When you are visiting a website and have a question or problem, would you rather make a phone call or open a live chat window? If you’re like most of us, the answer is “chat.” Your customers probably feel the same way—so if your ecommerce site isn’t offering chat, you could be missing out on sales.
According to a study by LogMeIn:
- 38 percent of customers who use live chat make purchases as a result of the chat session.
- 63 percent of customers say they are more likely to return to a website if it offers live chat.
- A whopping 90 percent of customers like using live chat because it’s anonymous, convenient and has an almost immediate response time.
Need more convincing? Here are 11 ways live chat can benefit your ecommerce website:
- Customers can get answers quickly without having to find a phone, dial and go through an annoying phone tree to get to a live person.
- The interaction is documented and can even be printed out for later reference by the customer.
- Customer service employees can cut and paste links and other useful information into the conversation.
- Your employees can speed service by cutting and pasting responses to common issues.
- Customers can place their orders right away, since they’ll still be on the website after completing the chat.
- Typing information such as order numbers or name spellings reduces human error and customer annoyance—your employees won’t mispronounce names or have to ask customers to repeat themselves.
- Customer service employees using chat can often deal with more than one customer at once—unlike customer service over the phone.
- Chat can be a great adjunct to a customer call center. After all, there are still some users who prefer to speak to live assistance by phone.
- Chat enables you to maximize your business website. It can be used to direct customers to useful information on the site, making them more educated about what you sell.
- The cost of providing online chat customer service is typically lower than the cost of providing phone customer service.
- It’s easier to outsource to overseas customer service centers, since foreign accents will not cause communications issues with customers on chat.
