Do you need customer support chat for your ecommerce business?
Posted by Larry Taggart on November 5th, 2017
Ecommerce sales, according to market experts, have saturated. Established players, especially dealing in luxury clothing business are looking for newer means to reach out to their customers. Many leading brands have invested in customer support chat system in order to optimize live chat sales. You cannot compromise on customers’ satisfaction. To provide a great shopping experience, proving excellent customer service is the key and live chat is an important step towards that.
The way companies used to handle their customer service function is changing rapidly. Calling or emailing is no longer the preferred mode of communication for people as it may be disturbing at times. Live chat is the only channel available with the ecommerce retailers to interact with their customers when they actually want. The mode is instantaneous and provides information that the customer is looking for. Customers can ask quick questions on their selected items and mostly are satisfied with the answers given by the live chat agents. It has resulted in an increased rate of conversion.
Nowadays a whole lot of young clientele have the purchasing power to spend on online shopping. They splurge on luxury items including dress, accessories, gadgets and often services like travel. As per a recent report, in US alone there are nearly 80 million customers who are spending 0 billion annually. By 2020 this figure is expected to go up to .4 trillion, contributing almost 30% of total retail sales annually. It is important for the retailers to know that almost 54% of this segment of customers (in the age bracket of 35-44 years) prefers to interact with the seller through live chat.
Software companies have developed systems that can help ecommerce businesses optimize live chat sales. These software are based on artificial intelligence or AI and machine learning-based algorithms. The live chat agents have more information about their customers, their purchasing habits, needs and preferences and therefore can engage the buyers in a better way. On the basis of the data available with the system, the system can predict the requirement of the customer and can also match his or her specifications with a product more closely.
Today, customer support chat is instant, convenient, easy to learn and time saving for the agents. They can now handle multiple chat instants at the same time. A record of chat can be saved and sent to the customer through email for their future reference. All these have resulted in customer satisfaction rate of 73% as opposed to app (53%); social media (48%); phone (44%); email (61%) and SMS (41%).
Live customer support chat allows buyers to remain anonymous and narrate their queries and complains more freely. They don’t need to call up and then wait for a long time. Effectiveness of live chat is much more in terms of conversion as well. Therefore, it seems to be the best option for majority of the online shoppers of ecommerce outlets. Many leading fashion brands (France-based Longchamp and the U.K.'s Burberry Group, for example) have recently started using live chat in China’s most popular messaging app, WeChat. The best options retailers now have is to optimize live chat sales to drive growth.
Optimize live chat sales with customer support chat is the need of the hour.
