Imagine you have walked into your favorite electronics store to find a TV that you have had your eye on for a while, but you can’t find it. Could they be out of stock? Has it been discontinued? You look around for a member of staff to ask, but they are all unavailable. Now you think, is this worth waiting for, or shall I try the next store over the street? You walk out and find your TV at the other store because they had staff on hand to deal immediately with your queries.
Ecommerce sites that do not have Live Chat built into them are the same. Customers will not call a number or wait for an email response to ask a quick question. The result? They have found a different website and you have lost the sale.
How important is Live Chat?
Forrester.com carried out a survey that found “53% of customers are likely to abandon their e-commerce purchases if they can’t find quick answers to their questions. 73% say that valuing their time is the most important thing companies can do to provide them with good customer service.”
What benefits will Live Chat bring your business?
The benefits of incorporating a Live Chat solution into your ecommerce site include:
- Saving valuable time and boosting your staff’s productivity
- Allowing customers to get quick answers to their questions
- Humanizing your online store to make consumers feel confident in making purchases
- Capturing leads and Increasing brand awareness
- Offering increased customer insights via connected CRM systems and reports.
Let's look at each of these benefits in more detail.
Time-saving solution
Adding Live Chat to your ecommerce site will increase your staff’s efficiency and productivity. Multiple customer conversations can be handled by the same agent simultaneously, all while providing a personalized service experience boosting buyer online confidence.
Other benefits for ecommerce sites include messages being delivered to a group of agents who can opt to ‘take’ a conversation to deal with it. If the visitor needs more experienced help, the conversation can be transferred to a different agent whilst keeping the previous conversation transcript, solving the problem quicker.
Options can be offered to visitors, enabling them to choose the right department for their query. For example, a business could set up options for customers to choose sales, support or returns teams. Pre-defined questions can be set up so that agents do not need to type out the same requests for information every time.
Short-cut to a conversation
3CX Live Chat offers ecommerce visitors direct contact with your agent or group of agents immediately. However, if a query is becoming complex, visitors can opt to elevate the text conversation to a phone call using their browser. This is made possible if the Live Chat application has been linked with a 3CX PBX System. The customer benefits from a seamless connection as they are immediately linked with the agent they have already been conversing with, removing the need to explain the conversation to a new agent.
It puts the human element back into shopping
In recent years, ecommerce shopping has taken human interaction out of the experience. Customers have been left to solve problems and try to compare products with no assistance. They have not been able to receive simple explanations of the benefits of one product over another.
In comparison, a friendly chat box offers options to pop-up messages like “Hi, how can we help”, imitating the high street shopping model and further boosting consumer trust. Your ecommerce site will also receive additional benefits, including the new opportunity for your sales agents to use the conversation to upsell potentially higher profit margin products.
Customized appearance to match your brand
Embedding this feature directly into your ecommerce site means the customer benefits from a whole brand experience while browsing the site. Depending on your preferences, the 3CX offers many functions, integrations, and customization options, including:
- Choosing which pages the chat bubble is displayed on
- Editing the initial information fields for visitors to fill out (e.g. Name only, email only, name and email, or none)
- Choice of avatars & adding brand logos
- Styling of colors to match your website, including 3 template styles.
- Out of hours messages to notify visitors when an agent is available or not.
Knowledge is power
Ecommerce sites cannot physically see their customers, so reporting is incredibly important. The benefits of reporting could be overlooked, as owners may think the “box has been ticked” once a live chat system has been implemented. But that is just the start of the job.
Once linked with a 3CX Phone System, the reports can be run using 3 different templates. They will provide information such as:
- How many agents are members of the chat queues
- Quantity of chats received, answered and abandoned
You can also use Google Analytics to track on-screen visitor activity and interactions with the chat bubble.
CRM lead tracking and generation
Besides tracking customer activity using the reports, 3CX can integrate with many well-known CRM, helpdesk, and ticketing platforms. By adding this next level of integration, web visitor live chats can easily garner more information and create a sales pipeline for the ecommerce team to follow up on. Additional benefits to linking 3CX with a CRM system include:
- Contact creation and journaling if the live chat is elevated to a voice call
- Live chat transcripts can be synced with customer contacts on the CRM platform to ensure agents can see a full history of all communications.
Summary
Adding Live Chat to any website is a great addition, but for an ecommerce store, the benefits are clear. It is an absolute MUST. 3CX Live Chat can be used in a standalone mode or it can be linked with a 3CX system offering additional advantages such as template reports to assist in business analysis and adding additional channels such as Facebook messenger and business SMS. 3CX can be downloaded and hosted for free for the first year.
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