For eCommerce websites, live chat support adds the human touch. It connects you instantly to the people using your site, in a way that emails just can’t do. Here are a few of our favorite ways that live chat support benefits online retailers.

In business, there’s nothing quite like the human touch.

It’s the reason people go to the same coffee shop every day because the barista knows their name. It’s nice to be remembered and to feel like we matter to a business. In a sense, we get to build a relationship with the business.

For eCommerce websites, live chat support adds the human touch. It connects you instantly to the people using your site, in a way that emails just can’t do. Here are a few of our favorite ways that live chat support benefits online retailers.

1. Increased Customer Satisfaction

Would you bother asking a question about a product if you had to write an email and wait (what could be hours) for a response? Odds are, you wouldn’t. In today’s market, speed is important for customers, and people are impatient at the best of times.

If it’s possible to get an answer right now, then that’s what they’ll go for. Live chat support lets you provide this. You get to talk to your customers in real-time and answer any questions they have in real-time. This makes for satisfied customers that have good experiences on your site. They are also more likely to do business with you again.

A recent survey done by eMarketer showed that 63% of people were more likely to go back to a website that has live chat support.

2. Collecting Additional Data On Your Customers

It goes without saying that knowing what your customers want is important. Live chat support helps with this because it gathers additional data on the customers’ activity on the website.

This data is known as VOC or Voice of Customer data. It includes the duration of the visit and what parts of the website they accessed and for how long. This is extremely helpful in targeting your website to your customer base. If one area of your site is particularly popular with the website’s visitors, then it’s one of your business’s strong points. On the other hand, if the data shows an area is unpopular, it’s possible to work on it, develop it and improve it.

3. Collecting Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is vital for any business, but it can be difficult to collect online. Many people won’t fill out surveys over email, let alone over the phone. No matter how long it actually is, it feels tedious. With live chat support on your site, it’s easier to get that important feedback. A chat invite or an animation can open up a friendly conversation with the customer.

Live chat is also a more efficient way of getting responses from customers. One customer service agent can have several chats going on at the same time. This means that live chat support is more efficient and cheaper to run.

4. Building A Connection With Your Customers

Forming connections with your customers is important for business success. It makes sense. We like to buy things from people we know and trust. In eCommerce, it can be hard to form these bonds, even with repeat customers.

An advantage of live chat support is that it lets you talk directly to your customers. If they’re first-time customers, you can ask for their contact information. Even if they don’t buy from you the first time around, they’ll be kept updated on your business.

It’s good for repeat customers too. The conversation can be personalized to them, and their particular needs. The great customer service will encourage people to come back. This way they can develop a bond with your business. Simply having live chat support will increase confidence in your website. A study done by ATG on Global Consumer Trends shows this. Just having a “live chat” button makes the vast majority of people confident that they can get help if they need it.

5. Increased Sales and Conversions

A huge advantage of live chat support is that it increases the number of sales and conversions on your website.

According to Subiz, one website saw their conversions increase by 25% after installing live chat support. There are a couple of reasons for this. With the added information that lives chat support gathers, the conversation can be tailored to the customer. Based on that, you can decide which offers or additional products to offer them.

Live chat support increases the trust people have in a website, so again they’re more likely to spend money. In a sense, live chat support is like having a sales assistant for your digital store. The benefit of having live chat support on sales and conversions is remarkable. A report by eMarketer found that 35% more people bought from online businesses when using live chat.

There are so many advantages to having live chat support for eCommerce websites. The interactive element that it adds raises the number of sales on the site. It lets online businesses build deeper connections with their customers and collect feedback from them. Customers are also more satisfied after using websites that have live chat support.

If you’re looking for the right live chat to add to your website then we’d recommend using LiveChat. LiveChat is a great tool that will help you improve customer satisfaction and help you deliver customer support in real time. Plus it has great reporting tools that help you keep track of how well it’s performing.  

These are just a few of the benefits of live chat support. Why not give it a go, and see what it can do for you?

Want to learn more about what the best customer support chat tools are? Check out this blog post by MobileMonkey!