Are you looking for a simple way to make more sales on your ecommerce website? Then consider adding live chat to your customer service options. Here are some of the benefits you can gain by using live chat:
- By giving customers more options for how to get help, their customer satisfaction increases, building strong and lasting customer relationships. A survey of 1,000 consumers by the E-Tailing Group found that business owners who add live chat see customer satisfaction nearly double—increasing by 80 percent to 90 percent.
- Customers get the convenience of interacting at their own pace, instead of waiting “on hold” on the phone for a customer service rep to become available.
- Many customers prefer live chat, especially the Millennial generation. In the E-Tailing Group survey, 20 percent of online shoppers say live chat is their first choice for communicating with retailers.
Typically, the addition of live chat results in an increase in sales (sometimes as much as 35 percent) because customer service representatives can answer questions instantly and keep customers from leaving your site in frustration. Customer service reps can also suggest related or complementary products to accompany what a customer is buying, or gently “upsell” customers to higher-quality and higher-priced options.
When investigating options for live chat solutions, here are some features to look for:
- Canned messages: This feature lets you create “template” responses to frequently asked questions so that customer service reps don’t have to retype them every time. This also provides a consistent customer service experience and ensures that company policy is stated correctly (no need to worry that a customer service rep will tell a customer the wrong information about returns, for example).
- The option to “push” Web pages to a customer: By sending a hyperlink to a specific page and/or inserting basic HTML code, you can drive traffic to a specific website page or product—or even to specific elements on the page. This enables customers to investigate their options while chatting with you.
- Mobile-friendliness: You want customers to be able to start a live chat from any computer, tablet or smartphone, wherever they have Internet access.