You don’t have to be a marketing expert to know that quality customer service plays a crucial role in business. Your customers are the ones who spread the word about you and help grow your customer base.

Many eCommerce websites have been adding live chat support to their help desk software in order to provide real-time answers rather than having customers leave their websites. Real-time chatting with a customer support expert not only builds customers‘ confidence during their shopping experience but also helps to improve your conversion rates. According to a survey of American online consumers, 68% engage in live chat and 63% prefer getting back to a website with live chat for repeat purchase.

Here are 5 reasons why live chat software is beneficial for a business today:

First of all, live chat offer tremendous convenience for customers. A Forrester research article found the following:

46 % of online consumers say that having questions answered by a live agent while in the middle of an online purchase is one of the most important features a website can offer.

There are two types of customers who need help and use live chat to get it. The first are potential buyers. These are the most common situations in which potential online customers might use live chat:

• They want to know more about product specifications

• Having trouble finding a specific item on a given website

• Want to compare products or know the details of a sale your eCommerce shop may be having

These scenarios enormously influence purchase decisions. In fact, more than 38% of online customers took their purchase decision due to a live chat session. Remember, that chat agents play a huge role and if they are properly trained, they can easily generate more sales.

The second group of live chat users are your current customers. The most common reasons why they use live chat are:

• Want to know the status of their order

• Want to ask about return policies

• Want to report bugs or suggest improvements in your service

This last point represents a nice perk of live chat, in that you can get nearly instant feedback or notifications when there’s a wide-scale customer-facing problem. For instance, if you run a Saas (software as a service) business, and anything goes wrong, live chat gives you an immediate view of the issue from your customers‘ perspective.

With that in mind, here are 5 reasons live chat can help your eCommerce business get an edge in 2021 and beyond

1. Real Time Convenience to Customers: 

   The growing attraction of chat to eCommerce is not a fluke. Rather, it is driven by the same forces that brought the rise of Netflix and UberEats: the pursuit of convenience. Consumers appreciate online shopping for its accessibility. They enjoy how online shopping helps them find and compare products with minimal effort – sometimes from multiple vendors at once.  Live chat allows customers to solve problems and even make purchases from the comfort of their own homes. Like eCommerce, live chat is convenient enough to fit into any part of the user’s day: Studies show that 51% of customers prefer live chat for multitasking purposes, with another 21% preferring live chat so they can shop while they work.

2. Live Chat is Cost Efficient:

   It increases efficiency by allowing live chat agents to handle multiple chats simultaneously, thus reducing the need to hire more agents. Intelligent live chat software such as LiveAgent allows multiple options for chat distribution and utilization.  It increases the average order value since customers get real-time advice and answers to any questions they might have. It saves „product return“ expenses as a live chat representative can help you pick the right product or service, which suits the customer best, thus he or she will be satisfied with it and will not need to return it back.  It reduces overall helpdesk center costs by lowering the waiting queue time when compared to a call center.

3. Live Chat Gives Your eCommerce Business A Hefty Competitive Advantage:

   It has never been more important to stand out among your competitors than it is today. The amount of business rivals is tremendous and is increasing every day. Not only are small and medium-sized businesses recognizing the importance of providing real-time customer service, but even major corporations like Apple, SKY, Virgin Airlines, and many more are using live chat to be one step ahead of the competition.  When one considers the exceptional advantage of providing a personalized experience and attaching a human (yet virtual) face to a company of any size, it is easy to understand the advantage of providing chat.

4. Increase Conversion Efficiency: 

   Having a real person walk you through a purchase adds confidence and customers tend to spend more than the ones who don’t use live chat. A positive experience leads to a higher average order value, thus your sales are directly affected by live chat.  The key to success in conversion increase(with live chat) is having your representatives properly trained. Provide them with insightful knowledge about your products, so they can recommend additional purchases that may be the perfect fit for that particular customer. Equip them with discount coupons, which they can offer to customers who are still hesitating before purchase.

5. Build Long Term Relationships: 

   Satisfied, long-term customers are statistically less likely to switch. As an added bonus, they tend to be less price-sensitive. Experts say that customers who feel taken care of are less concerned about what they are paying.63% of customers who‘ve used live chat tend to come back rather than the ones who don’t. Studies show that regular customers tend to buy more often and they are less expensive to maintain because of their familiarity with your business and the processes behind it.

When customers feel their voice is heard and they chat with a person behind the company, it’s more likely that they’ll have a stronger connection to your business and share their positive experiences.

  Here are some bonus tips when starting to use live chat:

• Make sure you have at least one operator that will be available for the majority of the working day. (If your live chat agent is usually offline more than online, it might have a negative influence.)

• Train your team. Make sure that your chat agents have enough knowledge to answer customers‘ queries. Equip them with sales skills – it will boost your conversion rates and increase sales.

• Play the human card . The whole point of having live chat is bringing human help to customer’s shopping experience. Providing robotic responses can kill the effectiveness of live chat.

• Learn from your customers. Analyze and track the most common issues which customers face, and create responses to be used live and via FAQs sections.

• Track the performance of your agents. LiveAgent easily analyzes the performance of your customer service representatives. Advanced features allow you to directly track whether a purchase was made after or while chatting with an agent, how many chats it took for an agent to close a sale after a customer query, and how many chats did the rep answer during work hours, and much more.

• “Pay attention to word choice. When using written communication channels, the words we choose can affect the way our message is understood. People who use live chat are typically not experts on the topic they are asking about (that is often why they are using live chat, which is to ask you questions about this subject), so loading a response with industry terms and jargon will only confuse them further.”

• Engage customers to start chatting with you via chat invitations

With these 5 compelling reasons as well as some capable guidelines to help you guide your staff in leveraging chat, there is no reason why your eCommerce store cannot (and frankly, no reason why you should not) start to make chat an integral part of your growing eCommerce business.