Learn how eCommerce live chat helps online businesses on Shopify.
Up until sometime ago, live chats used to be associated with certain kinds of stores selling a particular type of product. Or they were mainly used by businesses operating at a certain scale (mid to enterprise level).
However, with the rise of online business, live chat has transformed into the quintessential tool that has the power to enhance the customer’s life cycle and elevate their shopping experience on your online store or site.
But the benefits of live chat go beyond just delivering a faster and more convenient customer service.
In addition to enhancing support experience, live chat brings a myriad of benefits like boosting agent productivity, helping you to get to know your customers better and communicate product decisions. Infact, customers increasingly prefer live chat over social media, email or even phone support. Why? Because it's faster, convenient and efficient!
In the next 12-18 months, live chat is expected to continue to grow by as much as 87%. In some industries, this growth has increased by as much as 150%.
So what is fueling this growth? This increased adoption is because customers now prefer to chat with someone in real-time and online, rather than going through the hassle of calling a company for support.
The need for an instant communication tool like live chat is changing the way consumers interact with organizations.
Still not convinced?
Here are some statistics to bolster your confidence in the power of live chat:
- A study by J.D. Power found that a staggering 42% of online consumers prefer to contact a company through the live chat feature than using email (preferred by 23% customers), social media or Q&A forums (16%). So it’s not just phone support that’s losing its appeal compared to live chat – it’s other digital channels too! Here’s why:
- Live chat also delivers high-quality customer service and is a convenient and effective support channel compared to the other conventional customer support channels. While 50% of consumers prefer having a live person answer questions in the middle of a purchasing decision, 42% of consumers say they prefer to live chat as it reduces their wait time.
- A Harvard Business School Report suggests that businesses witnessed a 5% increase in customer retention rates and a 25-95% increase in profits.
- 63% of shoppers who used live chat on a website are likely to return back to that site.When it comes to maximizing leads and optimizing ROI, live chat turns out to be an excellent method to acquire more customers, resulting in more sales.
- An ICMI Report observed that live chat led to a 48% increase in revenue per chat hour and a 40% increase in conversion rate. If customers get their queries resolved within a minute, they are more likely to buy from that brand.
The above-mentioned statistics suggest that live chat support can successfully reduce cart abandonment, increase sales, and boost conversions. Also, it plays an instrumental role in strengthening relationships between the company and its audience, helping to generate more leads through customer loyalty.
The pandemic nudged a lot of offline businesses to go online for sustainability - from grocery, electronics, luxury brands, training centers, gyms, etc.But they forgot the one thing that was important to all of them that made their offline business a success - the human conversations that they could have at the physical stores.
A chatbot can fill in for that missing human link between the customer and the retailer, thus creating a more personalized approach while keeping the convenience of online shopping.
Lets walk you through a couple of businesses and how they benefit from using live chat:
How different types of businesses benefits from live chat
Fashion and apparel industry was the first to adopt live chat for its online retail services. Chatbots in fashion and apparel retail are an excellent means of providing essential customer service in online commerce as it swiftly takes you through all the steps of viewing the available products, selecting the item, and making the purchase. They are also helpful in providing quick information on frequently asked questions such as delivery times, returns and refunds, store locations etc.
Live chat benefit for the fashion retail industry in numerous ways:
- Improved Customer engagement: Live Chats can induce a positive customer experience, introducing first-time customers to the brand and making their product discovery journey easier.
- Improved Cost-efficiency: Live Chats can help the company save costs as maintaining a chatbot is more cost effective than hiring a person to provide basic consulting services.
- Increased conversion rate: Live Chats engages the customer from the moment they step into your site till the time they make a purchase, thus improving the conversion rate of the online store.
One such fashion apparel brand which has successfully implemented Live chat is ModCloth.
Modcloth has a live chat functionality which enables consumers to chat one-to-one with the staff. Its live chat employs a friendly tone of voice. The differentiator here is the inclusion of a photo and first name of the person which makes the user feel like they are talking to an actual person rather than a faceless brand. This further emphasizes that the brand is customer-centric.
Ready to see how live chat can work for your fashion and clothing Shopify store? Get TextChat today.
Live chat is getting good traction when it comes to healthcare and wellness websites. Several hospitals and wellness clinics now use live chat to help the online customer get information and make an appointment request. This mainly helps busy doctors and other healthcare service providers who want to attract new patients but don’t have the manpower or time to connect with online visitors during work hours. Live chats work to convert those visitors to actual appointments.
American Well, a telemedicine company, is a great example of how websites with live chat can use it to determine user intent quickly. By providing pre-filled buttons, it makes it easier to navigate users to multiple pages on their site.
Ready to see how live chat can work for your health and wellness Shopify store? Get TextChat today.
Live chat can reap benefits to all players in the beauty industry: whether its brick and mortar businesses like salons, spas and beauty schools or online businesses like an ecommerce cosmetic shop.
A beauty and cosmetic live chat can engage a customer by providing essential information about your business like details about your product or service, working hours, price list and reviews/examples of your service.
A live chat can:
- Share product updates or new offers: Live chats can communicate information about new products, sales, discount offers and more to engage prospects.
Provide customer support 24/7: Live chats are active 24/7 and will offer help no matter the time of the day.
- Schedule and book appointments: Live Chats make appointment scheduling for brick and mortar businesses quicker and eliminates the need to fill out any lengthy forms.
- Increases sales: A beauty live chat creates a highly effective sales funnel in place. Combine 24/7 availability, appointment scheduling and effective communication about sales and new products to users; and you’ve got the perfect recipe for increasing sales.
- Provide personalized expert advice: A lot of beauty and cosmetic businesses increase customer engagement on their sites by providing expert written content on beauty, guides to buying the right cosmetics and solutions to the customer’s common beauty woes. Your live chat bot can provide these tips, tricks and advice while the customer chats with a beauty expert. This can be followed up with an opportunity to suggest a solution within your brand by booking an appointment with an expert or making a product suggestion.
Nordstrom is the perfect example of a brand using live chat to drive engagement and sales on its site. Nordstrom divides its chat based online customer service into categories like ‘beauty stylist’ and ‘designer stylist’. This not only covers all bases of customer questions and improves customer satisfaction, but also prolongs customer retention on its site as site abandonment goes down.
Ready to see how live chat can work for your beauty and cosmetics Shopify store? Get TextChat today.
With the rise in online jewellery stores, customers now have endless options among enticing designs, customization options, try at home features and fast secure shipping. Catering a delightful shopping experience to a large customer base can become a challenging endeavor. Issues like delayed shipping or delay in communication can leave a customer dissatisfied with your brand.
A live chat can help here in many ways. A live chat operator can guide visitors who may have plenty of questions regarding your products, and offer them relevant information instantly. Similarly, a live chat can offer quick solutions to grievances like wrong or delayed deliveries much more effectively than email or phone services.
A good example of an online jewellery store going an extra step to wow their customers is Goldsmiths. Goldsmiths uses sound and video enabled live chat as opposed to just text to deliver a personal look and feel to a visitor.
Moreover, to encourage users to shop from their online store, the live chat feature mimics the personal service it offers in physical stores to give them an in-store experience.
Ready to see how live chat can work for your jewelry Shopify store? Get TextChat today.
Many leading luxury brands like Burberry, Sephora, Victoria’s Secret, and Estée Lauder have incorporated live chat in their websites for creating an individualized customer experience.
Luxury brands thrive on the unique and personalized user experience they provide their customers, and live chat becomes a quintessential tool to achieve that.
One of the brands that has turned around its user experience is Victoria’s Secret. A popular lingerie brand, Victoria’s Secret chatbot works as a navigator in the field of lingerie shopping. It offers both expert advice and friendly companionship to lingerie shoppers.
Its live chat serves as the initial navigation menu that redirects users to a particular page on the website based on their inputs. The chat opens with a suggestion to view the new designs created by the brand. If a viewer is interested in viewing the item in more detail, the chat leads you to the webpage which displays the entire line of products in all colors and sizes.
The live chat also offers to sign you up for the Victoria’s Secret newsletters and to check out the FAQ. If an inquiry is not pre-programmed within the software, the chatbot offers to chime in with an associate to help out.
Ready to see how live chat can work for your luxury brand on Shopify? Get TextChat today.
When the COVID-19 pandemic rendered automobile stores non-functional, more customers resorted to browsing and buying cars online. Your website, which now acts as a digital showroom needs to be fully equipped with support from sales staff, live support and immediately online customer service.
All of which can be enabled with a live chat. Automobile companies can use live chat for:
- Offering assistance: A prospective customer would enquire about a ton of information about the car before making a purchase decision . With a myriad of variables and details that need to be checked, visitors are looking for instant information. The live chat enables you to answer questions in real time and provide speedy automotive customer service online.
- Track leads: If your customers can’t find the information they’re looking for quickly, they’ll lose interest and drop off from your site. Using Live chat you can track your visitor’s activity, observe what vehicles or help areas they’re viewing and reach out to them with relevant information.
- Improve your team’s efficiency: Live chat not only benefits the customers but also is a great value addition to the company. It's quicker and cheaper than other mediums of communication and enables sales reps to nurture multiple leads at once.
Moreover, including features like video support to your live chat greatly enhances your chances of selling high-end products. Chatbots speed up conversations and reduce resource strains by handling FAQs.
A great example of an automobile company using live chat to enable better engagement on its website is Skoda.
To start interactions with customers early on in the decision-making journey, Skoda partnered with a video live chat tool to drive engagement using both visuals and chat. It’s ‘Live Tour’ service featuring a Skoda product host takes the visitor on a 360-degree tour of the vehicles in Skoda’s product line.
The live chat has also allowed Skoda to connect with potentially interested customers and showcase their newly launched vehicles. The live chat asks the customer if they would like to see a live demo of the car and connects them to a product host.
For Skoda, the live chat tool proved to be an immense success with 48% of visitors requesting a test drive, 10% conversion into real car sales, and 2000 overall live tours.
Ready to see how live chat can work for your automobile and services Shopify store? Get TextChat today.
The COVID-19 pandemic impacted the gym and fitness industry tremendously. As a result, fitness enthusiasts resorted to virtual fitness and started embracing online tools to connect to their fitness centers and plan their fitness goals. Owing to this shift, gyms and fitness centers have adapted a completely online approach to appeal to new consumer behaviors.
Today, customers prefer to explore all their options before they commit to a particular health club. The best place to check out a fitness centre or a health club is online. This enables visitors to quickly find relevant information and check out reviews left by other customers.
Live chats can take over a lot of manual work like:
- Providing personalized support to members
- Collecting feedback from customers
- Showcase new products and services to first time visitors
- Highlight ongoing/upcoming programs to entice newcomers
- Resolve customer problems quickly
- Highlight discount offers and communicate available partnerships
- Schedule and coordinate meetings with trainer/nutritionist
- Help a potential customer with general assistance: A live chat feature provides timely assistance with essential details required by a visitor while they explore your fitness site. For every query the user enters, the live chat responses escort them down a path based on their response. This enables potential customers to discover all the facilities and any discounts or loyalty programs being offered.
- Understand customer’s fitness goals: With a series of pre-planned questions, a live chat gets the customer to provide details about what they are trying to accomplish and get an idea of their short-term and long-term goals. They can then redirect the visitor to the right fitness plan or even connect them to a health specialist, thus helping them make an informed purchase decision.
- Connect with a personal trainer: A live chat can assist customers in their search for finding the ideal fitness trainer. With a live chat, visitors can discover trainers within their budget, schedule appointments and discuss their fitness goals. The chat can even notify if the trainer is available for a particular time slot or not.
For example, Total Gym fitness implemented live chat to increase their online engagement and connect better with their target customer: a home consumer looking to make a change in their life.
To personalize the visitor’s experience on their site, Total Gym turned to implementing a live chat feature on the site to help facilitate conversions, answer customers’ questions during the purchasing process and help them in making informed buying decisions.
Ever since implementing Live chat, their online engagement has boosted and yielded 39% of the gym’s overall online orders across desktop, tablet, and smartphone devices.
Ready to see how live chat can work for your gym and fitness club Shopify site? Get TextChat today.
With an increasing number of consumers becoming health conscious and striving for a healthier lifestyle, the demand for nutritionists/dieticians has gone up. People seek online help from someone who can guide them with a good diet to help them achieve their fitness goals. Resultantly, numerous health facilities have started leveraging live chat options to help people get in touch with a nutrition specialist immediately.
Live chats enable nutritionists to directly connect with consumers and help them keep track of their meal plans. This can work for people who are short on time, cannot visit a fitness center regularly, or meet their nutritionist physically. A live chat can gather details of the client’s medical history and help the nutritionist create a meal plan to fulfill their goals. Nutritionists also use live chats to assist their clients with periodic check-ins, changes in diet plans and timely discussions.
Shoprite’s online dietician chat service engages customers with its registered dieticians to gain advice on nutrition, food choices, healthy diets, food trends as well as related health and wellness information.
Ready to see how live chat can work for your nutritionist service and consulting Shopify site? Get TextChat today.
Live chat finds a major utility in home decor and interior designing sites.
Havenly is an online interior design company that connects clients to designers virtually. Site visitors can chat with a professional interior designer about any design decisions before deciding to buy anything.
The live chat indulges the visitor in a brief chat where they gather details on their budget, needs and preferences, preferred style. Based on the information provided, a designer can make product suggestions directly over the live chat and can also suggest ideas for interior design.
Ready to see how live chat can work for your home decor and interior design Shopify store? Get TextChat today.
Educational institutions are using live chat to connect better with prospective students, current students, faculty and staff.
- Develop proactive engagement: Using live chat, an educational website can proactively approach their site visitors. This works for prospective students and parents who wish to inquire more about a school or program and do not want to go through the hassle of emailing or calling the institution. A proactive chat on web pages can offer quick information on your course offering or admission requirements.
- Improve parental engagement: Live chat encourages parents to interact more with the site. Due to its ease of use, parents can directly approach a program representative even during busy work hours.
- Multilingual support: Live chat is a cost-effective tool for facilitating global communication. A multilingual support through live chat will help students living abroad gain the necessary information when researching an institution/program.
The International University of Applied Sciences Bad Honnef - Bonn has a live chat active on every page.
Ready to see how live chat can work for your educational institution site on Shopify? Get TextChat today.
With more and more people ordering food online, restaurants are leveraging live chats to improve customer service. From browsing through a menu and finding best selling items to booking a table, live chats enable an easy and frictionless service.
- Order Placement: A Live chat representative can guide the customer on what’s best on the menu, ask for the number of people the food is being ordered for, give pricing and complete order placement. The chat can also communicate the exact delivery time after order has been placed. This will improve the efficiency of the delivery placing process and ensure smoother handling of orders.
- Menu inquiry: When visiting a new restaurant, customers often look for suggestions on what to order and enquire about the speciality of the restaurant or the portion sizes. A live chat can cater to your customers and help them out with recommendations, thus improving the sales of the restaurant.
- Gather feedback: Live chat operators can ask customers ordering from your website to rate your service and restaurant performance. They can also lodge grievances and complaints regarding a late delivery or a food item they did not like.
Domino’s is a great example of a restaurant leveraging live chats to provide a convenient experience. The live chat allows you to order in minimum no of steps and has a rich visual imagery to entice the customer into checking out the menu and completing the order. It makes ordering simple with 3 options: new order, reorder or track order.
Ready to see how live chat can work for a restaurant or cafe on Shopify? Get TextChat today.
An increasing number of nonprofit organizations are adopting live chats for their site’s functioning. Live chats help the organization:
- Reduce expenses: Communication is an important aspect in any nonprofit. And employing a lot of people to ensure timely communication can be expensive. To overcome this, a live chat software will enable you and volunteers to keep in touch with donors and any other interested party on the go and from any device. This not only saves money but also increases the efficiency and response rate of people in charge of donor communication.
- Increase visibility: Live chat works to engage visitors on your website, thereby increasing the time they spend on your site. This is seen as a positive factor when Google decides your site’s rank in search results and increases the chances of your site to get discovered.
- Secure more donations: Nonprofits and fundraisers rely on good online communication strategies to reach more donors and increase their chances of securing more donations. Before they make a donation, donors have to develop trust in your nonprofit and to do so, they require a ton of information to learn about the organization.
Live chats can be used to communicate quick and informative answers provided through pre-set messages which can provide crucial information to questions like:
- Why should one make a donation?
- What cause is the organization supporting?
- Why should they trust your organization
Aid In Recovery is a great example of a non-profit that uses live chat to offer immediate assistance and assessment for people struggling with addiction and looking for help. Operating with the goal of providing quick assistance to anyone who needs it, Aid In Recovery uses live chat to get patients the help they need as soon as they ask.
Ready to see how live chat can work for your non-profits or charity site on Shopify? Get TextChat today.
With grocery and other essential items easily available online with just a few clicks, online grocery stores strive to optimize their site constantly for giving a convenient shopping experience. Online grocery stores are turning to live chat to offer a faster and better shopping experience.
Here how live chat can benefit grocery stores:
- Make product suggestions: Grocery sites can use live chat to recognize shopping habits of their repeat customers and suggest similar items from your stock the next time they visit your site. This will strengthen your relationship with your customer, making you appear as a service which takes care of their shopping needs and improves their overall experience with your online store.
- Gather Customer Feedback: To stay one step ahead of your competitors, gathering regular feedback from your customers is key to giving them the service they love. A live chat can feature a small questionnaire to learn more about customer trends. For example, if a large percentage of your customers prefer a particular brand of kitchen supply item, then you can change your stock accordingly.
- Product Promotions & Special Offers: Online grocery shoppers are always looking for promotional deals and discount offers. And running timely offers on products can give you a winning edge over your competitors. Live chat is the quickest way to reach out to customers and new visitors with special offers and Holiday Deals. You can display an exclusive product range to new visitors and entice them to shop with you.
Albertsons, one of the largest U.S. food and drug retailers added a live chat and an AI powered virtual assistant to assist customers in real time when they shop from the grocer’s website or mobile app. The live chat assists customers through their shopping journey and provides real time answers to inquiries such as item availability or shipping time.
Ready to see how live chat can work for your grocery and general essentials store on Shopify? Get TextChat today.
While fashion brands may use live chat to navigate a customer to make the purchase, technology brands leverage it to speed up customer care. They understand that reduced waiting time is the key advantage to bring in your brand’s custom service, and live chat helps you achieve just that.
Nikon is a great example of a technology brand offering speedy assistance through a live chat. It leverages chatbots to help customers overcome common product issues, thus saving the hassle of sending back products for repair.
Ready to see how live chat can work for your electronics store on Shopify? Get TextChat today.
As you can see from these website live chat success stories, implementing a live chat feature can simplify business processes and deliver an unforgettable experience to your visitors.
Take advantage of a live chat box to directly engage with your customers. Capture leads, provide quick support, increase sales and captivate your customers by improving the shopping journey on your site.
That said, launching a live chat feature on your Shopify site doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. Nor does it require a crazy amount of technical expertise.
Let’s make live chat easy for your Shopify business with TextChat.
