If your marketing strategy has yet to roll out live chats to your website, this summer is as good a time as any to get started. When it comes to e-commerce stores, in particular, live chat can go a long way to boosting your brand’s credibility, delivering a better customer service experience, and helping more visitors further down the conversion journey.
For many customers, instant communication is essential for satisfying customer service experience. Indeed, research indicates that more than half of users are more likely to repurchase from a company that offers live chat support.
Furthermore, live chat is becoming a more important feature for e-commerce businesses keen to reduce shopping cart abandonment, as this marketing feature keeps customers engaged and encourages them along the buying process.
If you’re looking to boost your e-commerce sales via live chat, here are three tips to get started.
Train your team properly
Typically, the main difference between live chats that facilitate conversions and returning customers, and those that don’t, is a trained team. If you rely on employees to keep your live chats afloat, you need to ensure they have trained adequately so your business has the best chance of success. You wouldn’t throw an employee into a job without adequate training, and the same rule applies to live chat.
Guide your team through the process of operating live chats, spending enough time, money, and resources on hiring the right people and onboarding them efficiently. If you don’t, you’ll undoubtedly pay for it later on. Draw attention to terminology that should be used, how to handle a wide range of tones from visitors, and what questions and answers your team should anticipate.
Create a Character
In order to keep your brand image consistent across all areas of your online presence, it’s important that you put a face to a name for your live chat. Whether you have a real person behind the screen handling chats or a bot doing most of the work, it helps to create some kind of persona for your online messaging so users get a more human experience.
Indeed, a range of businesses create characters in order to appeal to their target audience – it is far easier to relate to and express issues with a person or character rather than with words on a screen. Personas also make it easier for users to leave honest feedback, giving you scope to refine your strategy and make necessary changes to your business.
Optimize for Mobile
In the modern marketplace, you simply can’t afford to ignore optimizing your live chats for mobile. More than half of site visits now come from mobile devices, and that share is steadily expanding. If your website’s live chat feature isn’t compatible with mobile and non-desktop users, you’re making life difficult for more than half of your audience, while missing out on potential sales and new customers.
When done right, live chat can be a game changer for your business. With live chat, visitors get the help they need much faster, while your business can focus on taking on the next challenge.