In the early days of live chat, it was often considered an impersonal response to customer complaints or a waste of time for teams that couldn’t put in the effort needed to make it effective.
Fortunately, live chat has evolved and become a powerful way to enhance customer experience and provide real-time support to customers.
Why Should Customer Service Teams Use Live Chat?
At its core, live chat allows you to provide personalized recommendations that speak to customer preferences and needs, removing the invisible barriers of trust and decision-making fatigue. For this reason, 41% of customers believe live chat is the best way to communicate with businesses.
Additionally, it gives customer service teams a unique understanding of the pain points and challenges customers face. Over time, your team can notice patterns and use that information to improve products, services, marketing, and even sales.
How to Attract Potential Customers During the Purchase Consideration Process
When sending marketing emails, pushing ads, or even posting a billboard, you often interrupt people during moments when they’re not thinking about shopping or are in the mood to make a purchase. A well-placed bus advertisement is great for catching attention so that the person remembers to look for you later but forgets your business name.
When using a live chat app, you have a contextual marketing approach. This means that potential customers have shown intention to buy something from your site: they are already there and browsing.
Engage them during the decision-making process and send a proactive message telling them that you are available to chat immediately. Now, instead of closing the tab or minimizing it until they have time to consider their options, they can ask you any lingering questions – that’s the amazing power of live chat.
For example, you can message Heatonist Sauce experts and ask about the best hot sauce to use for frying or on taco night, and they will respond to you in real time with personalized recommendations they have tested themselves.
Increasing Conversion Rate: Let Customers Talk to You in Real Time
Our analysis of Shopify Inbox usage indicates that businesses that respond to customer chat within five minutes are 69% more likely to make a sale from the customer. Customers who chat with businesses via Shopify Inbox are 70% more likely to convert. Forrester reports that customers who talk to the brand not only convert three times more often, but their average shopping cart value is 10%-15% higher than other customers.
In this article, we will explore how you can effectively use live chat support and enhance your customer experience. Why should customer service teams use live chat?
At its core, live chat allows you to provide personalized recommendations that speak to customer preferences and needs, removing the invisible barriers of trust and decision-making fatigue. For this reason, 41% of customers believe live chat is the best way to communicate with businesses.
Additionally, it gives customer service teams a unique understanding of the pain points and challenges customers face. Over time, your team can notice patterns and use that information to improve products, services, marketing, and even sales.
How Can Planet Nusa Use Live Chat to Increase Conversion and Build Community?
Planet Nusa is an activewear brand that makes eco-friendly sportswear from sustainable materials like recycled fishing nets from the ocean. They use Shopify Inbox for live chat on their online store to recreate the retail shopping experience.
We talked about
with co-founder Mille Skat to learn more about how Planet Nusa uses live chat to boost sales and community feeling among its customers. “Getting activewear should be easy and fun. Shopify Inbox has been a great tool for that.”
Demystifying Sizing to Boost Sales
Planet Nusa discovered that answering consumer questions allows them to convert those answers into direct sales. This is especially important for online selling, where customers do not get a fitting room to try on the clothes they want to buy – unless they purchase them.
“There still isn’t a perfect solution for converting sizes online – especially when selling to customers with different local sizes,” says Mille. “Traditional charts where customers have to measure themselves at home aren’t something we want it to be! Getting activewear should be easy and fun.”
“When questions about sizing arise, we can advise them on selecting sizes they already have in their wardrobe or send links to our profiles on social media and frankly say: ‘I’m a standard medium in my regular clothes, and I have that in my T1 sports pants. Here’s my Instagram if you want to check out the sizes. ?’
Demystifying your product is beneficial even if you’re selling non-retail products. You can apply this idea to anything: customers may want to know the size of a table, the color of a velvet pillow in natural light, or the weight of a drinking cup. You can answer all those questions instantly through live chat.
Building Strong Relationships with Shopify Inbox
Shopify Inbox helps manage customer conversations, create automated messages, and gain insights to focus on converting conversations, all through Shopify Inbox. Get Shopify Inbox.
Extracting Insights from Chat Conversations
There’s a good reason many companies record phone support calls. You may have heard the classic phrase “This call is recorded for training and quality purposes” when speaking with a customer service representative, for example.
The same can be said for your chat conversations. Regularly present your support conversations to your support team to review common patterns and themes.
Do customers frequently ask about shipping costs? Perhaps you could create a blog post or make shipping costs clearer. Are customers inquiring about a specific feature that you don’t have? This could be a good opportunity to engage your product team to see if it should be added to the product roadmap.
Utilizing your chat conversations to leverage insights can lead to improved customer satisfaction, marketing, and even sales! Your customer service team can truly be the most valuable source of ideas for your business.
Stay Close to Customers
Unless using a bot to categorize live chat requests is part of your strategy, customers expect to have a human on the other end of the line. Your chat should feel like a great in-store experience, similar to chatting with your favorite café barista coffee. Don’t hesitate to share your personal favorite products and the reasons you love them. Customers will appreciate that you have tried (and love) all your products yourself.
Friendliness should always be your policy when you can’t be online as well. For example, when the Planet Nusa team misses a chat or responds a bit late, they explain to customers saying: “We’re a small brand, and we were on our way back home on our bikes. But we’re back and love to help you. ?”
Sharing
This level of detail – that they were riding bikes home – gives customers an understanding of the team’s operation level. It’s also a nice piece of information that makes the brand feel more personal and authentic, rather than just a logo on a website.
Preparing Your Customer Support Team for Success
Of course, you can’t expect to invest in a customer service program and call it a day. Providing a great customer service experience is a team effort. Your chat support team should understand your brand values and processes to perform at their best.
Is the ideal customer experience clear? Do your customer service representatives know how to handle a variety of customer service experiences? Without preparing your support team, you risk turning live chat into something that reduces customer satisfaction rather than aiding your business growth.
Ensure the Live Chat Support Option is Easy to Find
Access to live chat shouldn’t be limited to the “Contact Us” page. The live chat messenger should be visible on every product page, as long as it doesn’t interrupt customers while they browse. For example, Shopify Inbox is available on every page of the online store, even during the checkout process.
If a customer spends too long on a particular page, consider adding an automatic pop-up to check if they need assistance.
Use Live Chat as a Customer Feedback Loop
Chat support is a great opportunity for informal user testing. Where are customers consistently struggling?
Pre-sale questions someone asks via live chat can be used to fix the root cause of issues that might prevent other potential customers from making a purchase, for example, unclear product pages.
If you discover that customers are encountering an issue, the best thing you can do is ask specific questions to find out how you can assist them and how you can fix the problem for other visitors on your site.
Leveraging Live Chat to Build Strong Relationships
What truly drives Planet Nusa is the ability to use live chat to make customers feel part of the global community they are creating. “We find that our customers want to be heard, and why shouldn’t they be? We are in constant communication with them across all platforms, so live chat is a natural necessity,” says Mille.
Planet Nusa uses its presence across multiple channels to create an online community for its customers that goes beyond great shopping experiences. Its aim is to foster a sense of empowerment and belonging for women around the world through sustainable clothing and connection. Live chat helps them achieve that. As Mille says, “The best part of talking to your customers in real-time is that they feel like they are part of the community we are trying to build, both online and offline.”
Keys to a Great Live Chat Strategy
1. Know your inventory better than anyone else
Anyone handling live chat in your team should know enough about every product you sell to recommend the perfect product to a customer. This also means understanding your best-selling products so you can use that information to promote other products or services. The goal is not just to push your products or services but to support your customers and potential customers wherever they are in their purchasing journey.
2. Consider video chat support
Although it may not be suitable for all businesses or customers, you may benefit from using video chat support. For example, it could be helpful in SaaS for a team member to join a call and share their screen to explain specific features. While video chat support requires an additional investment of time and resources, it should be considered when building out your chat process.
3.
Providing Thoughtful Recommendations
Throughout your chat session, ask your team to pose some clarifying questions to ensure they have enough information about what the customer is looking for. This allows your service representatives to offer personalized recommendations and discuss their needs, rather than a one-size-fits-all personal need.
4. Keeping the Chat Organized
Having live chat can be confusing if you don’t have a good way to organize incoming conversations. A tool like Shopify Inbox can organize all your chats for you so you can respond in real-time. Shopify Inbox allows you to see conversations with your team and customers in one place, enabling collaboration to meet customer needs. Whatever tool you choose, make sure to stay organized from the start to ensure you can spot patterns and common themes that arise during your conversations.
5. Extracting Insights from Chat Conversations
There’s a good reason many companies record phone support calls. You may have heard the classic phrase “This call is being recorded for training and quality purposes” when speaking with a customer service representative, for example. The same can be said about your chat conversations. Regularly review your support chats with your support team to analyze common patterns and themes.
6. Staying Personal
Unless using a bot to sort live chat requests is a part of your strategy, customers expect to have a human on the other end of the line. Your chat should feel like a great in-store experience, akin to chatting with the barista at your favorite coffee shop. Don’t shy away from sharing your personal favorite products and why you love them. Customers will appreciate that you have tried (and love) all your products yourself.
7. Setting Your Customer Support Team Up for Success
Of course, you can’t expect to invest in a customer service program and call it a day. Providing a great customer service experience is a team effort. Your chat support team should understand your brand values and processes to do their best work.
8. Ensuring the Live Chat Support Option is Easy to Find
Accessing live chat shouldn’t be limited to the “Contact Us” page. The live chat messenger should be visible on every product page, as long as it doesn’t interrupt customers while they’re browsing. For instance, Shopify Inbox is available on every page in online stores all the way through checkout.
9. Using Live Chat Software as a Customer Feedback Loop
Chat support is a great opportunity for informal user testing. Where are customers consistently struggling? Pre-sale questions asked via live chat can be used to fix the root cause of issues that may deter other potential customers from making a purchase, e.g., unclear product pages.
Leveraging your chat conversations for insights can lead to improved customer satisfaction, marketing, and even sales! Your customer service team can truly be the source of the most valuable ideas for your business.
Live Chat is a Powerful Addition to Your Business
Just like providing an amazing in-store shopping experience, live chat builds the foundation of trust between your customers and your business. When done correctly, it can enhance customer satisfaction and ultimately your customer experience.
While paid ads, email marketing, and other acquisition efforts can drive traffic, converting that traffic into sales depends on customer trust in your brand and the products you sell.
Chat
Live chat is the window to building stronger connections with your potential customers – just as conversation builds trust between new friends. It may take some time to master it well, but for many businesses, the effort is worth it.
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