message is sent, which gives time for your representatives to gather resources and prepare answers in advance. This feature is known as message prediction and is one of the main reasons chat support is quick.

Provide multilingual customer service

In today’s globalized online market, providing multilingual customer service is critical. You don’t want to lose opportunities because your team can’t understand or speak to a customer. However… hiring multilingual representatives can get costly.

Instead, how about letting your support channel bear the load of translating messages from both your visitors and representatives to enable seamless communication? Most live chat solutions today translate as many as 90 languages in real-time, completely breaking this major communication barrier.

Be available to mobile customers

Mobile Internet usage represents over 52% of all user traffic online and, as presented by Buildfire, 62% of people who own a mobile device have made a purchase through it in the past six months and 42% plan to do more shopping through their devices in 2019.

Looking at these numbers, it makes perfect business sense that not only your e-commerce website must be compatible with mobile devices, but your customer service channels should as well.

Conclusion

Live chat customer service helps millions of businesses transform their visitors into customers. It lets you reply quickly, provide personalized customer service, be available on mobile and it also offers a wide range of features to help you sell more and retain customers.

Whether you’re starting out as a small business or you are already the owner of well-established e-commerce, you can certainly benefit from providing a live chat to help scale your sales and meet your customer’s expectations.