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Imagine a customer is at the checkout of your eCommerce store. They have a pair of shorts in the basket, and they’re right on the edge of clicking ‘Complete order’. But there’s just one problem. They’re not quite sure if they’ll be the right size. And if they’re not, can they return them for free?
Now imagine that in the bottom right corner of the screen, there is a button they can click to immediately connect with an agent and get their question answered. With their concerns relieved, do you think they will be more likely to finalize their purchase and convert?
This real-time support channel is live chat, and it can significantly reduce cart abandonment and increase sales when used well. But live chat isn’t just an effective tool for increasing conversion near the end of the digital customer journey – it can help funnel customers through several key stages of the journey, from consideration to repeat purchase.
To help you use your live chat software to its fullest, this blog will run through the live chat best practices for 3 key stages of the eCommerce customer journey.
1. Consideration
When a customer is in the consideration stage of the eCommerce customer journey, they are searching your website – and your competitors’ websites too. As they compare their options, this is your chance to outshine your competition. You need to engage with your website visitors, impress them, and convince them that they should buy from you.
Live chat offers the perfect tool to do this by responding to any of your prospect’s questions or concerns immediately. But more than this, live chat allows your agents to respond quickly without sacrificing quality. Live chat software, like Comm100’s, offer a range of tools that help your agents respond faster to impress your prospects and help put your brand top-of-mind. These tools include:
Comm100’s AI-powered tool, Agent Assist, helps your agents even more. Agent Assist monitors chats in real-time and suggests answers to the agent. All the agent has to do is select the best answer and send it to straight to the visitor with a click of the mouse, taking speed and accuracy to a whole new level.
To build an even greater connection with prospects, agents can even use Comm100 Audio and Video Chat. Like any great relationship, face time is key to developing rapport. By switching from live chat to video or audio call (with just one click), agents can build a closer relationship with prospects, showing them that they have their undivided attention and stamping your brand in their mind.
2. Purchase
Comm100 Live Chat provides a dashboard where agents can monitor visitors in real-time, alongside valuable user data such as viewing history, time spent on page, shopping cart contents, and much more. With this information at their fingertips, agents can provide a more personalized and helpful chat service that is tailored to the customer’s unique profile.
As well as reacting to chat requests, agents can also proactively reach out to specific customers, using this visitor data and insight to reach out to visitors who look like they need an extra nudge to convert.
This can be done manually by an agent, or automatically. To manually send a chat invitation, an agent simply finds the visitor within the dashboard and clicks to send them a message. For automatic proactive chat, you don’t need to monitor and spot visitors that need help or that final nudge to buy. Instead, you can automatically trigger chat messages based on a number of rules. Here are just a few examples of how you could set up a proactive chat to help increase conversion.
These proactive chats could prompt the visitor to speak with an agent or nudge them towards purchase with an incentive to close the deal. By utilizing the visitor data in the dashboard, agents can also cross-sell or upsell.
3. Repeat purchase
As well as acquiring customers, retaining them and generating repeat purchases is critical. Customers who come back again and again have the highest lifetime value (LTV) out of all your customers, and should be treated like VIPs.
63 percent of online shoppers said that they were more likely to return to a site with live chat.
While spotting a VIP out of a crowd in-person is easy to do, how can your agents do this when they visit your website? Just as we earlier spoke about how you can gain website visitor data from the Comm100 real-time dashboard, you can also identify your VIPs by integrating your customer database or CRM.
When a VIP returns to your site, a tag will appear on their individual profile, so the agents know to give them the white glove treatment. Comm100’s platform can also alert agents to a VIP presence in real-time so they can reach out to them if appropriate. If a VIP initiates a chat, you can even set up routing and segmentation capabilities to make sure they are directed to the right person so they receive the most helpful, streamlined support that will keep them coming back for more.
Recommended reading: Never Miss a VIP – How to identify and delight your most important customers in the digital world
Video chat can also be used to connect with VIPs and encourage repeat purchases. Nothing compares to face-to-face communication when it comes to building trust and rapport, and video chat is the perfect tool to do so, giving your VIPs complete attention and making them feel special.
Wrap-up
You would never open a brick-and-mortar store without sales staff, so why would you launch an eCommerce website without digital customer engagement?
Comm100 Live Chat is built to help eCommerce brands support the key stages of the customer journey to drive sales, reduce cart abandonment, and increase engagement. Here’s what just one of our eCommerce customers had to say about Comm100 Live Chat:
– Global Commercial & Home Irrigation Manufacturer
All of the features and tools included in this blog are included within Comm100 Live Chat (except for Agent Assist). Find out how Comm100 Live Chat can help eCommerce businesses increase sales and improve customer satisfaction:
Offer real-time, personalized, efficient support that your customers and agents will love at 1/3 the cost of voice support.
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