Many people enjoy shopping online, but one problem they face with ecommerce sites, is not having the live customer support that brick and mortar stores offer. It doesn’t take an expert to know just how crucial high quality customer service is in any business. Customers help spread the word about your business, and in turn, grow your customer base. Instead of having customers leave their website, many businesses are incorporating live chat into their website.
BoldChat, an online business that offers live chat software, detailed in their 2015 Live Chat Performance Benchmarks report that: “For the average website, adding live chat will increase conversions and average order size. A chatter is 2.8 times more likely to convert than a regular website visitor. That, coupled with the fact that, on average, a buyer who chats will spend 60% more, indicates that live chat – and those employing it – is improving sales throughput and value. Mobile visitors have the largest increase with mobile chatters spending 68% more than mobile non-chatters.” Full PDF here.
If you have been thinking about investing in live chat support, here are four reasons there is value in communicating with your live visitors!
Convenient for Customers
Although you may have ways to support your customers online, such as a contact form or a phone number they can call, many of them do not want to wait long for help to arrive. This is especially helpful for e-commerce sites, where customers will have many questions about the products being offered. Support phone numbers are fine, but live chats give customers immediate help instead of having to navigate through a labyrinth of numerical options to get assistance.
Cut Down on Costs
Live chat software will help you cut down on the costs needed to deploy an employee to answer the phone. Not to mention it will cut back on your phone plan expenses. A live chat representative can also increase efficiency because they can handle multiple chats at the same time.
Increase Sales
Often, there are customers who are not so tech savvy, or just have a question that the website does not answer. Instead of them leaving to go to a competitor’s website, a live chat can walk them through the process and help them complete the checkout process, increasing the amount of sales made. Employees can also suggest other products that might be beneficial to the customer, based on what they are purchasing.
Ongoing Improvement
When live chat representatives talk to customers, they find out the problems they are having with the website, products, or anything else. This is vital information to making improvements so that customers are happy, and make it more likely that they’ll spend money at your business.