How to Use eCommerce Live Chat for Ultimate Customer Satisfaction
If a customer arrives on your website for the first time and likes what they see, they’ll explore. As they peruse your online store and examine products of interest, you can further assume that they are thus-far satisfied. Before long, they’re on your live chat with questions regarding their potential purchase.
Like most eCommerce brands, you likely spent thousands of dollars building a positive user experience on your website. How do you keep this customer satisfaction going through the next step — live chat customer service?
At the end of last year, Smart Insights pulled research data and found that “Website visitors who engage with a brand through live chat are worth 4.5 times more than visitors who don’t.”
Smart Insights further noted (about brands that take the initiative to engage their online shoppers with live chat):
[That those brands] are three times more likely to convert as compared to those who don’t. When a visitor browses your website, the amount of content could be overwhelming, leading to confusion. When you start a chat with them, their doubts are instantly solved.
If your live chat capabilities are not up for the task to quickly and efficiently address customer questions, your thousands of dollars invested in UX design amounts to nothing.
Ultimately, your live chat platform should properly route and prioritize conversations. Allocating the necessary resources to achieve these live chat capabilities will save you money by reducing the number of agents you need and making the agents you have far more productive.
Thankfully, today’s live chat digital tools are assisting eCommerce brands in handling a higher volume of customer inquiries, as well as more complicated customer concerns. If your current CSAT (customer satisfaction) approach does not include a live chat platform that can get the job done, then it’s time to examine what are the critical components for a successful live chat system.
The Critical Components For a Successful eCommerce Live Chat System
Your customers want fast answers to their questions. At the same time, they want a positive experience when seeking help. The trick is providing both benefits without sacrificing one of the two — even a little bit.
Studies continually show that live chat is at present one of the most efficient ways to accomplish both priorities, so long as eCommerce brands know how to select and implement the right platform for their brand.
And while we’ve talked about the demands of your customers, there is something else you must take into consideration. Your live chat agents only have so much capacity to juggle customer questions over live chat. More often than not, your agents manage stressful conversations while watching their cue grow larger. This is overwhelming for most agents.
Because your customer support agents have a limited capacity, you have the opportunity to raise that limitation with the proper automation tools.
These critical components listed below will make your eCommerce live chat efforts all the more effective.
Pre-Chat Surveys
As your customers enter the live chat session, surveys can gather all initial information from the customer to help them receive the help that they need.
In this live chat introduction, you need the tools to help you organize, sort, and prioritize your customer inquiries on behalf of your live chat agents.
Customer Behavioral and Historical Data
After pre-chat surveys gather initial information, additional analytics tools can sync with your live chat platform to provide the live chat agent with as much information as possible before the online conversation begins. Based on this web visitor’s behavior, live agents can enter the chat window knowing what that customer has shopped for in the past or what particular needs that customer has.
Conversation Routing
Mediocre live chat platforms may not assign inquiries efficiently. It is not uncommon for some live chat agents to become overwhelmed with customers in their queue while other agents are standing by.
Additionally, sales agents end up with existing customers in need of tech support, and vice versa.
Whichever eCommerce live chat platform you choose, you need to be able to count on reliable conversation routing.
After qualifying inquiries with historical data, real-time data, and answers to chatbot questions, a reliable conversation routing tool can spread the load across all agents within the proper department.
Depending upon the nature of your product line, you can create rules that automatically sort customers into the appropriate queue. When creating these rules, use keywords, customer status, or even the last time that a customer was on your website to accurately route conversations to the right agent or department.
Optimized use of automation tools like conversation routing allows your customers to receive the help they need promptly. Additionally, your live chat agents will be more productive and working under less unnecessary stress.
Chat Queue Prioritization
The most exciting recent development in modern-day live chat technology is the ability of live chat managers and business owners to prioritize customer inquiries.
For example, managers can create a rule that sends a customer to the top of the chat queue if the customer has items in their cart. This customer is ready to buy and merely needs a few more details to make a purchase.
Additionally, live chat managers can program the system to show messages from customers that already completed a purchase behind those customers with items in their carts.
While the goal is never to frustrate existing customers, some inquiries are more urgent than others.
The example above is just one of many that can help a customer support team align their strategies with marketing and sales. Chat queue prioritization tools empower intentionality among the various departments resulting in increased sales and conversation rates.
Final thoughts
When learning how to use your eCommerce live chat platform, it’s important to remember that your ultimate goal is more sales and customer loyalty through collaboration with your customers.
Customers feel empowered when they have access to the information they need. More than half of your customers prefer live chat technology when seeking answers. It’s easy to use and faster than navigating a phone automation system.
But the benefits of live chat — as well as your UX design — can dwindle away if your platform fails to assimilate customer data, prioritize, and assign conversations to the right department in a timely manner.
Customers that find what they need in a live chat session feel a greater sense of trust in your brand.
Additionally, live chat best tools and practices will enable your agents to feel less overwhelmed when managing conversations with customers.
Lastly, conversation routing and chat queue prioritization deliver chat managers from having to go through every single conversation before transferring them to the right customer support agent.
In today’s fast-paced, digital retail environment, eCommerce brands need to equip their live chat agents to do more with less. Not only will the automation tools discussed in this guide save your organization money, but it will provide a better customer experience leading to more sales and customer retention.
