Ecommerce Live Chat

Live chat is usually a text-based communication that happens online between a customer and a merchant. It's akin to the instant messaging you might do with a friend through Apple's iChat or AOL's InstantMessenger.

From the seller’s perspective, online chat lets support staff reach out to a customer visiting its website in a one-on-one interaction to offer assistance or to push promotional offers. A “live chat” icon is placed on the merchant's website, and a customer clicks that icon to initiate a chat with a customer-service representative.

For ecommerce businesses, live chat is a strategy for reducing shopping-cart abandonment which, from recent research conducted by www.marketingsherpa.com, averages 59.8 percent. Live chat extends communication opportunities between buyer and seller while maximizing the customer’s overall satisfaction with their website experience.

According to industry research conducted by Phplivesupport.com, a livechat technology provider, an online shopper who uses the live chat is 20 percent more likely to make a purchase than a customer who does not. The reason is live chat’s ability to serve as a virtual-sales assistant during a visitor’s product selection and ordering process.

Maximizing the online-customer experience is a priority for ecommerce businesses because, by satisfying the customer’s goals, they can satisfy their goals for more sales. Live chat, whether through its common instantmessaging platformor itsmore advanced customer analytical capabilities, creates key opportunities for ecommerce businesses including:

• Offering an alternative and more instantaneous communication channel for website visitors compared to telephone and email.
• Enabling consultative interactions between a visitor and a customer support agent for relevant upsell and cross-sell opportunities while supporting the visitor’s buying process.
• Providing real-time consumer behavior insights to identify intentions and create new strategies for adapting and influencing those behaviors.
• Creating a powerful merchandising-research tool based on customer interactions for new product-development opportunities.
• Helping reduce shopping-cart abandonment by enabling customer-support staff to intervene prior to losing the sale and aiding the customer to completion, either through a promotional incentive like free shipping or guiding them past a checkout barrier.
• Temporarily allowing websites to overcome site-search and navigational challenges by pushing the most relevant web pages to the visitor based on their requested needs. “Temporarily” because insights gained through live chat should be funneled back into site search and navigational improvements.
• Ability to craft personalized and highly-relevant offers based on a visitor’s unique behavior including click-stream, referring URL, keyword usage and time on site data.

If your goal is to develop long-lasting relationships by providing key services to potential and existing customers, LiveChat it’s definitely a move in the right direction. Since it provides the ability to multi-task, the overall time expenditure is less than phone handling for most sites. And if you were a night owl, how great would it be to land a customer at 2 a.m. because he’s been surfing the web all night trying to find something, and you were there to guide the way?